Processing Link Structures and Linkbases on the Web

Hyperlinks are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, highly responsible for its success. XLink improves on HTML's linking capabilities in several ways. In particular, links after XLink can be "out-of-line" (i.e., not defined at a link source) and collected in (possibly several) linkbases, which considerably ease building complex link structures. Modeling of link structures and processing of linkbases under the Web's "open world linking" are aspects neglected by XLink. Adding a notion of "interface" to XLink, as suggested in this work, considerably improves modeling of link structures. When a link structure is traversed, the relevant linkbase(s) might become ambiguous. We suggest three linkbase management modes governing the binding of a linkbase to a document to resolve this ambiguity.