The object-oriented hypermedia design model
Communications of the ACM
Web Modeling Language (WebML): a modeling language for designing Web sites
Proceedings of the 9th international World Wide Web conference on Computer networks : the international journal of computer and telecommunications netowrking
Modeling Data Entry and Operations in WebML
Selected papers from the Third International Workshop WebDB 2000 on The World Wide Web and Databases
Modeling and Designing Processes in E-Commerce Applications
IEEE Internet Computing
Using a process graph to improve system-user knowledge sharing
Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Computer human interaction for the management of information technology
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With the ubiquity of e-commerce, process oriented websites have increased in complexity associated with the growing volume of transactions and underlying business rules. A single business process involves a careful execution of rules in a specified order. Current conceptual design for such websites consists of a data, hypertext and presentation layer. It is in the hypertext layer where both navigation and functional elements are embedded. The functional elements are in turn rich in business rules that are hidden in the navigation elements. Consequently, there are no clear rule definitions, and thereby leading to erroneous results in websites generated from these models.In this study, we isolate the business rules from the hypertext layer and introduce a new process definition layer to capture these rules. The proposed layer acts as a centralized repository of well-defined rules and applies them against corresponding executable processes. We propose a hybrid model framework that combines WebML, a web modeling language for representing the informational elements, and W3C's Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL), a platform independent portable language based on XML for representing functional elements that encapsulates the business rules. We construct a sample bargain store case study rich in business rules in order to test the proposed model. In the implementation phase we use the Pi4SOA tool for the realization of the now isolated business rules written in WS-CDL. For each executed business process initiated by an associated scenario file, the process definition layer verifies it against the corresponding rules and returns an appropriate response accordingly. This approach reveals that WS-CDL can successfully be used to implement business rules. Moreover, the proposed hybrid approach enables the separation of business rules from the hypertext layer, and thereby provides an enhanced conceptual framework to better handle process oriented applications.