A Meta-model Approach to the Management of Hypertexts in Web Information Systems

Modern Web Information Systems (WIS) are called to manage a huge amount of pieces of information, in a way that is often difficult to share, correlate and maintain. This is mainly due to the fact that the engineering of such systems is often based on proprietary and ad-hoc modeling languages and this makes hard the interoperability between different WISs. In this scenario, an important task of a modern Web application is the development of its navigation model, which provides an hypertextual view of the underlying data. It follows that the interoperability of Web applications relies often on the comparison, integration and exchange of information expressed in terms of hypertext structures. In this paper, we present a metamodel approach to the representation and development of navigational models of Web Information Systems supporting the definition of different models and the translations from one model to another. To this aim, we present a General Hypertext Model that covers a variety of Hypertext modeling methods and show how this metamodel can be profitably used in different application WIS scenarios.