Managing large WWW sites

Abstract

The trend towards ever‐larger WWW sites with hundreds of thousands of pages maintained by teams of developers has made apparent the need for tools to manage such large‐scale efforts. In this paper we present a mechanism for organising and manipulating groups of nodes and links in WWW sites. These constructs are used to create dynamic views of the data in a given site according to various organisational and presentational criteria. Moreover, proven techniques for the management of hypertext networks (e.g. versioning, variants, etc.) can be readily implemented through the use of this model. Additionally, the model allows the creation of user views through the combination of these constructs via a number of operations. After the description of our model we present a prototype system developed at the University of Geneva that demonstrates how the mechanisms included in our model can be integrated into an existing http server. We then examine how the same mechanisms can be employed in the management of large WWW sites.