Open Cross-Document Linking and Browsing Based on a Visual Plug-in Architecture

Digital documents often do not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to parts of other documents. Nevertheless, most existing document formats only support links to web resources but not to parts of third-party documents. An open cross-document link service should address the multitude of existing document formats and be extensible to support emerging document formats and models. We present an architecture and prototype of an open cross-document link service and browser that is based on the RSL hypermedia metamodel. A main contribution is the specification and development of a visual plug-in solution that enables the integration of new document formats without requiring changes to the cross-document browser’s main user interface component. The presented visual plug-in mechanism makes use of the Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) specification for modularisation and plug-in extensibility and has been validated by developing data as well as visual plug-ins for a number of existing document formats.