Conceptual Modeling for Educational Hyperbooks

In the last years, several modeling techniques for hypermedia systems have been developed, which extend known domain modeling techniques from the database and software engineering field with dedicated constructs for specifying possibilities of navigation. The focus of these frameworks is on providing front ends to loosely structured collections of multimedia data. In our virtual classroom project we are creating hyperbooks capable of being extended for several topics in computer science. We argue that such educational hyperbooks need a specialized conceptual modeling approach. The current paper presents a very general modeling framework for hyperbooks, which extends previous work by representing all aspects of a hyperbook application in a declarative data model. This explicit, complete model of the hyperbook application allows a reusable implementation. We introduce a fully generic client/server architecture for displaying the hyperbook from a WWW server to a WWW client.