Publication Details

In the following you can find some more details about the selected publication. For some of the papers you can also download a .pdf version of the paper for personal use only.

Publication Details Author(s): Florian Daniel Title: Model-Driven Design of Context-Aware Web Applications Reference: Ph.D. Thesis, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, May 2007. Abstract: The evolution of the Information Technology in the last years has seen the World Wide Web transforming from a read-only hypertext media into a full-fledged, multi-channel and multi-service application delivery platform. As a consequence, there has been an evolution from simple, static Web sites to complex, data-intensive Web applications. As for the development of such Web applications, the described evolution demands for appropriate development methods, able to cope with the growing complexity and the specific peculiarities of such new generations of Web applications. It is the field of Web Engineering that addresses this demand and that aims to develop systematic methodologies and solutions for an efficient development process for modern Web applications. Also, with the advent of new and powerful mobile devices, the Web is addressing a continuously growing number of users and is more and more pervading our everyday life. In this regard, the need to improve the user's browsing experience, e.g., by adapting the application to user preferences and device characteristics, has become manifest. Personalization and adaptation to preferences and devices have already proved their benefits for both application providers and content or service consumers. Similarly, context-awareness and more flexible adaptation mechanisms are increasingly becoming key factors to enhance both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the Web applications of today and especially of tomorrow. "Context-awareness'' is intended as capability to take into account whichever properties or information that characterize the interaction with the application, i.e. the context, and to react to changes that such properties or information may experience during the use of the application. Reactions, i.e. application adaptations, are therefore not anymore based on the sole user preferences and device characteristics, but more in general on any property that characterizes the context of the interaction. Typical application adaptations in Web applications are, for example, the adaptation of contents or hyperlinks, the execution of operations or services, or the adaptation of presentation or style properties. In line with these considerations, this dissertation puts its focus on the development of context-aware and adaptive Web applications. As answer to the challenge faced by the Web Engineering field, this dissertation proposes a conceptual, model-driven method for the design of context-awareness and adaptivity in Web applications. The proposed method is achieved by extending an already established conceptual modeling language for Web application design, i.e. the Web Modeling Language (WebML), also providing for the automatic generation of the application code. The proposed design model reflects a conceptualization of problems and solutions deriving from the use of context-aware and/or adaptive features in the domain of the Web, thus representing a comprehensive instrument covering the main requirements in the design of context-aware Web applications. This dissertation provides one of the first methodological approaches to context-awareness and adaptivity in the field of Web Engineering. More precisely, this dissertation is one of the first attempts to enlarge the applicability of adaptive application features in the Web from "adaptive hypermedia systems'' to "context-aware Web applications''. While the former typically are based on a user model that is dynamically updated based on the observation of the user's navigation actions, the latter may be based on a more complex context model and active, context-triggered application features. Although the research described in this dissertation is applied to the WebML method, its general nature also contributes to the advancement of the Web Engineering field in general. The dissertation starts with an introduction to the background knowledge required for the comprehension of the outlined ideas, i.e. context-awareness, adaptability, adaptivity, and the Web Modeling Language (WebML). Inspired by a comparison of solutions provided by other Web modeling methods, the dissertation then gradually introduces the new concepts related to adaptivity and context-awareness into WebML, describes the implementation of the extended model in the context of the WebRatio CASE tool for the design of WebML applications, and discusses a modeling case study. Then, the dissertation shows how the achieved results have been exploited in different contexts and how we envision the work will evolve. The concluding chapter summarizes the presented work, discusses benefits and limitations, and outlines ongoing and future work. Download paper