Towards Modeling of DataWeb Applications - A Requirement\u27s Perspective

The web is more and more used as a platform for fullfledged, increasingly complex information systems, where a huge amount of change-intensive data is managed by underlying database systems. From a software engineering point of view, the development of such so called DataWeb applications requires proper modeling methods in order to ensure architectural soundness and maintainability. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, a framework of requirements, covering the design space of DataWeb modeling methods in terms of three orthogonal dimensions is suggested. Second, on the basis of this framework, eight representative modeling methods for DataWeb applications are surveyed and general shortcomings are identified pointing the way to nextgeneration modeling methods

PROBLEM SOLVING SUPPORT BY THE MULTI-LAYER HYPERMEDIA MODEL

Hypermedia is a suitable tool to describe knowledge and to support the problem solving process. Hypermedia nodes contain information elements and links represent relations between them. The users of present electronic materials, however, cannot modify the contents of the materials and include their individual knowledge. A new hypertext model, called Multi-Layer Hypermedia Model (MLHM) was developed to support the manipulation of the presented knowledge. With applying this model, electronic materials can be created that express writer´s as well as user´s knowledge and support the problem solving process. When using HTML as the basic layer of the model, the hypermedia system can expand the usability of HTML based materials

Surveying navigation modelling approaches

Recently, a number of authors who work on web application modelling have paid attention to the ideas regarding separation of concerns that underlie aspect-orientation, as well as some ideas that come from the model-driven development community. They attempt to improve the representation and separation of some concerns such as customisation or navigational concerns that are scattered throughout different software artifacts and tangled with other concerns in order to give a best support to the evolution of web applications. This paper surveys recent proposals in this field and compares them within a homogeneous framework that bridges the gap between the many different terminologies used, and highlights open problems that need further research.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007-64119Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN-2007-67843-C06-0

Efficient Modeling of Hierarchical Dialog Flows for Multi-Channel Web Applications

In Web-based applications, most user interactions take the form of navigating between Web pages. The structure of the navigation model thus has a strong impact on a Web application's usability. However, specifying a user-friendly navigation model for complex applications can be time-consuming, especially when designing for multiple presentation channels. We therefore present the formal semantics of the dialog flow notation (DFN) that provides constructs for the design of modular navigation models, and especially focus on constructs that reduce the specification redundancy within and between channels, thus reducing the design effort for Web-based user interface

Hypermedia Systems Development: A Comparative Study of Software Engineers and Graphic Designers

Hypermedia systems development is, in many regards, different from conventional systems development, chief amongst these differences being its multidisciplinary nature. Foremost amongst the roles in hypermedia development are software engineering and graphic design. However, traditionally the tension between software engineers and graphic designers is pronounced. It is therefore important to gain an understanding of the differences between the two camps with a view to bringing them closer together. This paper reports on the findings of a survey of hypermedia developers conducted in Ireland. One of the objectives of the survey was to compare and contrast the development approaches, methods, and techniques used by software engineers with those used by graphic designers. It was found that software engineers and graphic designers are much closer than might be believed in their attitudes on the value and importance of processes and documented working methods. However, graphic designers primarily base development approaches around the use of specific tools, whereas software engineers are more reliant on traditional and object-oriented software development methods. Regarding diagramming methods, there is some evidence of cross-pollination, as software engineers often use informal techniques such as storyboarding and graphic designers use software engineering techniques such as use case diagrams, but graphic designers find software engineering techniques to be less useful than vice versa

Authoring courses with rich adaptive sequencing for IMS learning design

This paper describes the process of translating an adaptive sequencing strategy designed using Sequencing Graphs to the semantics of IMS Learning Design. The relevance of this contribution is twofold. First, it combines the expressive power and flexibility of Sequencing Graphs, and the interoperability capabilities of IMS. Second, it shows some important limitations of IMS specifications (focusing on Learning Design) for the sequencing of learning activities

Measuring Interaction Design before Building the System: a Model-Based Approach

Early prototyping of user interfaces is an established good practice in interactive system development. However, prototypes cover only some usage scenarios, and questions dealing with number of required steps, possible interaction paths or impact of possible user errors can be answered only for the specific scenarios and only after tedious manual inspection. We present a tool (MIGTool) that transforms models of the behavior of a user interface into a graph, upon which usage scenarios can be easily specified, and used by MIGTool to compute possible interaction paths. Metrics based on possible paths, with or without user navigation errors, can then be computed. For example, when analyzing four mail applications, we show that Gmail has 3 times more shortest routes, has twice more routes that include a single user error, has routes with 13\ufewer steps, but has also optimal routes with the smallest probability to be chosen. Without MIGTool, this kind of analysis could only be done after building some prototype of the system, and then only for specific scenarios by manually tracing user actions and relative changes to the screens. With MIGTool the exploration of suitability of a design with respect to different scenarios, or comparison of different design alternatives against a single scenario, can be done with just a partial specification of the user interface behavior. This is made possible by the ability to associate scenarios steps to required user actions as defined in the model, by an efficient strategy to identify complete execution traces that users can follow, and by computing a range of diverse metrics on these results

Mobile Business Processes

Today’s global markets demand global processes. Increasingly, these processes are not only distributed, but also contain mobile aspects. We discuss two challenges brought about by these mobile business processes: Firstly, the need to specify the distribution of processes across several sites, and secondly, the need to specify the dialog flows of the applications implementing those processes on mobile devices. To remedy the first challenge, we give an overview of the Process Landscaping method with its support for refining processes across multiple abstraction layers and associating their activities and objects with distinguished locations. Next, we present a Dialog Flow Notation and Dialog Control Framework for the specification and management of complex hypertext-based dialog flows. These tools allow developers to build user interfaces for mobile client devices with different input/output capabilities, which all access the same application logic on a central server