Hyperlinks analysis in multilingual Web applications

Multilingual Web applications - applications where the information is provided in more than one language - present new difficulties for Web developers and maintainers. One of them is managing hyperlinks in correct way. Inconsistencies can raise when the same hyperlink structure is not replicated in every language (internal inconsistency) or when hyperlinks that connect pages in different languages are not symmetric (external inconsistency). In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to check the internal and external consistency of the hyperlinks that connect Web pages. A comparative evaluation of it has been conducted on a sample of 10 small multilingual Web sites, chosen among Web sites of Italy-based firms and educational institutions.