Functional services for application development

A core system architecture is proposed following a functional model that separates the application subsystem into three functional groups, namely hypermedia, management, and communication, and provides an application development support system. This architecture provides access to storage systems (information provision engines) independently of their internal per site structure. Once the core system building blocks are available at the information provider sites, different applications can be easily developed on top of the functional services provided by the core system. These applications, although using the same core system, will be different in the way the functionalities are provided to the users, as they may have quite different requirements in how they want to search, use information, present, customize, collaborate, etc.