Evolving hypermedia systems:: a layered software architecture

Hypermedia systems are evolutionary in nature. This paper presents SEM-HP, a model based on a semantic, systemic and evolutionary perspective, which facilitates the management of hypermedia evolution during the whole lifecycle process. Following the model the architecture of hypermedia systems can be conceived as composed of three sub-systems (conceptual, presentation and navigation) and two abstraction levels, the system level and the meta level (the first used by the reader and the second by the designer). The objective of this division is to achieve a good separation of concerns both in the development and in the evolution processes and to obtain a better understanding, thus facilitating the further development of tools. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.