A Process Approach for Providing Hypermedia Services to Existing, Non-hypermedia Applications

Hypermedia has initiated an explosion of application development based on a navigational model of information access. However, many thousands of existing applications continue to operate successfully without hypermedia services, even if they could benefit from a navigational paradigm. One of the reasons why developers of an existing application might choose to ignore the benefits of hypermedia is the cost of converting the application. If this cost could be minimized, would developers convert to or experiment with hypermedia? What is the cost of conversion? How would a conversion impact the structure or data management components of the application? This paper discusses these issues from a developer’s perspective by presenting three methods of retrofitting existing, non-hypermedia applications to provide hypermedia services. Two methods are based on traditional hypermedia data models and architectures. The third method, and focus of the paper, is an approach that is based on a process model of hypermedia. This approach allows developers to experiment with hypermedia as an information access paradigm without incurring the costs of a full conversion. Moreover, this approach establishes an open environment, leading to application integration under a common framework and allowing any application to participate. The basis of this approach is an autonomous process that is completely external to the application. The facility monitors application activity and provides first-generation hypermedia services to all or selected applications running on a user’s display. Thus, even though an application provides no hypermedia services itself, is not aware of and does not depend on a hypermedia model, it can operate as a first-generation hypermedia application as a result of this facility. Implementation details, benefits, and limitations of this approach are discussed.