JWE Abstracts 

Vol.10 No.2 June 15, 2011

Research Articles: 

Enterprise Frameworks for Data Intensive Web Applications: an End-User Development Model Based Approach (pp087-108)
        Franca Garzotto
This paper investigates enterprise frameworks in the context of data intensive web applications, and proposes an approach that integrates the paradigms of End User Development and Model Based development. An enterprise framework denotes a reusable, semi-complete application “skeleton” that can be easily adapted to produce custom software products in a specific business sector. Traditionally, it is conceived as a tool for expert software developers. In contrast, we propose to regard enterprise frameworks as tools that enable domain experts to develop for data intensive web applications in a given field without the need of technological training or support by expert programmers. We propose the adoption of a model-driven process for framework-enabled development, based on conceptual models that are appropriate for the framework domain and domain experts can understand, adapt, and customize. We discuss requirements for and benefits of combining the two paradigms, and exemplify our approach presenting CHEF, an enterprise framework for data-intensive multichannel web applications in the domain of cultural heritage and cultural tourism. CHEF has been developed in the context of a wide international initiative called MEDINA and has been intensively evaluated in this and other projects.

Model-Driven Web Development for Multiple Platforms (pp109-152)
        Ali Fatolahi, Stephane S. Some, and Timothy C. Lethbridge
Mode-driven development of web applications relies on the definition of the mappings that transform high-level models to models of specific web platforms. Thus, the transformations are often platform-specific and may not be used for more than one platform. The current web, however, is a heterogeneous network of different technologies and it often happens that one specific application needs to run on several platforms. Also, many patterns of web applications could be re-used in several projects that are performed using different technological configurations. In this paper, we describe our approach for targeting multiple platforms by defining an intermediate abstract web platform. This is a technology-independent model that carries common properties of web applications. Thus, transformations will become two-step transformations; the first step targets the abstract web platform and hence, is re-usable. The second step maps the abstract web model to specific web platforms; this is shorter than conventional platform-specific transformations.

Automatic maintenance of Web directories (pp153-173)
        Carlos Hurtado and Marcelo Mendoza
Web directories allow Web users to browse a hierarchy of categories, under which different types of resources are classified. We study the problem of maintaining a Web directory, that is, the problem of continually discovering and ranking resources that are relevant to the categories of the directory. We propose an unsupervised computational method that conducts the maintenance of the directory by analyses of user browsing data. The method is based on the extraction and classification of user sessions (sequences of resources selected by users) into the categories of the directory. In addition, we show that the directory maintenance method can be slightly modified to find queries that are useful to find relevant resources allowing users to switch from directory browsing to query formulation. Experimental results allow for affirmation that the proposed methods are effective, that they attain identification of new pages in each category and also recommend related queries with high precision, without needing labeled data to conduct traditional web page and query classification tasks.

Book Review: 

On Handbook of Research on Web 2.0, 3.0 and X.0: Technologies, Business, and Soclial Applications, edited by San Murugesan (pp174-174)
        Bebo White

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