Towards The Algebraic Analysis Of Hyperlink Structures

Structuring media objects such as text or graphics by means of XML is a broadly discussed issue in hypermedia modelling. Thereby, an entire hypermedia document is not only arranged in such a way that different developers may interchange data and have easy access to the inner structure of media objects. Moreover, utilizing a given document structure to find new possibilities of linking documents is a major concern. Formal approaches, however, rarely appear in this context. In this paper, we contribute to formally structuring media objects and their linkage, thereby aiming at analyzing hyperlink structures. That is, properties of hyperlink structures such as reachability, existence of certain paths through a hyperdocument, or dangling links may be verified mathematically in advance of implementing the hyperdocument. Algebraic specifications serve as a formal model which allows to obtain algebras reflecting hyperlink structures and which is open to analyze their static properties.

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