Hypertext searching - a survey

The idea of hypertext has been successfully used in Jewish literature. Its importance has been steadily growing over the last two decades. Internet and other information systems use hypertext format, with data organized associatively rather than sequentially or relationally. A myriad of textual problems have been considered in the pattern matching field with many non-trivial results. Nevertheless, not much work has been done on the natural combination of pattern matching and hypertext. In contrast to regular text, hypertext has a non-linear structure and the techniques of pattern matching for text cannot be directly applied to hypertext. In this paper we survey some of the work that has been done on exact and approximate pattern matching in hypertext. We show that in contrast to regular text, it does make a difference whether the errors occur in the hypertext or the pattern. The approximate pattern matching problem in hypertext with errors in the hypertext turns out to be N P- Complete and the approximate pattern matching problem in hypertext with errors in the pattern has a polynomial time solution.