Supplementing virtual documents with just-in-time hypermedia functionality

Digital library systems and other analytic or computational applications create documents and display screens in response to user queries “dynamically” or in “real time.” These “virtual documents” do not exist in advance, and thus hypermedia features (links, comments, and bookmark anchors) must be generated “just in time”—automatically and dynamically. In addition, accessing the hypermedia features may cause target documents to be generated or re-generated. This article describes the specific challenges for virtual documents and dynamic hypermedia functionality: dynamic regeneration, and dynamic anchor re-identification and re-location. It presents Just-in-time Hypermedia Engine to support just-in-time hypermedia across digital library and other third-party applications with dynamic content, and discusses issues prompted by this research.