Description

The Navigation Manager (NavMan) is a Sproc that serves navigational hypermedia abstractions. It provides clients four abstractions: document, anchor, link, and context. Documents are arbitrary StructBase objects with an attribute named locspecs that records the persistently addressavle parts of the document. Anchors are contentless objects with one attribute named endpoints that contains document id/locspec pairs. Links are contentless objects that have two endsets named to and from that each contain at most one anchor object id. Contexts are contentless objects that have one endset named links that contains zero or more link ids.

The NavMan is designed to speak the Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP) being designed by the Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group. It does not conform exactly to the OHP v1.2 draft, however. Specifically, it currently uses a "document identifier" parameter in the GetAnchorTable message. Also, the protocol currently uses H-4 messages instead of the text stream called for in the specification. The first issue is a matter of current debate in the working group, while the second can be addressed by a new PDC generation extension without any changes to the NavMan.

Documentation

• NavMan Programmer's Guide scheduled for release late June 1997
• NavMan Reference Guide scheduled for release late June 1997
  

Software Releases

Current release: NavMan-1.0.1 [1997.06.09]

Software requirements:
base component: H-4.2.1+; SIM-1.0.1+; PDC-3.1.2+; GPT-1.1.2+; SB-1.0.2+;
extensions: none
behaviors: none
documentation: HDC-4.0.0+.
Distributions:

These are currently only accessible from on machines on the CSDL subnet. They should become publicly available by 16 June 1997. Thanks.
NavMan-1.0.1 source (173K)
NavMan-1.0.1 prebuilt for Sparc/Solaris 2.4 (1473K)


Scheduled next release: NavMan-1.1.0 [1997.06.16]

Change log:

NavMan-1.0.1 [1997.06.09] - updated to new os layer components
NavMan-1.0.0 [1997.05.12] - initial release


Applications:

Navigator.1.0.0+

Installation Instructions

To install NavMan, follow the generic installation directions found on the general HOSS software information page. Note the the include file link step must be performed for this component.

Problems

This section contains a list of known bugs, problems, and missing features. If you would like to report a bug, mail hadmin@csdl.tamu.edu.

The problems listed here refer to the current version of NavMan, 1.0.0 [1997.05.12].

• memory leaks (pnuern@csdl.tamu.edu)
  
• authoring facilities are bad (pnuern@csdl.tamu.edu)
  
• need to switch to ASCII stream PDC libraries when built (pnuern@csdl.tamu.edu)
  
• needs resolvability checker installed (pnuern@csdl.tamu.edu)
  
• needs conditional structure guard installed (pnuern@csdl.tamu.edu)