An Object Oriented Database Approach for Supporting Hypertext

Almost all hypertext systems do not use DBMS as their information base. This paper describes a prototype, called InterSect, which is a hypertext system integrated with an object oriented database. The data model of InterSect is an object oriented hypertext data model. This model will be described by using Z specification language. There are three main features of the InterSect approach. First InterSect is designed in a fully object oriented way. Second, some important mechanisms such as versioning and composition of the next generation hypertext systems are supported by InterSect. Third, InterSect supports a conventional database view together with a hypertext view of the database contents. We will use as an example the software documentation environment in order to illustrate these characteristics of InterSect.