The goal of this paper is to argue the need to approach the personalization issues in Web applications from the very beginning in the application's development cycle. Since personalization is a critical aspect in many popular domains such as e-commerce, it important enough that it should be dealt with through a design view, rather than only an implementation view (which discusses mechanisms, rather than design options). We present different scenarios of personalization covering most existing applications. Since our design approach is based on the Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method, we briefly introduce it, emphasizing the way in which we build Web application models as object-oriented views of conceptual models. We show how we specify personalized Web applications by refining views according to users' profiles or preferences; we show that an object-oriented approach allows maximizing reuse in these specifications. We discuss some implementation aspects and compare our work with related approaches, and present some concluding remarks.

The acceptance of UML as a de facto standard for the design of object-oriented systems, together with the explosive growth of the World Wide Web has raised the need for UML extensions to model hypermedia applications running on the Internet. In this paper we propose such an extension for modeling the navigation and the user interfaces of hypermedia systems. Similar to other design methods for hypermedia systems we view the design of hypermedia systems as consisting of three models: the conceptual, navigational and presentational model. The conceptual model consists of a class diagram identifying the objects of the problem domain and their relations. The navigational model describes the navigation structure of the hypermedia application by a class diagram specifying which navigational nodes are defined and an object diagram showing how these navigational nodes are visited. Finally, the presentational model describes the abstract user interface by composite objects and its dynamic behavior by state diagrams. Each model is built using the notations provided by the UML, applying the extension mechanism of the UML, i.e. stereotypes and OCL constraints, when necessary.

We propose a precise UML-based authoring method for Web applications. This authoring method is part of the UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) approach. Starting with a requirement analysis done by use cases technique, it focuses on the design phase. The conceptual model of the application is used as guideline for modeling the navigation space. From the navigation space model we derive, in a next step, a navigation structure model which shows how to navigate through the navigation space using access elements like indexes, guided tours, queries and menus. Finally, a presentation model is constructed based on the navigation structure model. It provides an appropriate UML notation to support sketching and storyboarding. In addition, we suggest to use UML interaction diagrams to represent the presentation flow. During the whole development process we identify steps that can be performed in an automatic way thus providing the basis for a generation mechanism for Web application design. The different models of the design process are represented by using a UML conform extension of UML for Web applications (UML profile). The authoring process is illustrated with an example: a Web--based conference review system. The strength of the presented Web engineering approach is given by the fact that we use exclusively the UML notation and techniques. Moreover, our specification of constraints with OCL (part of UML) allows augmenting the exactitude of the models. In the same way our methodology has a high degree of precision in the description of guidelines of the authoring process of Web application, which can even partially be automated. Keywords: Web Engineering, Unified Modeling Language, Web applications, Authoring Process, Design Method, Systematic Development, UML Extension 1

vub.ac.be Currently, the vast majority of web sites do not support accessibility for visually impaired users. Usually, these users have to rely on screen readers: applications that sequentially read the content of a web page in audio. Unfortunately, screen readers are not able to detect the meaning of the different page objects, and thus the implicit semantic knowledge conveyed in the presentation of the page is lost. One approach described in literature to tackle this problem, is the Dante approach, which allows semantic annotation of web pages to provide screen readers with extra (semantic) knowledge to better facilitate the audio presentation of a web page. Until now, such annotations were done manually, and failed for dynamic pages. In this paper, we combine the Dante approach with a web design method, WSDM, to fully automate the generation of the semantic annotation for visually impaired users. To do so, the semantic knowledge gathered during the design process is exploited, and the annotations are generated as a by-product of the design process, requiring no extra effort from the designer. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.4 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Hypertext/Hypermedia – architecture, user issues; K.4.2

We present the latest version of WSDM, an audience driven web site design method, which is better tailored to model complex business processes. For this the Conceptual Design phase has been equipped with a Task Modeling step that uses ConcurTaskTrees (CTT), a task modeling technique from the HCI field. This is an easy and powerful technique and only some minor modifications were needed to make it fit for its use in WSDM. In addition, the Navigational Design step has been adapted slightly to allow for a better separation between structure and workflow. 1

This paper presents a UML Profile for Web applications. It is a UML extension based on the general extension mechanisms provided by the UML that defines specific stereotypes to model the navigational and presentational aspects of Web applications. This profile is part of a methodology for the analysis and design of Web applications. This methodology performs separate steps for conceptual, navigational and presentational modeling in a similar way as it is proposed by other methods for hypermedia or Web design. The novelty of this approach consists in the modeling techniques and notation used, that are entirely based on the Unified Modeling Language.

Abstract. The term World Wide Web (WWW) emphasizes that the Web is global and many companies realize that this creates new opportunities. A considerable amount of literature on web site development stresses that, in order to attract and retain more customers, it is vital to create different versions of a web site and adapt those versions to the local communities they target. This process is usually called globalization and the different web site versions are called localized web sites. Although content management systems (CMS) for web sites provide support for multinational web sites, current web site design methodologies do not consider the issue of globalization. In general, the globalization effort is done after the web site is designed and implemented. This makes globalization much harder. In this paper, we show how to extend an existing web site design method, WSDM, to support the design of localized web sites. 1

This work presents an OO software production method that provides conceptual modelling extensions (in terms of models and abstraction primitives) to facilitate the web application sp ecification and development process. It also discusses a strategy to automatically go from the problem space (conceptual models) to the solution space (final software product) in an automatic way, by implementing a set of mappings between conceptual primitives and their corresponding software representations. To include a practical view of the approach, the work describes a real case-study of a University Department Web System that has been developed with this method. 1.

Nowadays, it is getting more and more common to develop Web applications where part of the functionality is carried out by different systems. These systems provide functionality developed in different technologies that are integrated to build a complete web application. To deal with the integration issue that allows us to build this kind of Web applications, current Web Engineering methods should provide the mechanisms that facilitate this integration with third business parties during the modeling process. This paper presents a model driven method to achieve integration with external parties at a high level of abstraction. The method provided is an extension to the OOWS approach for the construction of this new kind of Web applications. The Travel Agency System has been taken as a case study to clearly understand how the whole method is applied. 1.

Adaptive web sites are sites that automatically improve their internal organization and/or presentation by observing userbrowsing behavior. In this paper we argue that adaptive behavior of websites should be controlled in order to keep the website manageable. We believe that adaptive behavior may be a useful complement to a good website design method on the condition that the adaptations are limited and according to the modeling approach followed during design. Therefore, we allow a website designer to specify at design time the adaptive behavior that will be allowed at runtime. To accomplish this goal, an Adaptation Specification Language is defined that allows designers to specify at the level of the navigational model, which adaptations could be performed at runtime. The language is event based, i.e. a collection of rules is used to specify the adaptation operations to be carried out if certain conditions are satisfied. The approach proposed is elaborated in the context of WSDM, an audience driven website design method, but is generally applicable to other design methodologies.