Abstracted Navigational Actions for Improved Hypermedia Navigation and Maintenance

This paper discusses the MESH framework, which proposes a fully object-oriented approach to hypermedia. Object-oriented abstractions are not only applied to the conceptual data model, but also to the navigation paradigm. This results in the concept of context-based navigation, which reduces the end user’s disorientation problem by means of dynamically generated, contextsensitive guided tours. Moreover, maintainability is greatly improved, as both nodes and links are defined as instances of abstract classes. In this way, single links and entire guided tours are anchored on type level as abstract navigational actions, which are independent of the actual link instances.