HMT: modeling interactive and adaptive database-driven hypermedia applications

As applications in the World Wide Web are growing steadily regarding both size and functionality, database support plays a more and more important role. The technical questions of integrating databases and the WWW have been discussed and answered within the last few years, but the area of design methodologies still lacks a comprehensive framework for modeling these kinds of applications. Established modeling methodologies like ER or OMT cannot support hypermedia concepts like hyperlinks or higher level navigational structures like Guided Tours; new hypermedia modeling methodologies like RMM or OOHDM do not cover important aspects like personalization or temporal design. This work presents the Hypermedia Modeling Technique (HMT), which has been developed in order to provide a comprehensive framework for modeling databasedriven hypermedia applications. It consists of several design steps like ER design of the application domain, conceptual hypermedia design, authorization design (personalization) or temporal design. Due to the strict separation of HMT model and hypermedia system, HMT is not bound to the creation of WWW applications, but can also be used for other hypermedia platforms like XML or PDF. For mapping HMT schemas to a computable format, a metadata repository has been developed. This repository allows storing the HMT specification of an application completely within the database system, thus ensuring integrity, consistency and easy maintenance of the application. The HMT approach has been verified by implementing a prototype CASE-tool. It is based on java servlets, JDBC and a relational database system.