Extend Dexter model to capture more semantics of hypermedia

Abstract

The hypermedia technology has been widely used in both industrial and academic areas for many years. The most successful example of using this technology is the Internet Web application. However, beyond such success, we still have not reached an agreement on what the formal structure of hypermedia is and we have not had an international standard for defining a hypermedia system. The lack of a standard data model for hypermedia prevents us from further studying and understanding the hypermedia fundamental structure. In 1990, Halasz and Schwartz[HM90] proposed a reference model called Dexter which is the first attempt to try to provide a standard structure for understanding hypermedia. Since then, Dexter has been widely used as a de facto standard for hypermedia. In this paper, we describe how to extend Dexter by adding several semantic constructors. As the result of such extension, the extended data model can provide not only the constructors to define nodes but also the semantic connectors to represent semantic relationships among defined nodes.