Logical structure of a hypermedia newspaper

The OtaOnline project at the Helsinki University of Technology has been deploying the distribution of Finnish newspapers such as Iltalehti, Aamulehti and Kauppalehti on the Internet since 1994. The editors produce the electronic counterpart of these papers by a conversion process from QuarkXpress documents to HyperText Markup Language. The project is about to step into a new phase by introducing an approach which provides many new features not available in the old process. This paper describes an object-oriented approach which implements the logical model of a hypermedia newspaper. This model encapsulates the structure of the hypermedia documents as well as their capability for transforming into different presentation formats. It also provides a semantical rating mechanism to be used with intelligent agents. A distribution scheme which enables efficient use of this model is also presented.