Structural Engineering: Processes and Tools for Developing Component-Based Open Hypermedia Systems

The emergence of Component-Based Open Hypermedia Systems aims at the releasing of Hypermedia and Web applications from the monocracy of link as the information structuring primitive. Instead, an open set of structure services, each one providing structure abstractions relevant to a specific domain, is offered to an open set of client applications. Nonetheless, the lack of an engineering framework guiding the development process of CB-OHS has a part in their limited exploitation. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of CB-OHS from an engineering approach, and we propose a framework and a number of tools, supporting all phases of their development process.