Navigation in hypermedia applications: Modeling and semantics

Navigation—browsing from one related piece of information to another—is an important means of accessing information for a large class of applications: hypermedia, object‐oriented databases, multimedia databases, and even traditional systems. In this article, we discuss a variety of sophisticated navigation paradigms. We distinguish among free, guided tour and history‐based navigation. In addition, we discuss integrating pure browsing with query‐based access. We discuss static and dynamic models of the various navigation patterns, highlighting the fact that defining an adequate browing semantics requires a data model and a runtime model, both of which are more complex than those commonly found in hypermedia or databases. We illustrate these concepts with examples from a real‐life banking application.