25 Years of Model-Driven Web Engineering : What we achieved, what is missing

Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) approaches aim to improve the Web applications development process by focusing on modeling instead of coding, and deriving the running application by transformations from conceptual models to code. The emergence of the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) has been an important milestone in the evolution of Web modeling languages, indicating not only the maturity of the field but also a final convergence of languages. In this paper we explain the evolution of modeling and design approaches since the early years (the 90’s) detailing the forces which drove that evolution and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of some of those approaches. A brief presentation of IFML is accompanied with a thorough analysis of the most important achievements of the MDWE community as well as the problems and obstacles that hinder the dissemination of model-driven techniques in the Web engineering field.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada (LIFIA

25 Years of Model-Driven Web Engineering : What we achieved, what is missing

Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) approaches aim to improve the Web applications development process by focusing on modeling instead of coding, and deriving the running application by transformations from conceptual models to code. The emergence of the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) has been an important milestone in the evolution of Web modeling languages, indicating not only the maturity of the field but also a final convergence of languages. In this paper we explain the evolution of modeling and design approaches since the early years (the 90’s) detailing the forces which drove that evolution and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of some of those approaches. A brief presentation of IFML is accompanied with a thorough analysis of the most important achievements of the MDWE community as well as the problems and obstacles that hinder the dissemination of model-driven techniques in the Web engineering field.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada (LIFIA

Paralelos entre a curadoria de conteúdo em redes sociais e a gestão do conhecimento

Partimos para o novo mundo, aquele em que muitas vezes o virtual é muito mais importante e relevante para a sociedade que o próprio ambiente físico. Nesse cenário, tudo se resume a dados e informações assimilados e geridos, eficientemente ou não. A gestão dessa informação já ocorre no âmbito do conhecimento explícito, ou seja, são dados e informações que já estão consolidados nos veículos de comunicação, como o livro impresso, fotografia e até a Internet. Em paralelo com essa administração da informação, o crivo, a seleção e a recomendação do conteúdo jogam um papel de igual importância no navegar por entre o imenso mar de dados.   Tanto na gestão do conhecimento como na curadoria de conteúdo, a complexidade está na inserção do conhecimento tácito no universo, ou seja, um ou mais indivíduos da organização fornecem suas experiências, crenças, sentimentos, vivências, valores, crítica etc. Este trabalho quer encontrar paralelos e pontos convergentes entre curadoria de conteúdo e gestão do conhecimento, descobrindo formas de potencializar as práticas de gestão e curadoria consolidadas

Integración de patrones en el proceso de diseño de sistemas hipermedia mediante el uso de ontologías

Los métodos de diseño hipermedia asisten al diseñador a través de una serie de fases y productos. Sin embargo, un diseñador, tanto si es experto como no, puede llegar a tomar una solución inadecuada a un determinado problema de diseño que puede ser perjudicial para el usuario. Los patrones de diseño son ese mecanismo que puede ayudar a aliviar tanto el acometido de nuevos desarrollos como la dificultad en la toma de decisiones para la mejora de sistemas ya existentes, en tanto en cuanto puedan integrarse de forma eficiente con los métodos de diseño y sean accesibles de manera efectiva a los diferentes integrantes del equipo de desarrollo. Para resolver estas carencias, el primer objetivo de esta tesis ha sido organizar el conocimiento de los pdh, proporcionando unos criterios de clasificación, un catálogo de patrones, un lenguaje de patrones y un marco de integración con los métodos de diseño, en el cual un conjunto de pasos guían una aproximación basada en patrones que permite transformar la especificación de requisitos en entidades de diseño en el modelado conceptual, gracias a las soluciones capturadas por los patrones. Además para poder automatizar este conjunto de herramientas se ha propuesto un modelo de representación semántico basado en ontologías que permite mantener enlazada la representación textual del patrón mediante anotaciones, haciendo a los patrones mutuamente comprensibles a diseñadores y a programas.______________________________________________ The development of large-scale hypermedia and web systems must be carried out following a well defined systematic process, that is, applying hypermedia and web engineering methods and techniques. In addition, considering that the development process of web systems is characterized by obtaining an operative product in a short period of time, designers can alleviate decision making resorting to design patterns. A design pattern records the knowledge and the experience of domain experts on how to make a software system more reusable and flexible as a result of many efforts on the design and codification of systems. Currently, if a designer or a developer of hypermedia applications wants to solve or to communicate a specific design problem by means of hypermedia design patterns (hdp), as starting point, she would have to search across multiple existing publications or some of web repositories available in order to identify the pattern or patterns that best fit her needs. To date, the necessary mechanisms to help the designer to find the appropriate pattern or patterns and to integrate them into hypermedia design methods do not exist. Therefore, the success of this activity will depend only on the designer knowledge about the existing resources and her experience in the use of patterns. In order to solve these lacks, the first aim of this thesis has been to organize the knowledge of hdp, providing a set of classification criteria which takes into account as much hypermedia application modeling needs as the different levels of abstraction used in the pdh literature. From these criteria, a pattern catalogue has been elaborated to facilitate the search of patterns during the resolution of particular design problems as well as a pattern language as a step-by-step guide that advises designers how to accomplish the design process from different levels of abstraction, whereas it proposes alternative problems to resolve. Finally, from the pattern language, an integration framework with design methods has been specified, in which a set of steps guides a pattern based approach to transform requirements specifications to design entities into the conceptual modeling, thanks to the solutions captured by patterns. This process has been evaluated in an empirical way to verify its validity and utility. Once the space and the knowledge of patterns are organized, new challenges and realities should be faced up to. In particular, the great amount of patterns and its different sources, even counting on the mechanisms before mentioned, lead a non-experienced des- igner in the use of patterns to the necessity to explore most of them, in addition to the effort to understand when and how the pattern must be applied. At this stage, it is worth counting on software tools that allow for the organization, recovery and exploration of patterns with searches dedicated to finding appropiate patterns to generic design problems as well as their application in other software systems, such as CASE tools. However, firstly it is necessary to share a formal specification of patterns in order to preserve compatibility among software tools. To date, the hypermedia engineering field does not have its own formalization that allows the development of software tools for patterns, and the formalizations proposed in the software engineering field only take into account the pattern solution and leave aside the textual pattern description, so important to understand the foundation that underlies pattern’s problem and solution. All elements of a pattern are required to develop effective tools for patterns organization, recovery and exploration. For example, to include the intention of pattern would allow for indexing patterns according to the problem that solve, helping users to find the appropiate pattern for a design problem. For that reason, a semantic representation model based on ontologies that combines the domain knowledge about hypermedia used for the pattern description with the pattern format has been proposed. Afterwards, this representation provides the underlying framework to complement the textual pattern representation by means of semantic annotations, which is supported by a tool that helps both users and authors of patterns to formalize their own repositories. This combination of the formal representation linked to the textual pattern representation by means of annotations allows to patterns to be mutually comprehensible by designers and programs. An example of this is the development of a semantic web repository and the automatization of the integration process of hdp in a tool support for the design of hypermedia applications, using both developments the pattern language formalized by means of the annotation tool proposed. The development of these tools have proven the technical feasibility of the solution here proposed

E2ML: Educational Environment Modeling Language

This study moves from the consideration of the communication dynamics within the instructional design practice. With the introduction of electronic media, the design of educational environments in Higher Education has ceased to be a craftsmanship activity, and has acquired some features proper of mass production. This makes communication a more and more critical issue in design. The original goal of this work is to propose a communication tool that can support designers in this new and more challenging professional context. The result is E2ML, a conceptual design language with a simple notation system. The method proposed is that proper of design and applied sciences: critical observation of needs and practices aimed at the definition of a new tool. The Introduction is devoted to setting the research problem and to introduce a new perspective on education and technologies, taken from the work of B. Lonergan. Chapter I proposes a review of the existing literature about instructional design, which includes also the more recent developments concerning Learning Object and Learning Technologies metadata standards. Chapter II introduces E2ML, in its simple and advanced versions, while Chapter III answers some questions about its conceptual background and exploitation, and explores the relationship between E2ML, other Instructional Design models and Learning Technology standards. Chapter four collects several case studies that illustrate the use, benefits and shortcomings of the new language. Chapter V finally proposes a first evaluation framework for such a language along with data collected from a small study conducted with experienced instructional designers

"Modeling-by-Patterns" of Web Applications

"A pattern ... describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over" [1]. The possible benefits of using design patterns for Web applications are clear. They help fill the gap between requirements specification and conceptual modeling. They support conceptual modeling-by-reuse, i.e. design by adapting and combining already-proven solutions to new problems. They support conceptual modeling-in-the-very-large, i.e. the specification of the general features of an application, ignoring the detedls. This paper describes relevant issues about design patterns for the Web and illustrates an initiative of ACM SIGWEB (the ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Web). The initiative aims, with the contribution of researchers and professionals of different communities, to build an on-line repository for Web design patterns