On product versioning for hypertexts

Versioned hypermedia has shown its success in promoting better understanding and management of evolving document collections in many domains. However, providing versioning capability for a hypermedia system raises several important structural and cognitive issues. Our research has produced Molhado, the first hypermedia infrastructure that applies the product versioning model to versioned hypermedia. Molhado not only supports configuration management for hypermedia structures in a fine-grained manner, but also provides version control for individual hyperlinks and document nodes. This paper explains how the product versioning model in Molhado addresses serious issues identified by earlier research on versioned hypermedia. We will also discuss the new issues raised by using this versioning model.