Hyperdocuments as automata: verification of trace-based browsing properties by model checking

  • Authors:
  • P. David Stotts;Richard Furuta;Cyrano Ruiz Cabarrus

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill;Texas A&M Univ., College Station;Univ. Francisco Marroquin, Guatemala

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

We present a view of hyperdocuments in which each document encodes its own browsing semantics in its links. This requires a mental shift in how a hyperdocument is thought of abstractly. Instead of treating the links of a document as defining a static directed graph, they are thought of as defining an abstract program, termed the links-automaton of the document. A branching temporal logic notation, termed HTL*, is introduced for specifying properties a document should exhibit during browsing. An automated program verification technique called model checking is used to verify that browsing specifications in a subset of HTL* are met by the behavior defined in the links-automation. We illustrate the generality of these techniques by applying them first to several Trellis documents and then to a Hyperties document.