Management of Multi-structured Hypermedia Documents: A Data Model,Query Language,and Indexing Scheme

Structured documents have gained popularity with the advent of documentstructure markupstandards such as SGML, ODA, HyTime, and HTML.Document management systems can provide powerful facilities by maintaining thestructure information of documents.Since the hypermediadocument is also a kind of structured document, wecan apply the results of many studies, whichhave been performed in storing, retrieving, and managing structured documents,to the hypermedia document management.However, more factors should be considered in handling hypermedia documentsbecause they contain multimedia data and also have multiple complex structuressuch as hyperlink networks and spatial/temporal layout structures as well aslogical structures.In this paper, we propose an object-oriented model for multi-structuredhypermediadocuments and multimedia data, and a query language for retrievinghypermedia document elements based on the content and multiple complexstructures.By using unique element identifiers and an indexing scheme whichexploits multiple structures,we can process queries efficiently with minimal storage overheadfor maintaining structure information.