Naming as a Fundamental Concept of Open Hypermedia Systems

Names play a key role in distributed hypertext systems, for two main reasons: Firstly, because accessing and managing system services require finding and locating the relevant components. Secondly, because managing structures between hypertext resources, such as nodes, anchors and links, requires that these resources are named and addressed. We argue that naming services are endemic to hypertext systems and therefore, form a core part of any hypertext system's infrastructure. In particular, the current move towards interoperable component-based Open Hypermedia Systems (CB-OHS) demonstrates the need for naming components.