Web ML - Concepts

Concepts

WebML enables designers to express the core features of a site at a high level, without committing to detailed architectural details. WebML concepts are associated with an intuitive graphic representation, which can be easily supported by CASE tools and effectively communicated to the non-technical members of the site development team (e.g., with the graphic designers and the content producers). WebML also supports an XML syntax, which instead can be fed to software generators for automatically producing the implementation of a Web site. The specification of a site in WebML consists of four orthogonal perspectives:

  1. Structural Model: it expresses the data content of the site, in terms of the relevant entities and relationships. WebML does not propose yet another language for data modeling, but is compatible with classical notations like the E/R model, the ODMG object-oriented model, and UML class diagrams.
  2. Hypertext Model: it describes one or more hypertexts that can be published in the site. Each different hypertext defines a so-called site view (see Figure 2). Site view descriptions in turn consist of two sub-models.
    • Composition Model: it specifies which pages compose the hypertext, and which content units make up a page.
    • Navigation Model: it expresses how pages and content units are linked to form the hypertext. Links are either non-contextual, when they connect semantically independent pages (e.g., the page of an artist to the home page of the site), or contextual, when the content of the destination unit of the link depends on the content of the source unit.
  3. Presentation Model: it expresses the layout and graphic appearance of pages, independently of the output device and of the rendition language, by means of an abstract XML syntax. Presentation specifications are either page-specific or generic.
  4. Personalization Model: users and user groups are explicitly modeled in the structure schema in the form of predefined entities called User and Group. The features of these entities can be used for storing group-specific or individual content, like shopping suggestions, list of favorites, and resources for graphic customization.

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