Design of generalized document viewer using object chain representation

The author proposes a generalised document viewer (GDV) system, which provides a format-independent interface with which to access documents in various formats. He also proposes a new approach for document representation to be used in the GDV system. In this approach, a document is represented by a chain of objects, each of which belongs to a certain class and transforms access operations according to the class-specific transformation rule. A user´s request is interpreted as a request to the uppermost object of the chain, transformed by objects in the chain successively, and executed by the lowermost object in the chain. The initial state of a document is an object chain containing an unidentified object. As the unidentified object identifies and divides itself, classification (and chain generation) proceeds step by step