Navigation patterns in hypermedia databases

Navigation, or browsing, is an important way of accessing information for a large class of applications, in particular hypermedia, object-oriented databases, and multimedia databases. A variety of sophisticated navigation patterns, some of which involve integration of query mechanisms, are presented. Their semantics are discussed as they relate to the semantic of connections among information structures and to the dynamical computed status of exploration. It is argued that the definition of sophisticated browsing semantics requires a model for information and link structures which is more sophisticated than the models commonly found in hypermedia or databases. Examples of complex navigation sessions in a real-time application are provided