Practical semantic analysis of web sites and documents

  • Authors:

  • Thierry Despeyroux

  • Affiliations:

  • AxIS Group, Cedex, France

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

As Web sites are now ordinary products, it is necessary to explicit the notion of quality of a Web site. The quality of a site may belinked to the easiness of accessibility and also to other criteria such as the fact that the site is up to date and coherent. This last quality is difficult to insure because sites may be updated very frequently, may have many authors, may be partially generated and inthis context proof-reading is very difficult. The same piece of information may be found in different occurrences, but also in data ormeta-data, leading to the need for consistency checking. In this paper we make a parallel between programs and Web sites. We present some examples of semantic constraints that one would like to specify (constraints between the meaning of categories and sub-categories in a thematic directory, consistency between the organization chart and the rest of the site in an academic site). We present quickly the Natural Semantics a way to specify the semantics of programming languages that inspires ourworks. Natural Semantics itself comes from both an operational semantics and from logic programming and its implementation uses Prolog. Then we propose a specification language for semantic constraints in Web sites that, in conjunction with the well known "make" program, permits to generate some site verification tools by compiling the specification into Prolog code. We apply our method to alarge XML document which is the scientific part of our instituteactivity report, tracking errors or inconsistencies and alsoconstructing some indicators that can be used by the management of theinstitute.