Building Semantic Web Portals with a Model- Driven Design Approach

Abstract

This chapter presents an extension to Web application conceptual models toward Semantic Web. Conceptual models and model-driven methodologies are widely applied to the development of Web applications because of the advantages they grant in terms of productivity and quality of the outcome. Although some of these approaches are meant to address Semantic Web applications too, they do not fully exploit the whole potential deriving from interaction with ontological data sources and from semantic annotations. The authors claim that Semantic Web applications represent an emerging category of software artifacts, with peculiar characteristics and software structures, and hence need some specific methods and primitives for achieving good design results. In particular the contribution presented in this chapter is an extension of the WebML modeling framework that fulfils most of the design requirements emerging in the new area of Semantic Web. The authors generalize the development process to cover Semantic Web needs and devise a set of new primitives for ontology importing and querying. The chapter also presents a comparison of the proposed approach with the most relevant existing proposals and positioned with respect to the background and adopted technologies.