Aging Links

Rooted in the principle of hypertext, linked information is almost ubiquitous due to the WWW and related services. Links between information objects are established for various reasons, aspects of which are encoded by a link type or expressed through link context, e.g., by the surrounding content. Such reasons may lose their validity through content evolution in the link target. Fine-grained solutions are required that enable the user to gain evolution awareness without being distracted from his main task. In this paper we present aging links as a non-intrusive mechanism for improving awareness in cooperative work with linked information networks. A link may age, affected by the evolution of the link target, leading to a gradual loss of its validity. The aging process is driven by evolution-indicating events and may be flexibly controlled by link type specific aging strategies. A customizable service, EvEnAge, based on standard technologies, prototypically implements the concept of aging links for XML documents.