Augmenting CASE Tools with Hypertext: Desired Functionality and Implementation Issues

Information systems have become bigger and more complex as their support has expanded to cover larger business domains, communication and work. At the same time technical design options such as client/server architectures and graphical user interfaces have increased the size and complexity of applications. In addition, pressures to build better systems more quickly have motivated the use of integrated design environments, such as CASE. Several integration approaches such as process modeling, frameworks and hypertext technology have been proposed. Of these we consider the least analyzed, hypertext technology, in this paper. Because of the novelty of hypertext in CASE there are several unresolved issues related to this approach. Present hypertext technology has been mainly applied to non-structured representations such as text, which is radically different from complex structured representations such as the diagrams and matrices used in CASE. CASE tools also imply that a design object has both representational and conceptual aspect, which has not been investigated in relation to hypertext. In this paper we discuss how hypertext can be incorporated into a metaCASE tool which uses all the common representation paradigms: diagrams, matrices and tables. We also report the implementation and architecture of such an environment.