SWAM — a structured WWW access model

As the number of World-Wide Web users increase, the information content of the WWW documents gets richer and richer. Today, it is not uncommon to find a Web document involving many levels of subdocuments; each, in turn, consists of a number of hyperlinks; and each hyperlink may reference any part of the web. These intermingled hyperlinks render the conventional browsing and authoring methods ineffective. Traditional browser and authoring tools do not provide an overall view of the structure of the document. As a result, readers may need to go through many hyperlinks to obtain the required information, and individual authors of a group editing project may not conform to the same authoring style. To overcome such problems, a Structured WWW Access Model is proposed. In it, browsing and authoring are performed on two levels. The users first view the structural graph depicting the overall structure of the document, and, by choosing the required nodes on the graph, the users can selectively access the desired document segments. As an example of its use, the fat-rat system was developed.