Navigation - browsing from one related piece of information to another - is an important means of accessing information for a large class of applications: hypermedia, object-oriented databases, multimedia databases, and even traditional systems. In this article, we discuss a variety of sophisticated navigation paradigms. We distinguish among free, guided tour, and history-based navigation. In addition, we discuss integrating pure browsing with query-based access. We discuss static and dynamic models of the various navigation patterns, highlighting the fact that defining an adequate browing semantics requires a data model and a runtime model, both of which are more complex than those commonly found in hypermedia or databases. We illustrate these concepts with examples from a real-life banking application.