Towards Self-Managing Web Sites: The Link Integrity Problem

Most Web sites contain faulty links. These affect the perceived quality of the information on the site and the reliability of any associated services. Despite such motivation, and a wide discussion of the issue over many years, achieving a reasonable level of link integrity across the Web remains an open challenge. This paper describes some work towards clarifying and resolving that challenge. The approach taken in this paper involves the embedding of automatic checks for link integrity in each site. The problem is examined using Soft Systems Methodology, in the general context of creating and maintaining a Web site to provide user information and associated services. Some experimental work towards implementing such a system is described, discussing opportunities for autonomic behaviour