Decoupling Geographic from Conceptual Information in Physical Hypermedia Models

In this paper we address how to manage geographical information in physical hypermedia applications, i.e. those mobile applications in which real and digital objects are linked using the hypermedia paradigm. We briefly introduce the problem domain (physical hypermedia) and motivate our research with a simple example. We next present the core of our approach, and extension of the object-oriented hypermedia design method (OOHDM). We analyze the nature of physical objects and show how to separate their geographic (or spatial) attributes, relationships and behaviors and propose a composition approach. Navigational aspects involving geographical features are finally presented. We compare our approach with other related work and conclude describing further research we are pursuing