Storing Hytime Documents in an Object-oriented Database

An open hypermedia-document storage system has to meet requirements that are not satis ed by existing systems: it has to support non-generic hypermedia document types, i.e. document types enriched with application-speci c semantics. It has to provide hypermedia-document access methods. Finally, it has to allow the exchange of hypermedia documents with other systems. On a technical level, an object-oriented database-management system, on a logical level, a well established ISO standard, namely HyTime, is used to satisfy the requirements mentioned above. By means of the example of documents incorporating hypertext structures we discuss the impact of taking such an approach on representation and processing within the database system.