Controlled hypertextual navigation in the sgmlql language

Abstract

Due to the growth of networks, the notion of document has evolved to the notion of hyperdocument. It is usual to fragment docu ments in a set of files referencing each other, distributed over a network. Manual navigation remains the most usual way to browse this graph-like structure to query documents either from a known URL or from the out put of an index server. Nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid digressions and even getting "lost in the cyberspace". Moreover, it is mandatory to read each accessed document to check its reliability. We present in this paper an extension of the SgmlQL language. The purpose of this exten sion is to define a specific operator to express and control hypertextual navigation. Path filters are defined and can be restricted according to the structure of the path, the followed links and the traversed documents.