Automatic hyperlinking

Anautolinkis ahyperlinkadded automatically to ahypermediadocument, after it has been authored orpublished.Automatic hyperlinkingdescribes the process or the software feature that produces autolinks. Segments of the hypermedia are identified through a process ofpattern matching.For example, in hypertext, the software could recognise textual patterns for street addresses, phone numbers,ISBNs,orURLs.

In a distributed hypermedia system, such as theWorld Wide Web,autolinking can be carried out by client or server software. For example, aweb servercould add links to a web page as it sends it to a web browser. A browser can also add links to a page after it has received it from the server.

Examples

Google Toolbar

AutoLink is a feature of theGoogle Toolbar.Users can convert street addresses,ISBNsin a web page in their browser to links by clicking a button on Google Toolbar. The links direct the users to Google Maps for street addresses andAmazon.com for book information.

Since introduced in February 2005, there has been a lot of controversy about this feature. Somewebmastersexpressed their concerns over the AutoLink feature claiming that Google had no rights to modify their webpages or to direct the users to a commercial website such as Amazon.

This causedBarnes & Noble,a competitor ofAmazon,to link all ISBNs on their site back to themselves to prevent people clicking them to take them to their competitor.

Google sceptics compare it withMicrosoft's unpopularSmartTags,which ultimately proved too controversial and were dropped.

Trac Wiki Engine

Tracis aweb applicationforissue trackingin software development. It has awiki enginewhich is used for all text and documentation in the system. This includes not only wiki pages but also tickets and check-in log messages. These pieces of text have AutoLinks created, for example the textticket:1links to ticket 1. This is an example of server-side AutoLinking.

AutoLinker

AutoLinker is apluginapplication which has been developed forvBulletinforum software. It allowskeywordsset by the boardadministratorto be turned into hyperlinks or popups automatically any time they are used in a forum post or message.

Tomboy Notes

Tomboy Notesis apersonal wikiand text editor for Linux that creates automatic hyperlinks for web andemail addresseswhile the text is being edited.

Moodle

Themoodleonline course platform uses autolinking for automatic linking of terms within a moodle site to aglossaryor database entries, or to resources within the same course.

Firefox plugin linkator

Linkator takes a different stance on the concept of autolinking by automatically creating a search link frommanuallyselected text.

Saga

Saga is a note-taking application that creates automatic links between notes. The application recognizes page titles and headings and automatically creates links to them when they are mentioned inside notes. By using autolinks users can quickly create connected knowledge bases.

InLinks

InLinks is an online software that automates internal linking between web pages by utilizing a named entity detection algorithm to establish connections between pages containing similar entities.

See also

• entity linking
• named entity recognition
• tf-idf
• autocomplete
• code folding