The Architecture of Hypertext Systems

A hypertext system is a complex piece of software, consisting of several parts which serve a very different purpose. We can distinguish for instance The above division has been proposed by Campbell and Goodman in 1988 [CG88].

We provide five different views on the architecture of hypertext systems. Since they give an abstract conceptual model of hypertext systems they are often called Reference Models.

As these models describe the possible conceptual elements in hypertext systems, no implementation exists for any of these models. Some systems have implemented parts of the HAM and the Dexter model.

(Note that this is not surprising: more than 20 years after the invention of the relational database model the major database systems still implement only part of the concepts of that model.)

To test whether you have mastered the reference models you should complete a short test on hypertext architecture.