Hypermedia Database

In the context of Document Management Systems, the notion of document is becoming less and less preponderant. A document corresponds to an assembly of information objects -SGML or non SGML objects-that may be shared by several documents. Moreover, these information objects are interconnected by various kinds of links. The conventional SGML Databases offer a good support for storing and manipulating collections of independent SGML documents. They have to evolve for managing a network of SGML and non-SGML documents, i.e, hypermedia documents. SGML allows to define infer-document links by using idl idref attributes and entity sharing. HyTime goes beyond the SGML limits concerning the hyperlinking features by offering the semantic to model complex links, such as a link from a document to a very precise location inside an other one. In order to offer all the functionalities necessary for managing hypermedia documents, SGML Databases must then take into account all the above constructs. The schema of these SGML databases consists in a tree structure representing the mapping of the SGML meta-model. But it has to evolve towards a graph structure for representing the HyTime hyperlinking model. This paper presents the principles to extend an SGML Database to an HyTime Database and the functionalities of a web interface to access to the documents stored in the database.