Structuring primitives in the Callimachus component-based open hypermedia system

Driven by the philosophy of the 'primacy of structure over data', Component-Based Open Hypermedia Systems (CB-OHS) present an open set of structure servers providing structural abstractions of different hypermedia domains. To address the emergent requirements and to facilitate the development of structure servers, structure should be handled as a first class entity. We propose patterns for structure, called templates, that define the structural model upon which structure servers operate. We present how structure servers are developed and operate in the Callimachus CB-OHS. Development of structure servers within Callimachus is based on the explicit specification of structure with the use of an atomic structural primitive called the structural element. Explicit structure specification eases the development of structure servers in CB-OHS, making such development less error prone and providing the basis for tailoring domain specific abstractions