Supporting navigation accessibility requirements in Web engineering methods

Web accessibility not only guarantees universal user access to the Web, but also provides interesting benefits for Web development. In order to achieve the goal of Web accessibility, an interesting approach is the incorporation of accessibility requirements into current Web engineering methods. This article presents the Accessibility for Web Applications (AWA) approach with the aim of integrating accessibility into Web engineering methods. The paper also discusses the application of the AWA approach to the Object-Oriented Web Solutions (OOWS) engineering method to produce accessible Web applications with a focus on navigational requirements. In order to demonstrate the practical applicability and usefulness of the approach, a proof of concept is described, the results of which indicating the satisfaction of navigation accessibility requirements. With the application of the AWA approach in the model-driven development (MDD) method, previously-defined OOWS models have been extended with the accessibility criteria, providing resources for the required changes in the process.This study has been developed with the support of the MAVIR Research Network (S2009/TIC-1542 [www.mavir.net/]), MULTIMEDICA PROJECT(tin201020644-c03-01) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the project, PROS-Req TIN2010-19130-C02-02. Co-financing was received from the ERDF.Publicad

A navigational role-centric model oriented web approach - MoWebA

[EN] This study presents MoWebA, a navigational role-centric model driven development (MDD) proposal for web applications development. The approach was conceived considering a previous study of web methods and analysing some open issues. This article presents the fundamentals of the proposal; the methodological aspects for modelling and transformation processes; and the defined notations/techniques for modelling and transformation tasks, including their abstract and concrete syntax definitions. We include a summary of the validation experiences and main results, and a comparison against other related proposals, in order to highlight the main contributions of MoWebA.This research is partially supported by the CONACYT (Paraguay), through the INV-056 Project.González Toñánez, M.; Cernuzzi, L.; Pastor López, O. (2016). A navigational role-centric model oriented web approach - MoWebA. International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology. 11(1):29-67. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJWET.2016.075963S296711

Developing BP-driven web application through the use of MDE techniques

Model driven engineering (MDE) is a suitable approach for performing the construction of software systems (in particular in the Web application domain). There are different types of Web applications depending on their purpose (i.e., document-centric, interactive, transactional, workflow/business process-based, collaborative, etc). This work focusses on business process-based Web applications in order to be able to understand business processes in a broad sense, from the lightweight business processes already addressed by existing proposals to long-running asynchronous processes. This work presents a MDE method for the construction of systems of this type. The method has been designed in two steps following the MDE principles. In the first step, the system is represented by means of models in a technology-independent manner. These models capture the different aspects of Web-based systems (these aspects refer to behaviour, structure, navigation, and presentation issues). In the second step, the model transformations (both model-to- model and model-to-text) are applied in order to obtain the final system in terms of a specific technology. In addition, a set ofEclipse-based tools has been developed to provide automation in the application of the proposed method in order to validate the proposal.Torres Bosch, MV.; Giner Blasco, P.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2012). Developing BP-driven web application through the use of MDE techniques. Software and Systems Modeling. 11(4):609-631. doi:10.1007/s10270-010-0177-5S609631114Andrews, T., Curbera, F., Dholakia, H., Goland, Y., Klein, J., Leymann, F., Liu, K., Roller, D., Smith, D., Thatte, S., Trickovic, I., Weerawarana, S.: Business process execution language for Web services version 1.1 (May 2003)Barna, P., Frasincar, F., Houben, G.J.: A workow-driven design of Web information systems. In: Wolber, D., Calder, N., Brooks, C., Ginige, A. (eds.) ICWE, ACM, pp. 321–328Bakshi, K., Karger, D.R.: Semantic Web applications. In: Proceedings of the ISWC 2005 Workshop on End User Semantic Web Interaction (November 2005)Brambilla M., Ceri S., Fraternali P., Manolescu I.: Process modeling in Web applications. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 15(4), 360–409 (2006)Brambilla, M., Preciado, J.C., Trigueros, M.L., Sánchez-Figueroa F.: Business process-based conceptual design of rich internet applications. In: ICWE, pp. 155–161 (2008)Brambilla, M., Butti, S., Fraternali, P.: Webratio bpm: a tool for designing and deploying business processes on the Web. In: ICWE, pp. 415–429 (2010)Business process modeling notation (BPMN). OMG final adopted specification. dtc/06-02-01 (February 2006)Ceri, S., Fraternali, P., Bongio, A.: Web modeling language (Webml): a modeling language for designing Web sites. In: Proceedings of the 9th international World Wide Web conference on Computer networks : the international journal of computer and telecommunications networking, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 137–157. North-Holland Publishing Co., The Netherlands (2000)Davis J.: Open Source SOA. Manning Publications Co, Greenwich (2009)Distante, D.: Reengineering legacy applications and Web transactions: an extended version of the UWA transaction design model. Ph.D. thesis, University of Lecce, Italy (2004)Distante D., Rossi G., Canfora G., Tilley S.R.: A comprehensive design model for integrating business processes in Web applications. Int. J. Web Eng. Technol. 3(1), 43–72 (2007)Duhl, J.: Rich internet applications. Technical report, IDC (November 2003)Fons, J.: OOWS: A model driven method for the development of web applications. Ph.D. thesis, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (2008)Fons, J., Pelechano, V., Pastor, O., Valderas, P., Torres, V.: Applying the OOWS model-driven approach for developing web applications. The internet movie database case study. In: Web Engineering: Modelling and Implementing Web Applications. Human–Computer Interaction Series, pp. 65–108. Springer, London (2008)Fowler, M.: Inversion of control containers and the dependency injection pattern. http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html (January 2004)Gershenfeld N., Krikorian R., Cohen D.: The internet of things. Sci Am 291(4), 76–81 (2004)Giner P., Cetina C., Fons J., Pelechano V.: Developing mobile business processes for the internet of things. IEEE Pervasive Comput. 9, 18–26 (2010)Gómez J., Cachero C., Pastor O.: Extending a conceptual modelling approach to Web application design. In: Wangler, B., Bergman, L. (eds) CAiSE. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1789, pp. 79–93. Springer, London (2000)Goth G.: The task-based interface: not your father’s desktop. IEEE Software 26(6), 88–91 (2009)Holmes, T., Tran, H., Zdun, U., Dustdar, S.: Modeling human aspects of business processes—a view-based, model-driven approach. In: ECMDA-FA, pp. 246–261 (2008)Kappel, G., Pröll, B., Reich, S., Retschitzegger, W. (eds): Web Engineering—The Discipline of Systematic Development of Web Applications. Wiley, England (2006)Koch, N.: Software Engineering for Adaptive Hypermedia Systems: Reference Model, Modeling Techniques and Development Process. Ph.D. thesis, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany (2001)Koch N., Kraus A., Cachero C., Meliá S.: Integration of business processes in Web application models. J. Web Eng. 3(1), 22–49 (2004)Limbourg, Q., Vanderdonckt, J.: Usixml: a user interface description language supporting multiple levels of independence. In: ICWE Workshops, pp. 325–338 (2004)Linaje M., Preciado J.C., Sánchez-Figueroa F.: Engineering rich internet application user interfaces over legacy Web models. IEEE Internet Comput. 11(6), 53–59 (2007)Link, S., Hoyer, P., Schuster, T., Abeck, S.: Model-driven development of human tasks for workflows. In: ICSEA ‘08: Proceedings of the 2008 third international conference on software engineering advances, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 329–335. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2008)Marcos, E., Cáceres, P., Castro, V. D.: An approach for navigation model construction from the use cases model. In: CAiSE Forum. Held in conjunction with the 16th Conference On Advanced Information Systems Engineering (June 2004)Pietschmann, S., Voigt, M., Meissner, K.: Adaptive rich user interfaces for human interaction in business processes. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2009), WISE, pp. 351–364. Springer LNCS (October 2009)Schwabe D., Rossi G.: An object oriented approach to Web-based applications design. Theor. Pract. Object Syst. 4(4), 207–225 (1998)Schmid H.A., Rossi G.: Modeling and designing processes in e-commerce applications. IEEE Internet Comput. 8(1), 19–27 (2004)Schwinger W., Retschitzegger W., Schauerhuber A., Kappel G., Wimmer M., Pröll B., Cachero C., Casteleyn S., Troyer O.D., Fraternali P., Garrigós I., Garzotto F., Ginige A., Houben G.J., Koch N., Moreno N., Pastor O., Paolini P., Pelechano V., Rossi G., Schwabe D., Tisi M., Vallecillo A., van der Sluijs K., Zhang G.: A survey on Web modeling approaches for ubiquitous Web applications. IJWIS 4(3), 234–305 (2008)Sousa K.S., Mendona H., Vanderdonckt J.: A model-driven approach to align business processes with user interfaces. J. UCS 14(19), 3236–3249 (2008)Sukaviriya, N., Sinha, V., Ramachandra, T., Mani, S.: Model-driven approach for managing human interface design life cycle. In: MoDELS, pp. 226–240 (2007)Tedre M.: What should be automated?. Interactions 15(5), 47–49 (2008)Torres, V., Giner, P., Bonet, B., Pelechano, V.: Adapting BPMN to Public Administration. In: Proceedings BPMN 2010 Springer’s Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP). Postdam, Germany (to appear)Troyer, O.D., Casteleyn, S.: Modeling complex processes for Web applications using wsdm. In: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Web-Oriented Software Technologies (held in conjunction with ICWE2003), IWWOST2003 (2003

Supporting Navigation Accessibility Requirements in Web Engineering Methods

[EN] Web accessibility not only guarantees universal user access to the Web, but also provides interesting benefits for Web development. In order to achieve the goal of Web accessibility, an interesting approach is the incorporation of accessibility requirements into current Web engineering methods. This article presents the Accessibility for Web Applications (AWA) approach with the aim of integrating accessibility into Web engineering methods. The paper also discusses the application of the AWA approach to the Object- Oriented Web Solutions (OOWS) engineering method to produce accessible Web applications with a focus on navigational requirements. In order to demonstrate the practical applicability and usefulness of the approach, a proof of concept is described, the results of which indicating the satisfaction of navigation accessibility requirements. With the application of the AWA approach in the model-driven development (MDD) method, previously-defined OOWS models have been extended with the accessibility criteria, providing resources for the required changes in the process.This study has been developed with the support of the MAVIR Research Network (S2009/TIC-1542 [www.mavir.net/]), MULTIMEDICA PROJECT(tin201020644-c03-01) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the project, PROS-Req TIN2010-19130-C02-02. Co-financing was received from the ERDF.Moreno, L.; Valverde Giromé, F.; Martinez, P.; Pastor López, O. (2013). Supporting Navigation Accessibility Requirements in Web Engineering Methods. Journal of Web Engineering. 12(3):181-202. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/44342S18120212

Model driven design and data integration in semantic web information systems

The Web is quickly evolving in many ways. It has evolved from a Web of documents into a Web of applications in which a growing number of designers offer new and interactive Web applications with people all over the world. However, application design and implementation remain complex, error-prone and laborious. In parallel there is also an evolution from a Web of documents into a Web of `knowledge' as a growing number of data owners are sharing their data sources with a growing audience. This brings the potential new applications for these data sources, including scenarios in which these datasets are reused and integrated with other existing and new data sources. However, the heterogeneity of these data sources in syntax, semantics and structure represents a great challenge for application designers. The Semantic Web is a collection of standards and technologies that offer solutions for at least the syntactic and some structural issues. If offers semantic freedom and flexibility, but this leaves the issue of semantic interoperability. In this thesis we present Hera-S, an evolution of the Model Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) method Hera. MDWEs allow designers to create data centric applications using models instead of programming. Hera-S especially targets Semantic Web sources and provides a flexible method for designing personalized adaptive Web applications. Hera-S defines several models that together define the target Web application. Moreover we implemented a framework called Hydragen, which is able to execute the Hera-S models to run the desired Web application. Hera-S' core is the Application Model (AM) in which the main logic of the application is defined, i.e. defining the groups of data elements that form logical units or subunits, the personalization conditions, and the relationships between the units. Hera-S also uses a so-called Domain Model (DM) that describes the content and its structure. However, this DM is not Hera-S specific, but instead allows any Semantic Web source representation as its DM, as long as its content can be queried by the standardized Semantic Web query language SPARQL. The same holds for the User Model (UM). The UM can be used for personalization conditions, but also as a source of user-related content if necessary. In fact, the difference between DM and UM is conceptual as their implementation within Hydragen is the same. Hera-S also defines a presentation model (PM) which defines presentation details of elements like order and style. In order to help designers with building their Web applications we have introduced a toolset, Hera Studio, which allows to build the different models graphically. Hera Studio also provides some additional functionality like model checking and deployment of the models in Hydragen. Both Hera-S and its implementation Hydragen are designed to be flexible regarding the user of models. In order to achieve this Hydragen is a stateless engine that queries for relevant information from the models at every page request. This allows the models and data to be changed in the datastore during runtime. We show that one way to exploit this flexibility is by applying aspect-orientation to the AM. Aspect-orientation allows us to dynamically inject functionality that pervades the entire application. Another way to exploit Hera-S' flexibility is in reusing specialized components, e.g. for presentation generation. We present a configuration of Hydragen in which we replace our native presentation generation functionality by the AMACONT engine. AMACONT provides more extensive multi-level presentation generation and adaptation capabilities as well aspect-orientation and a form of semantic based adaptation. Hera-S was designed to allow the (re-)use of any (Semantic) Web datasource. It even opens up the possibility for data integration at the back end, by using an extendible storage layer in our database of choice Sesame. However, even though theoretically possible it still leaves much of the actual data integration issue. As this is a recurring issue in many domains, a broader challenge than for Hera-S design only, we decided to look at this issue in isolation. We present a framework called Relco which provides a language to express data transformation operations as well as a collection of techniques that can be used to (semi-)automatically find relationships between concepts in different ontologies. This is done with a combination of syntactic, semantic and collaboration techniques, which together provide strong clues for which concepts are most likely related. In order to prove the applicability of Relco we explore five application scenarios in different domains for which data integration is a central aspect. This includes a cultural heritage portal, Explorer, for which data from several datasources was integrated and was made available by a mapview, a timeline and a graph view. Explorer also allows users to provide metadata for objects via a tagging mechanism. Another application is SenSee: an electronic TV-guide and recommender. TV-guide data was integrated and enriched with semantically structured data from several sources. Recommendations are computed by exploiting the underlying semantic structure. ViTa was a project in which several techniques for tagging and searching educational videos were evaluated. This includes scenarios in which user tags are related with an ontology, or other tags, using the Relco framework. The MobiLife project targeted the facilitation of a new generation of mobile applications that would use context-based personalization. This can be done using a context-based user profiling platform that can also be used for user model data exchange between mobile applications using technologies like Relco. The final application scenario that is shown is from the GRAPPLE project which targeted the integration of adaptive technology into current learning management systems. A large part of this integration is achieved by using a user modeling component framework in which any application can store user model information, but which can also be used for the exchange of user model data

A web engineering approach for the development of business process-driven web applications

Actualmente, la World Wide Web se ha convertido en la plataforma más común para llevar a cabo el desarrollo de aplicaciones corporativas. Estas aplicaciones reciben el nombre de aplicaciones Web y entre otras funciones, deben de dar soporte a los Procesos de Negocio (PN) definidos por las corporaciones. Esta tesis presenta un método de Ingeniería Web que permite el modelado y la construcción sistemática de aplicaciones Web que soportan la ejecución de PN. En este trabajo se conciben los PN desde un punto de vista más amplio que el abordado por otros métodos de Ingeniería Web. El tipo de PN abordados incluye tanto procesos cortos como largos. A grosso modo, esta concepción más amplia permite considerar procesos que involucran diferentes participantes (personas y/o sistemas) los cuales cooperan para llevar a cabo un objetivo particular. Además, dependiendo del tipo de proceso que se esté ejecutando (corto o largo), la interacción del usuario con el sistema deberá adaptarse a cada caso. El método presentado en esta tesis ha sido desarrollado basándose en el Desarrollo de Software Dirigido por Modelos. De esta forma, el método propone un conjunto de modelos que permiten representar los diferentes aspectos que caracterizan las aplicaciones Web que soportan la ejecución de PN. Una vez el sistema ha sido representado en los modelos correspondientes, mediante la aplicación de transformación de modelos se obtiene otros modelos (transformaciones de modelo-a-modelo) e incluso el código que representa el sistema modelado en términos de un lenguaje de implementación (transformaciones de modelo-a-texto). El método propuesto en esta tesis está soportado por una herramienta llamada BIZZY. Esta herramienta ha sido desarrollada en el entorno de Eclipse y cubre el proceso de desarrollo desde la fase de modelado hasta la generación de código. En particular, el código generado corresponde con el framework Web Tapestry (framework que genera aplicaciones Web en Java) y con WS-BPEL,Torres Bosch, MV. (2008). A web engineering approach for the development of business process-driven web applications [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/2933Palanci

Reverse Engineering and Testing of Rich Internet Applications

The World Wide Web experiences a continuous and constant evolution, where new initiatives, standards, approaches and technologies are continuously proposed for developing more effective and higher quality Web applications. To satisfy the growing request of the market for Web applications, new technologies, frameworks, tools and environments that allow to develop Web and mobile applications with the least effort and in very short time have been introduced in the last years. These new technologies have made possible the dawn of a new generation of Web applications, named Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), that offer greater usability and interactivity than traditional ones. This evolution has been accompanied by some drawbacks that are mostly due to the lack of applying well-known software engineering practices and approaches. As a consequence, new research questions and challenges have emerged in the field of web and mobile applications maintenance and testing. The research activity described in this thesis has addressed some of these topics with the specific aim of proposing new and effective solutions to the problems of modelling, reverse engineering, comprehending, re-documenting and testing existing RIAs. Due to the growing relevance of mobile applications in the renewed Web scenarios, the problem of testing mobile applications developed for the Android operating system has been addressed too, in an attempt of exploring and proposing new techniques of testing automation for these type of applications

A MDA Approach for Navigational and User Perspectives

[EN] The study presented in this paper focuses on a navigational and user perspectives analysis of Web applications, highlighting some of their critical points for modeling. To consider these critical points, we propose a notational definition focused on a general metamodel, consisting of three specific metamodels: the Navigational Tree, the Node, and Roles. The metamodels have been implemented with a specific MDA (Model Driven Architecture) tool called AndroMDA, to generate applications for PHP language. Both, the general metamodel and its implementation have been analyzed by means of a proof of concept. Finally, some interesting results as well as the contribution of the proposed metamodel in comparison with other methodological proposals are discussed.The first author would like to thank the “Itaipu Technological Park” (Parque Tecnológico Itaipú – PTI) for partially funding the research under a scholarship programGonzález, M.; Casariego, J.; Bareiro, JJ.; Cernuzzi, L.; Pastor López, O. (2011). A MDA Approach for Navigational and User Perspectives. CLEI Electronic Journal. 14(1):1-12. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/46633S11214

Engineering Concern-Sensitive Navigation Structures: Concepts, Tools and Examples

Improving navigability in Web applications is a serious challenge for developers as this quality feature is essential for applications success. In this paper we present the concept of concern-sensitive navigation, a useful conceptual tool to improve navigation by profiting from the nature of application’s concerns. Concern sensitive navigation allows enriching Web pages with information, services or links related with the context in which pages are accessed.We show how our ideas are applied during the development process (e.g. by applying wise design strategies for separation of concerns) and can also be used by final users while adapting an application (e.g. by modding). Some examples of Web 2.0 sites are used to illustrate this last possibility. We also compare our research with other similar approaches such as the construction of adaptive Web applications.Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada (LIFIA

Engineering Concern-Sensitive Navigation Structures: Concepts, Tools and Examples

Improving navigability in Web applications is a serious challenge for developers as this quality feature is essential for applications success. In this paper we present the concept of concern-sensitive navigation, a useful conceptual tool to improve navigation by profiting from the nature of application’s concerns. Concern sensitive navigation allows enriching Web pages with information, services or links related with the context in which pages are accessed.We show how our ideas are applied during the development process (e.g. by applying wise design strategies for separation of concerns) and can also be used by final users while adapting an application (e.g. by modding). Some examples of Web 2.0 sites are used to illustrate this last possibility. We also compare our research with other similar approaches such as the construction of adaptive Web applications.Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada (LIFIA