Vol.4 No.2 June 3, 2005
Editorial  (pp101-101)
        D Schwabe       
Research articles:
Automated Web Evaluation by Guideline Review  (pp102-117)
        J.  Vanderdonckt and A. Beirekdar
A novel approach is presented for automatically evaluating of the usability and accessibility (U&A) of web sites by performing a static analysis of their HTML code against U&A guidelines. The approach relies on separating guidelines evaluation logic from the evaluation engine. Due to this separation, the whole evaluation process can be divided into two main phases: specifying formal guidelines and web page evaluation. In the first phase, the formal structure of a guideline is expressed in terms of Guideline Definition Language (GDL). In the second phase, the web page is parsed to identify its contents and structure and link them to relevant guidelines to be evaluated on the page parsed. This approach enables the simultaneous evaluation of multiple guidelines selected on demand from different sources. It also optimises evaluation by automatically identifying common sub-structures among structured guidelines. It also supports the expression, by evaluators with different usability practises, of alternative evaluation strategies.

Bridging MDA and OWL Ontologies  (pp118-143)
        D. Gašević, D. Djurić, and V. Devedžić
Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Model-Driven Architectures (MDA) are two technologies being developed in parallel, but by different communities. They have common points and issues and can be brought closer together. Many authors have so far stressed this problem and have proposed several solutions. The result of these efforts is the recent OMG’s initiative for defining an ontology development platform. However, the problem of transformation between  ontology and MDA-based languages has been solved using rather partial and ad hoc solutions, most often by XSLT. In this paper we analyze OWL and MDA-compliant languages as separate technological spaces. In order to achieve a synergy between these technological spaces we define ontology languages in terms of MDA standards, recognize relations between OWL and MDA-based ontology languages, and propose mapping techniques. In order to illustrate the approach, we use an MDA-defined ontology architecture that includes ontology metamodel and ontology UML Profile. Based on this approach, we have implemented a transformation of the ontology UML Profile into OWL representation.

Towards assuring quality attributes of client dynamic Web applications: Identifying and addressing the challenges  (pp144-164)
        M. Sh. Aun, S. Yuen, and K. Agusa
Web applications, nowadays, impose some entirely new challenges in the field of software quality. They differ from traditional software applications in several critical dimensions. This paper identifies the challenges involved in assuring quality attributes of Client Dynamic (CD) Web applications and then presents an approach proposed to address such challenges. Our approach, in addition to combining static and dynamic processing, involves feature engineering techniques. It allows for separating features out of the implementation artifacts and enables their debugging and conformance to quality attributes. The aim of this paper is to identify the challenges involved and to describe the set of components that incorporate the essential architecture design of an environment dedicated for addressing such challenges. We limit our attention to applications, where client scripted pages are considered as the building blocks. Scripted pages play an important role in making the web more interactive and dynamic. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated (with the help of a prototype tool being implemented) by practical examples. The inherent advantages of our approach enables it to be helpful for assuring several other quality attributes such as maintainability and re-usability.

The Static Absorbing Model for the Web  (pp165-186)
        V. Plachouras, I. Ounis, and G. Amati
The analysis of hyperlink structure on the Web has been employed for detecting high quality documents. In approaches such as PageRank, the Web graph is modelled as a Markov chain and the quality of a document corresponds to the probability of visiting it during a random walk. However, it is not always straightforward to consider the Web graph as a Markov chain. For example, PageRank introduces a universal document, in order to transform the Web graph to a Markov chain.}{In this paper, we present the Absorbing Model, a hyperlink analysis model based on absorbing Markov chains, where the Web graph is transformed by adding one absorbing state for each document. We provide an authority-oriented and a utility-oriented interpretation of the Absorbing Model, and show that the latter is more effective than the authority-oriented model. Thus, we believe that it is quite important to make this distinction between the two types of hyperlink analysis. In addition, we provide evidence that support the investigation of more elaborate hyperlink analysis methods on a query-by-query basis.

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