Navigational Integration

Navigational integration is a style of integrating WISs by dynamically generating derived links between pages of the WISs. Derived links are function-invoking links from user-specified data-records in a given WIS, and are used for accessing related information of another WIS for the data-records.
To understand navigational integration intuitively, the below figure shows how two WISs work as an integrated resource by the navigational integration.

In this figure, the first WIS is assumed to have a client application that allows users to access the time- and location-dependent document information about one area (such as a conference program held in a building of a university). Also, the second WIS is assumed to provide database information about a larger area (e.g., information about departments in a university). Both of the WISs consists of a front page to access its result pages through their server functions.


Under the above assumption, the next figure shows a new WIS resulting from these original WISs by navigational integration. In this figure, the derived links depicted by bold lines are to pass data-records from result pages of the first WIS to the second WIS; namely, these links pass data of the 1st WIS in such a way :
  1. to directly invoke service of the second WIS and to access its result pages according to the passed data; or
  2. to set access-conditions of the front page of the second WIS and to allow a user to enter additional parameters for further operations. In this way, derived links are the links to invoke service functions of another WIS from one WIS.

Note that, from a user's viewpoint, a derived link is not different from a normal web-link; i.e., a derived link is executed only when a user clicks it on a browser. Thus, because of the usefulness as a shortcut of browsing. mobile users can benefit from navigational integration of WISs. However, because there are various WISs in reality, exact specification of derived links by a query command and materializing them in a web-browsing style as shown in this figure needs new technical tricks.