Web‐application composition through direct editing of Web documents and multiplexing of information access scenarios

In order to support user information retrieval on the Web, a framework is needed in which a user can define various types of data links as necessary by extracting only the necessary components from a Web application and then create a new compound document. This compound document refers to a document that includes services and tools embedded in it. In this research, the authors propose a framework which allows for clipping the structural elements of a Web application and directly manipulating the data linkages using formulas. As a result, the user can clip these components into cells from different Web applications, and then by linking them, create a unique compound document. Moreover, the authors provide a framework for cloning the clipped cells in order to compare the results of various different searches. Furthermore, in this paper the authors describe a method to use a word processing document or spreadsheet as a destination for embedding the clipped components, and function linking for these documents and the clipped cells. As a result, the created custom complex document can be reused and shared more easily.