Node and Link Objects

3.8 Summary

We conclude this chapter by summarizing the salient features of the node and link objects described above. In this chapter, we have shown that Web documents and hyperlinks are represented as node and link objects in WHOM. These objects are first-class objects in WHOM. The most important theme, here, clearly is the logical separation of the hyperlinks from the Web documents and the representation of metadata, structure, and content of HTML and XML data as a treelike structure. Specifically, the metadata of Web documents and hyperlinks are represented as a set of node and link metadata trees, respectively. The content and structure of Web documents and hyperlinks are represented by a node and link data tree. The correlation between nodes and their links is maintained by the metadata source and target URL and the reference identifier of the link object.