SUMMARY Hypermedia systems manage interconnected information residing within a potentially wide range of data types, including text, graphics, animations, and digitized sound and images. Effective database support for hypermedia-basedcomputing environments is essential. In order to be effective, this support must provide a variety of capabilities that are not offered by the current generation of database management systems. We report on a prototypic system called HB1 that has been designed to meet the storage needs of advanced hypermedia system architectures. HB1 is referred to as a hyperbase management system (HBMS) because it stores and manipulates information and the connectivity data that link information together to form hypermedia. HB1 is composed of three subsystems: the Object Manager (OM), Association Set Manager (ASM), and Storage Manager (SM). OM and ASM are both server processes accessible to distributed client processes via IPC interfaces. OM is an object server. ASM manages structural data applicable to the objects within OM’s repository that are involved in hypermedia connections. Physical storage is managed by SM which, in this implementation, is a semantic network database management system. HB1 instantiates a conceptual model of hypermedia that is distinctly computational, has a strong notion of anchor and link, and abstracts information, behavior, and structure from hypermedia. It has been used as a back-end for an open, object-based hypermedia system that implements distributed, inter-application linking. HB1 is proving to be an effective vehicle for research on HBMS organization.
['John L. Schnase', 'John J. Leggett', 'David L. Hicks', 'Peter J. Nürnberg', 'J. Alfredo Sánchez']
Design and Implementation of the HB1 Hyperbase Management System