Bridge Laws

Bridge laws were developed to determine the appropriate links and link markers automatically and embed them in the interactive application.^{[Bieber, 1991]} These link markers provided access to reports, operations (DSS commands), and other components of DSS applications. Bridge laws are translation routines provided by the application to the hypertext interface. They map the elements defined in the application's original non-hypertext data or knowledge base to entities in the hypertext engine. They do not alter the application's data or knowledge bases.

A user interface control subsystem was developed to maintain global information about user profile, user-defined links, comments, application keywords and application supplied bridge laws. It was responsible for interpreting contents coming from the application (using bridge laws) to provide virtual link markers by highlighting the objects. It tailored different views of the application based on different sets of filters.