Modeling User Input and Hypermedia Dynamics in Hera

Methodologies for the engineering of Web applications typically provide models that drive the generation of the hypermedia navigation structure in the application. Most of these methodologies and their models consider link following as the only materialization of the navigation structure. In this paper we see how extended user input can dynamically influence the navigation structure. By means of Hera it is shown how one can define this extended user input and capture the functional aspects related to the hypermedia dynamics in the RDF(S)-based design models. For this purpose we discuss the definition of input controls, the representation of state information, and the embedding of both in the application model. We also present the XML/RDF-based architecture implementing this.