The Distributed Link Service: A Tool for Publishers, Authors, and Readers

Abstract

The World Wide Web is a distributed service for hypermedia document retrieval. Adding a complementary hypermedia link service, from which clients can make enquiries of distributed sets of link databases, provides extra functionality for users: readers gain more subject-specific content-based media-independent links, authors gain freedom and flexibility in creating, composing, and reusing their resources, and publishers can repurpose their information assets for different audiences. This paper describes a hypermedia link service that is based entirely on standard Web browsers and servers and is being used successfully in a spectrum of Web projects.