Management of multi-structured hypermedia documents: A data model, query language, and indexing scheme

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