Finding redundant paths in hypermedia

Abstract

Web page prerequisites can be used to constrain how a user can explore a web site. This can be used in a number of ways, but plays an especially important role in educational sites. If disjunctive and conjunctive constraints are used to describe the preferences, some pages may become redundant given the user's previous path and the user may not want to visit them. The redundancy of a page is not a local property and may depend on many preferences. This paper describes an efficient algorithm that finds these redundant pages and discusses some applications of the approach.