Generating Hypertext Views on Databases

This paper presents a language and a system to construct a hypertextual view (a hyperview) of the content of a database. We first study different approaches to map database objects to hypertext components: tuple level mapping, tuple sets mapping, and associated tuples mapping. Then we present a declarative hyperview definition language which integrates these approaches. With this language one can specify for each node type and each link type how to construct it from the database contents. We also show how the semantic relationship represented in the database schema can be used to design the hypertext structure. A prototype translator has been implemented to generate a Worldwide Web (W3) hyperview of a relational database, the main components of this generation system are presented. We also show how the translation process can overcome some shortcoming of the W3 hypertext model.