A distributed hypermedia link service

Open hypermedia is an established model within the hypermedia research community; it provides an approach to engineering flexible and maintainable hypermedia systems based on the concept of a hypermedia link service. However the World Wide Web, which provides an important solution for distributed hypermedia, is typically used as a closed hypermedia system: it does not exploit the link service concept. This paper presents the design of a system which applies the open hypermedia philosophy to the World Wide Web, whereby the link service component is abstracted out into a third party service known as the distributed link service (DLS). A scalable architecture for the DLS is discussed and experience with a prototype is described.