Information Engineering on the World-Wide Web: Drawing Analogies with Software Engineering

The advent of the World-Wide Web as a distributed hypermedia database is forcing a departure from the traditional views of static, published information. The perception that the information here is easily alterable is creating, and will continue to create, the demand for continual change to this information. However, many issues such as maintaining visible structure for navigability and revision, versioning, and restructuring are causing this perception to be unfounded, particularly as the amount of information necessary to maintain increases. We draw on the experiences and observations gained in the eld of software engineering to show us some solutions and limitations to these problems which are being encountered now, and which we believe must get worse.