OntoWeaver: an ntology-based approach to the design of dataintensive web sites

  • Authors:

  • Yuangui Lei;Enrico Motta;John Domingue

  • Affiliations:

  • Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes;Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes;Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Web Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Building a data-intensive web site is a complex task. Ad hoc rapid prototyping approaches easily lead to unsatisfactory results, e.g. poor maintainability and extensibility. To address this problem, a number of model-based approaches have been proposed, which attempt to simplify the design and development of data-intensive web sites. However, these approaches typically lack expressive meta-models and, as a result, suffer from a number of limitations, e.g. the lack of appropriate support for the creation of complex user interfaces, for the specification of layouts and presentation styles, and for customization. In this paper we describe a new software tool OntoWeaver, which uses ontologies to drive the design and development of data-intensive web sites. OntoWeaver overcomes the problems of current approaches by providing a site view ontology, a presentation ontology, and a customization framework. Specifically, the site view ontology provides fine-grained modelling support for the creation of complex user interfaces and navigation structures. The presentation ontology captures the features of layouts and presentation styles of user interface elements. These two explicit meta-models allow the target web site to be represented in a declarative and re-usable format, thus enabling high level support for design, maintenance, and customization. The customization framework exploits this advantage and provides comprehensive customization support for the target web site at design as well as run time.