Irene Garrigós

A survey on web modeling approaches for ubiquitous web applications

Purpose – Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full-fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model-driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in-depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs. Design/methodology/approach – This methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability. Findings – The results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta-models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self-contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility. Originality/value – Different from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well-defined as well as fine-grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

Modelling dynamic personalization in web applications

This article presents an extension of the OO-H conceptual modelling approach to address the particulars associated with the design and specification of dynamic personalization. We describe how conventional navigation and presentation diagrams are influenced by personalization properties. The main benefit is that personalization specification can be modified without recompile the rest of the application modules.

A Conceptual Modeling Approach for OLAP Personalization

Data warehouses rely on multidimensional models in order to provide decision makers with appropriate structures to intuitively analyze data with OLAP technologies. However, data warehouses may be potentially large and multidimensional structures become increasingly complex to be understood at a glance. Even if a departmental data warehouse (also known as data mart) is used, these structures would be also too complex. As a consequence, acquiring the required information is more costly than expected and decision makers using OLAP tools may get frustrated. In this context, current approaches for data warehouse design are focused on deriving a unique OLAP schema for all analysts from their previously stated information requirements, which is not enough to lighten the complexity of the decision making process. To overcome this drawback, we argue for personalizing multidimensional models for OLAP technologies according to the continuously changing user characteristics, context, requirements and behaviour. In this paper, we present a novel approach to personalizing OLAP systems at the conceptual level based on the underlying multidimensional model of the data warehouse, a user model and a set of personalization rules. The great advantage of our approach is that a personalized OLAP schema is provided for each decision maker contributing to better satisfy their specific analysis needs. Finally, we show the applicability of our approach through a sample scenario based on our CASE tool for data warehouse development.

A Requirement Analysis Approach for Using i* in Web Engineering

Web designers usually ignore how to model real user expectations and goals, mainly due to the large and heterogeneous audience of the Web. This fact leads to websites which are difficult to comprehend by visitors and complex to maintain by designers. In order to ameliorate this scenario, an approach for using the i* modeling framework in Web engineering has been developed in this paper. Furthermore, we also present a traceability approach for obtaining different kind of design artifacts tailored to a specific Web modeling method. Finally, we include a sample of our approach in order to show its applicability and we describe a prototype tool as a proof of concept of our research.

A personalization process for spatial data warehouse development

Spatial data warehouses (SDW) rely on extended multidimensional (MD) models in order to provide decision makers with appropriate structures to intuitively explore spatial data by using different analysis techniques such as OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) or data mining. Current development approaches are focused on defining a unique and static Spatial multidimensional (SMD) schema at the conceptual level over which all decision makers fulfill their current spatial information needs. However, considering the required spatiality for each decision maker is likely to derive in a potentially misleading SMD schema (even if a departmental DW or data mart is being defined). Furthermore, spatial needs of each decision maker could change over time or depending on the context, thus requiring the SMD schema to be continuously updated with changes that can hamper decision making. Therefore, if a unique and static SMD schema is designed, acquiring the required spatial information is more costly than expected for decision makers and they may get frustrated during the analysis. To overcome these drawbacks, we argue for considering spatiality as a personalization feature within a formal design process. In this way, each decision maker will be able to access its own personalized SMD schema with its required spatial structures and instances, suitable to be properly analyzed at a glance. Our approach considers several novel artifacts: (i) a UML profile for spatial multidimensional modeling at the conceptual level, (ii) a spatial-aware user model in order to define decision maker profile; and (iii) a spatial personalization language to define spatial needs of decision makers as personalization rules. The definition of personalized SMD schemas by using these artifacts is formally defined using the Software Process Engineering Metamodel Specification (SPEM) standard. Finally, the applicability of our approach is shown through a running example based on our Eclipse-based tool for SDW development.

Ten Years of Rich Internet Applications: A Systematic Mapping Study, and Beyond

BACKGROUND. The term Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) is generally associated with Web applications that provide the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. Ten years after the introduction of the term, an ample amount of research has been carried out to study various aspects of RIAs. It has thus become essential to summarize this research and provide an adequate overview. OBJECTIVE. The objective of our study is to assemble, classify, and analyze all RIA research performed in the scientific community, thus providing a consolidated overview thereof, and to identify well-established topics, trends, and open research issues. Additionally, we provide a qualitative discussion of the most interesting findings. This work therefore serves as a reference work for beginning and established RIA researchers alike, as well as for industrial actors that need an introduction in the field, or seek pointers to (a specific subset of) the state-of-the-art. METHOD. A systematic mapping study is performed in order to identify all RIA-related publications, define a classification scheme, and categorize, analyze, and discuss the identified research according to it. RESULTS. Our source identification phase resulted in 133 relevant, peer-reviewed publications, published between 2002 and 2011 in a wide variety of venues. They were subsequently classified according to four facets: development activity, research topic, contribution type, and research type. Pie, stacked bar, and bubble charts were used to depict and analyze the results. A deeper analysis is provided for the most interesting and/or remarkable results. CONCLUSION. Analysis of the results shows that, although the RIA term was coined in 2002, the first RIA-related research appeared in 2004. From 2007 there was a significant increase in research activity, peaking in 2009 and decreasing to pre-2009 levels afterwards. All development phases are covered in the identified research, with emphasis on “design” (33%) and “implementation” (29%). The majority of research proposes a “method” (44%), followed by “model” (22%), “methodology” (18%), and “tools” (16%); no publications in the category “metrics” were found. The preponderant research topic is “models, methods and methodologies” (23%) and, to a lesser extent, “usability and accessibility” and “user interface” (11% each). On the other hand, the topic “localization, internationalization and multilinguality” received no attention at all, and topics such as “deep Web” (under 1%), “business processing”, “usage analysis”, “data management”, “quality and metrics” (all under 2%), “semantics”, and “performance” (slightly above 2%) received very little attention. Finally, there is a large majority of “solution proposals” (66%), few “evaluation research” (14%), and even fewer “validation” (6%), although the latter have been increasing in recent years.

Capture and evolution of web requirements using webspec

Developing Web applications is a complex and time consuming process that involves different kind of people, ranging from customers to developers. Requirement artefacts play an important role as they are used by these people to perform their daily activities. However, state of the art in requirement management for Web applications disregards valuable features that tend to improve the development process, such as quick validation during elicitation, automatic requirement validation on the final application and useful change management support. To tackle these problems we introduce WebSpec, a requirement artefact for specifying interaction and navigation features in Web applications. We show its use through the development of an example application in the social networking area, and its implementation as an Eclipse plugin.

Open business intelligence: on the importance of data quality awareness in user-friendly data mining

Citizens demand more and more data for making decisions in their daily life. Therefore, mechanisms that allow citizens to understand and analyze linked open data (LOD) in a user-friendly manner are highly required. To this aim, the concept of Open Business Intelligence (OpenBI) is introduced in this position paper. OpenBI facilitates non-expert users to (i) analyze and visualize LOD, thus generating actionable information by means of reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards or data mining; and to (ii) share the new acquired information as LOD to be reused by anyone. One of the most challenging issues of OpenBI is related to data mining, since non-experts (as citizens) need guidance during preprocessing and application of mining algorithms due to the complexity of the mining process and the low quality of the data sources. This is even worst when dealing with LOD, not only because of the different kind of links among data, but also because of its high dimensionality. As a consequence, in this position paper we advocate that data mining for OpenBI requires data quality-aware mechanisms for guiding non-expert users in obtaining and sharing the most reliable knowledge from the available LOD.

Monitoring strategic goals in data warehouses with awareness requirements

A data warehouse (DW) system stores data from multiple data sources in integrated form and provides capabilities for monitoring business operations to ensure compliance to strategic goals. As such, DWs constitute a fundamental building block for Business Intelligence (BI) operations. In this paper, we introduce the notion of Awareness Requirements (AwReqs) in the requirements analysis and elicitation phase for DWs. In this context, AwReqs provide analysts with the means for eliciting and modeling requirements over performance measures (indicators) to appraise the success or failure of strategic goals. To demonstrate the benefit of our approach, we present a typical business example throughout the paper and show how we can establish in the early stages of DW design the adequacy of the design for BI operations.

WebSpec: a visual language for specifying interaction and navigation requirements in web applications

Web application development is a complex and time-consuming process that involves different stakeholders (ranging from customers to developers); these applications have some unique characteristics like navigational access to information, sophisticated interaction features, etc. However, there have been few proposals to represent those requirements that are specific to Web applications. Consequently, validation of requirements (e.g., in acceptance tests) is usually informal and as a result troublesome. To overcome these problems, we present WebSpec, a domain-specific language for specifying the most relevant and characteristic requirements of Web applications: those involving interaction and navigation. We describe WebSpec diagrams, discussing their abstraction and expressive power. With a simple though realistic example, we show how we have used WebSpec in the context of an agile Web development approach discussing several issues such as automatic test generation, management of changes in requirements, and improving the understanding of the diagrams through application simulation.