Link awareness

Link awareness is defined as the ability to discover, view, search and update global hyperlink information about any resource with a URL on the World Wide Web. This global link information is a shared information resource.

Implementing link awareness is difficult. In practice, an implementation only approximates link awareness. There are at least two qualitative axes on which we can classify these implementations.

• Breadth of Coverage: The number and type of interlinked documents covered.
• Liveness: The ability (or lack thereof) to update the link information on the fly.

Implementation Examples

• Most WikiWiki implementations support link awareness within the scope of the documents that they host. Their breadth of coverage (in so far as link information is concerned) is narrow. A wiki, however, is very live (and indeed, liveness, is its raison d'etre).
• Google (http://www.google.com/)^TM supports link awareness through its web interface. (You type in a query of the form link:<URL>.) Google's breadth is impressive (it covers a lot of interlinked documents), but it is a far cry from live (it can take months before Google indexes a newly created document).
• Ila^TM is an experimental, scalable, distributed prototype document/link registry that is meant to be both live (you can submit updated documents to it) and have a wide breadth of coverage. It is hosted by TopoWeb (http://www.topoweb.com/)^TM.