MESAM: A Protégé Plug-in for the Specialization of Models

International audienceNowadays, several efforts are focused on re-using generic platforms to create new systems, in order to make the design process easier and faster. Often, the designer has his own models and resources and would like to reuse the generic system over his resources. That means, he has to integrate his models and resources in the system, and then to directly reuse the generic system. But many problems occur. One of them is that the designer needs to translate his models into the specific format that understood by the system and to use the vocabulary specific to that system. Furthermore, he also needs to translate all the instantiations of his models (i.e. the resources and their metadata). We think that this task is tedious and time-consuming and we want to avoid it. Our objective is to allow the designer to reuse his models (his vocabulary) and his models' instantiations without any change of format or vocabulary. For example, a generic Adaptive Hypermedia System (AHS) is made of a generic adaptation model relying on generic user and domain models. The designer would like to integrate his models and instances in the generic models in order to reuse the generic adaptation engine. Specific systems can be obtained by specializing the generic models. However, this specialization process is not always easy to perform. It has to be supported to make the design process easier and faster. This paper focuses on assisting designers to specialize generic models using their own models. We aim to automate this process which has been so far entirely manual. Our objectives are twofold: to create a support for defining mappings between elements in generic models and elements in the designer's personal models and to help creating consistent and relevant models integrating the generic and specific ones and taking into account the mappings between them. The proposed approach relies on OWL1, a W3C standard and SWRL2, a W3C proposal

A Pattern and Rule-Based Approach for Reusing Adaptive Hypermedia Creator's Models

International audienceThe design of Adaptive Hypermedia is a difficult task which can be made easier if generic systems and AH creators' models are reused. We address this design problem in the setting of the GLAM platform only made up of generic components. In this paper, we assume the GLAM platform is used to create a specific adaptive hypermedia. We present a pattern and a rule-based approach helping a AH creator in reusing its user and domain models and instances in order to make them taken into account. This semi-automatic approach takes the creator's models as specialisations of GLAM generic models and requires the creator to express a minimum set of mappings between his models and the generic ones. The process results in a merged model consisting of the generic and the corresponding specific model, being fully compliant with the GLAM adaptation model. A plug-in and experimentations in the e-learning domain have been partially designed