Languages and Tools to Specify Hypertext

We present a declarative language for the construction of hypertext views on databases. The language is based on an object-oriented data model and a simple hypertext model with reference and inclusion links. A hypertext view specification consists in a collection of parameterized node schemes which specify how to construct node and link instances from the database contents. We show how this language can express different issues in hypertext view design. These include: the direct mapping of objects to nodes; the construction of complex nodes based on sets of objects; the representation of polymorphic sets of objects; and the representation of tree and graph structures. We have defined sublanguages corresponding to particular database models (relational, semantic, object-oriented) and implemented tools to generate Web views for these database models.