Through history, search information tools based on the notion of page, such as tables of contents, index, references, etc., had been proposed. With the rise of computers, these tools, typically static in nature, had seen their power increased. In the field of digital texts, hypertext is a great achievement from a conceptual point of view, and the massive utilization of the Internet has spread his utilization at big scale.Text navigation term has many interpretations. The most known of them refers to the navi-gation process carried out by traditional browsers. Nevertheless, our conception of text navi-gation diverges from the traditional hypertext navigation one because we consider that navi-gating a text is the expression of a cognitive process that involves navigation specific knowl-edge. We claim that a reader's activity can be assisted by the exploitation of knowledge that exists in texts, and that this knowledge may be modeled in a declarative way. Creation of links is not enough: it is necessary to make explicit the notion of navigation operation, and it has to be done by an “expert” capable of encoding this knowledge.The present work has four main contributions. First, it defines a computer text representa-tion of texts, specific to our text navigation approach. Second, a formal language of visualiza-tion and navigational knowledge modeling, named Sextant, is proposed. While the construc-tions of the language are defined by a syntax, the meaning of these constructions is deter-mined by an operational semantic. Third, a text navigation system, named NaviTexte, has been implemented. Finally, several applications of NaviTexte in real world situations are presented.
