Hypercharts: extended statecharts to support hypermedia specification

Introduces hypercharts, a novel and effective notation that extends the well-known statechart formalism to make it suitable for the specification of temporal and information synchronization requirements of hypermedia applications. Three new definitions are added: timed history, timed transitions, and a set of synchronization mechanisms. The proposed extensions are based on the major characteristics of some Petri net-based multimedia models, and have their semantics described in terms of conventional statechart models. Therefore, any hyperchart construction can be transformed into a statechart that exhibits the desired behavior, giving hyperchart models the same semantic behavior as statecharts. The new constructs are illustrated using a case study based on a hypermedia-modeling example.