Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2007 Workshops

Today, nobody can contest that the amount and complexity of scientific data are increasing exponentially. In life sciences, the unique conjunction of complexity, size and importance of available data deserves special attention in both Web Information Systems (WIS) and data integration and mining areas. In the last few years, WIS have become the favourite mean for offering open access to biological data. Hundreds of data sources (databases with either user or program interface), numerous web sites and peer-reviewed literature are currently covering multiple facets of biology (genomic sequences, protein structures, pathways, transcriptomics data, etc.). However, the scientists have enormous difficulties in keeping up with this data deluge. The effective and efficient management and use of available data (including omics data), and in particular the transformation of these data into information and knowledge, is a key requirement for success in scientific discovery process. In fact, the bottlenecks for life sciences have shifted from data production to data access/integration, pre-processing, analysis/mining, and interpretation.

In human health and life sciences, researchers extensively collaborate with each other, sharing genomic, biomedical and experimental results. This necessitates dynamically integrating different databases into a single repository or a warehouse. The data integrated in these warehouses are extracted from various heterogeneous sources, having different degrees of quality and trust. Most of the time, they are neither rigorously chosen nor carefully controlled for data quality. Data preparation and data quality metadata are recommended but still insufficiently exploited for ensuring quality and validating the results of information retrieval or data mining techniques.

In a previous work, we built a data warehouse called GEDAW (Gene Expression Data Warehouse) that stores various information: data on genes expressed in the liver during iron overload and liver diseases, relevant information from public databanks (mostly in XML), DNA-chips home experiments and also medical records. Based on our past experience, this paper reports briefly on the lessons learned from biomedical data integration and data quality issues, and the solutions we propose to the numerous problems of schema evolution of both data sources and warehousing system. In this context, we present QDex, a Quality driven bio-Data Exploration tool, which provides a functional and modular architecture for database profiling and exploration, enabling users to set up query workflows and take advantage of data quality profiling metadata before the complex processes of data integration in the warehouse. An illustration with QDex Tool is shown afterwards.

This paper addresses a systemic problem in science: although datasets collected through scientific protocols may be properly stored, the protocol itself is often only recorded on paper or stored electronically as the script developed to implement the protocol. Once the scientist who has implemented the protocol leaves the laboratory, this record may be lost. Collected datasets without a description of the process used to produce them become meaningless; furthermore, the experiment designed to produce the data is not reproducible. In this paper we present the ProtocolDB system that aims at assisting scientists in the process of (1) designing and implementing scientific protocols, (2) storing, querying, and transforming scientific protocols, and (3) reasoning about collected experimental data (data provenance).

This paper deals with the integration of data extracted from the web into an existing data warehouse indexed by a domain ontology. We are specially interested in data tables extracted from scientific publications found on the web. We propose a way to annotate data tables from the web according to a given domain ontology. In this paper we present the different steps of our annotation process. The columns of a web data table are first segregated according to whether they represent numeric or symbolic data. Then, we annotate the numeric (resp.symbolic) columns with their corresponding numeric (resp. symbolic) type found in the ontology. Our approach combines different evidences from the column contents and from the column title to find the best corresponding type in the ontology. The relations represented by the web data table are recognized using both the table title and the types of the columns that were previously annotated. We give experimental results of our annotation process, our application domain being food microbiology.

Modeling in systems biology is concerned with using experimental information and mathematical methods to build quantitative models at different biological scales. This requires interoperation among various knowledge sources and services, such as biological databases, mathematical equations, data analysis tools, and so on. Semantic Web Services provide an infrastructure that allows a consistent representation of these knowledge sources as web-based information units, and enables discovery, composition, and execution of these units by associating machine-processable semantics description with them. In this paper, we show a method of using ontology alongside a semantic web services infrastructure to provide a knowledge standardisation framework in order to support modeling in systems biology. We demonstrate how ontologies are used to control the transformation of biological databases and data analysis methods into Web Services, and how ontology-based web services descriptions (OWL-S), are used to enable the composition between these services.

Up to a recent time, numbers of projects did not make available to the whole community the data resulting from the spatial or terrestrial missions. Since the advent of new technologies, the interoperability between the data and service providers has become a priority because it allows an easy access and sharing of various data (catalogues, images, spectrum ...) and it leads to the concept of Virtual Observatory. The astronomer will in a near future have new “virtual” instruments useful for his research through simple Web interfaces or user friendly tools. Collaborations are essential in order to lead to the consensuses and the bases necessary for its construction. National (OV France, U.S. NVO...) and transnational (ESA, ESO) projects have joined together within the International Virtual Observatory Alliance to take part in the development of Recommendations in various fields (Data Model, Data Access Layer, Semantics, Grid, etc.) through biannual dedicated conferences.

Collaborative data/knowledge management methods aim to achieve improved result quality through combination or merging of results and models obtained from multiple users and sites. Typical application scenarios in the domain of Web information systems include collaborative methods and meta methods for information acquisition (e.g. collaborative Web crawling and search, tagging), organization of document collections (e.g. collaborative classification and clustering), and knowledge sharing (e.g. alignment and sharing of personal ontologies). These areas have received increasing attention in the Web Information Systems community; however, connections and relationships between them have largely been neglected.

The workshop on Collaborative Knowledge Management for Web Information Systems (WE.Know) aims at closing this gap by bringing together researchers and practitioners dealing with collaborative methods in distinct contexts, and discovering synergies between their research fields.

Many activities on the web are driven by high-level goals of users, such as “plan a trip” or “buy some product”. In this paper, we are interested in exploring the role and structure of users’ goals in web search. We want to gain insights into how users express goals, and how their goals can be represented in a semi-formal way. This paper presents results from an exploratory study that focused on analyzing selected search sessions from a search engine log. In a detailed example, we demonstrate how goal-oriented search can be represented and understood as a traversal of goal graphs. Finally, we provide some ideas on how to construct large-scale goal graphs in a semi-algorithmic, collaborative way. We conclude with a description of a series of challenges that we consider to be important for future research.

Problems which users typically experience when dealing with search and management tasks within their personal document collections mainly result from lacking expressiveness and flexibility of the traditional file systems and data models to represent individual knowledge. Ontology-based approaches provide appropriate solutions, enabling people to semantically describe their multimedia items. Furthermore, suitable techniques for the support of information sharing and exchange in ontology-based systems are still missing or only weakly supported. In this paper we present a multi-user multimedia document management system based on Semantic Web technologies. We discuss requirements and preconditions with regard to user management and access control, and describe the technical implementation of our concept.

We describe procedures for solving disequation problems in theories with sequence variables and flexible arity symbols, and show how to use them for Collaborative Schema Construction.

What are the possibilities of Semantic Web technologies for organizations which traditionally have lots of structured data, such as metadata, available? A library is such a particular organization. We mapped a digital library’s descriptive (bibliographic) metadata for a large historical document collection encoded in MARC21 to a historical ontology using an out-of-the-box ontology, existing topic hierarchies on the World Wide Web and other resources. We also created and explored useful relations for such an ontology. We show that mapping the metadata to an ontology adds information and makes the existing information more easily accessible for users. The paper discusses various issues that arose during the mapping process. The result of mapping metadata to RDF/OWL is a populated ontology, ready to be deployed.

Importance of governance and associated issues of compliance and risk management are well recognized in enterprise systems. This importance has dramatically increased over the last few years as a result of recent events that led to some of the largest scandals in corporate history. Compliance related software and services is expected to reach a market value of over $ 27billion this year. At the same time, there is an increasing complexity on how to facilitate compliant business processes due to frequent and dynamic changes as well as shared processes and services executing in highly decentralized environments.

Due to the distributed nature of business operations, there is a need to develop tools, methods and techniques to support governance and compliance in web information systems (WIS). This is emerging as a critical and challenging area of research and innovation. It opens new questions e.g. modeling approaches for compliance requirements as well as challenge existing ones e.g. extension of process and service modeling and execution frameworks for compliance and risk management.

Nowadays organisations are subjects to frequent changes requiring continuous strategic alignment of business processes subject to increasing compliance requirements. We suggest a holistic integration of process management and risk management supporting a robust management of business processes while improving organisation’s resilience. The integration is based on a conceptual integration of risks and processes through meta-models. This paper is about a unified conceptual model of risk, which is a foundation for defining a semi-formal risk modelling language.

Building trusted P2P networks is a very difficult task, due to the size of the networks, the high volatility of the nodes, and potential byzantine behaviors. Interest in this area of research is ever increasing, because of the popularity of P2P networks, and their capability to provide a high availability of resources and services. In the last years, reputation systems have shown to be a good solution to build trust in large scale networks. Many papers have been published on this subject, and having a complete understanding on how they work is not easy. In this paper, we make a critical analysis of the most relevant results about reputation systems in the last three years, and propose a classification to clearly discriminate their common advantages and specific problems.

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) has become a defacto standard for describing processes in an accessible graphical notation. The eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) is an OASIS standard to specify and enforce platform independent access control policies.

In this paper we define a mapping between the BPMN and XACML meta-models to provide a model-driven extraction of security policies from a business process model. Specific types of organisational control and compliance policies that can be expressed in a graphical fashion at the business process modeling level can now be transformed into the corresponding task authorizations and access control policies for process-aware information systems.

As a proof of concept, we extract XACML access control policies from a security augmented banking domain business process. We present an XSLT converter that transforms modeled security constraints into XACML policies that can be deployed and enforced in a policy enforcement and decision environment. We discuss the benefits of our modeling approach and outline how XACML can support task-based compliance in business processes.

Customizability is generally considered a desirable feature of web portals. However, if left uncontrolled, customizability may come at the price of lack of uniformity or lack of maintainability. Indeed, as the portal content and services evolve, they can break assumptions made in the definition of customized views. Also, uncontrolled customization may lead to certain content considered important by the web portal owners (e.g. advertisements), to not be displayed to end users. Thus, web portal customization is hindered by the need to enforce customization policies and guidelines with minimal overhead. This paper presents a case study where a combination of techniques was employed to semi-automatically enforce policies and guidelines on community-built presentation components in a web portal. The study shows that a combination of automated verification and semantics extraction techniques can reduce the amount of manual checks required to enforce these policies and guidelines.

This work is in line with the

CoopFlow

approach dedicated for workflow advertisement, interconnection, and cooperation in the context of virtual enterprises. To support cooperation, one has to deal with the partners’ privacy respect. In fact, cooperation needs a certain degree of inter-visibility in order to perform interactions and data exchange. Nevertheless, cooperation may be employed as a cover to internalize the know-how of partners. To preserve privacy and autonomy, one must reduce workflow inter-visibility as tiny as the cooperation needs. We present in this paper a novel reduction-based method to preserve partners’ privacy. The principle of the algorithm is to get rid of all activities as well as control and data flows that don’t play any direct role into cooperation and don’t affect the behavior of the original workflow.

The realization and documentation of an effective Internal Controls System is required by regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX). In this paper we introduce a pattern based approach for modeling of the Internal Controls in Business Processes. They can be captured as declarative rules and checked during execution time of processes. The approach supports the definition of the controls outside of the operative Business Processes run by e-Business Systems in order to enable the reuse of process models and controls in different business and compliance environments. A detailed discussion on the domain model of Internal Controls and the system architecture necessary for realizing the approach is provided.

Organisational control principles, such as those expressed in the separation of duties, delegation of obligations, supervision and review, support the main business goals and activities of an organisation. One specific type of an obligation is that of a workflow task. The delegation of a task from one principal to another will result in a review task on the side of the delegating principal, allowing for the meaningful tracking of work. The target of this review task is the delegated task and a defined evidence needs to be negotiated, generated by the delegatee and reviewed by the delegator. This paper expands on earlier work we have done on delegation and revocation of tasks and the resulting review relationships. The concept of evidence had not yet been treated in sufficient detail and accordingly, a more detailed discussion around a framework for evidence lifecycle management is the subject of this paper.

The execution of cross-domain eGovernment processes is a challenging topic. In earlier work, we presented an approach based on collaborative workflows to support eGovernment interoperability. However, such collaborative workflows often appear to be lacking transparency and control supporting concepts and mechanisms. These are needed as eGovernment workflows appear to be heavily human-centric. What is in many cases described as collaboration appears to be a mere coordination and synchronization of processes, often ignoring human-centric interactions. One type of transparency and control supporting mechanism in human-centric collaboration is that of task delegation.

In this paper we aim to analyse the gap between coordination and collaboration in the context of workflow management for eGovernment. First, we present a real case study to identify the key distinguishing factors regarding collaboration as opposed to coordination. Based on this, we present our approach to support cross-organisational collaboration. In particular, we will focus on the concept of delegation in the context of heavily human-centric collaborative workflows. Finally, we propose a delegation extension and structured set of future requirements regarding a coordination architecture presented in earlier work.

The rise of service-oriented architectures will boost the amount of available Web services in the future. This will put the question of proper Web service discovery and description on the agenda. Current technologies such as UDDI and ongoing research efforts on semantic service technology are usually focused on technical, theoretical and correctness issues rather than on the ease of use. This results in high requirements on both the service requesters who are searching for services, and the service providers who have to contribute proper descriptions of their services.

This workshop aims at being a platform for the discussion on how semantic service technology can be made easier to use and handle to make it applicable in “real-world” usage scenarios which involves “normal” users instead of hard-core logic and semantic experts.

In order to make accessible new Semantic Web Services technologies to the end users, the level of tools supporting these technologies should be significantly raised. The paper presents such a tool - an INFRAWEBS Designer – a graphical ontology-driven development environment for creating semantic descriptions of Web services and goals according to WSMO Framework. The tool is oriented to the end users – providers of Web services and semantic Web services applications, who would like to convert their services into WSMO based semantic Web services. The most character features of the tool – intensive use of ontologies, automatic generation of logical description of a semantic service from graphical models and the use of similarity-based reasoning for finding similar service descriptions to be reused as initial templates for designing new services are discussed.

We present a goal-based approach for visualizing and browsing the search space of available Web services. A goal describes an objective that a client wants to solve by using Web services, abstracting from the technical details. Our visualization technique is based on a graph structure that organizes goal templates – i.e. generic and reusable objective descriptions – with respect to their semantic similarity, and keeps the relevant knowledge on the available Web services for solving them. This graph is generated automatically from the results of semantically enabled Web service discovery. In contrast to existing tools that categorize the available Web services on the basis of certain description elements, our tool allows clients to browse available Web services on the level of problems that can be solved by them and therewith to better understand the structure as well as the available resources in a domain. This paper explains the theoretic foundations of the approach and presents the prototypical implementation within the Web Service Modeling Toolkit WSMT, an Integrated Development Environment for Semantic Web services.

Formal goal and service descriptions are the shibboleth of the semantic web services approach, yet the people responsible for creating them are neither machines nor logicians, and rarely even knowledge engineers: the people who need and specify functionality are not those who provide it, and both may be distinct from the semantic annotators. The gap between users’ informal conceptualisations of problems and formal descriptions is one which must be effectively bridged for semantic web services to be widely adopted. We show how a simple technique—using a wiki to collect user requirements and mediate a progressive, iterative refinement and formalisation of user goals by domain experts and their knowledge engineer colleagues—can achieve this. Further, we suggest how the process could be extended, so as to itself benefit from semantic technologies.

Current problems in Business Process Management consist of terminology mismatches and unstructured and isolated knowledge representation in process models. Semantic Business Process Management aims at overcoming many of those weaknesses of Business Processes Management through the use of explicit semantic descriptions of process artifacts. However, this vision has a prerequisite: semantic annotations need to be added to the process models. In this paper, we present an approach that allows flexibly annotating semantics in a user-friendly way, by exposing ontological knowledge to the business user in appropriate forms and by employing matchmaking and filtering techniques to display options with high relevance only. By adding semantic information the precision of process models increases, ultimately supporting Web Service discovery and composition. As a proof-of-concept, the work has been implemented prototypically in a process modeling tool.

Information technology is seen as a critical tool to increase the level of automation when incorporating new business requirements due to changing needs. Therefore, one of the key challenges in the organizations today is to ensure the alignment between the business goals and the flexibility and responsiveness of IT systems to meet those goals. In this work we make a step forward in bridging the eternal gap between business and IT. Contribution of this work is two-fold. First, we present an intuitive way of specifying expressive user requests for the implementation of tasks in business process models. Second, we design a comprehensive approach to discovery of Semantic Web Services for process task implementation. The work has been prototypically implemented in a process modeling tool and can be used in different scenarios.

Web service search is an important problem in service oriented architecture that has attracted widespread attention from academia as well as industry. Web service searching can be performed by various stakeholders, in different situations, using different forms of queries. All those combinations result in radically different ways of implementation. Using a real world web service composition example, this paper describes when, what, and how to search web services from service assemblers’ point of view, where the semantics of web services are not explicitly described. This example outlines the approach to implement a web service broker that can recommend useful services to service assemblers.

Through the Web, huge amounts of information are now widely accessible. As a matter of fact, the Web can be seen as a large corpus accessed through Web-based Information Systems (WIS) which rely on classical client/server, n-tier or even services-oriented architectures. Due to recent advances in wireless and ubiquitous computing technologies, these WIS can now be used by nomadic as well as sedentary users, connecting from different kinds of access devices (workstation, laptop, PDA, mobile phones, etc.).

Considering the Web as a huge and growing corpus, one of the main challenges of WIS designers is to prevent users from experiencing the all too prevalent cognitive and informational overload. Meeting this goal guarantees to some extent the usability and the durability of a WIS. While in the field of Information Retrieval some solutions have been proposed to query specialized and limited corpora with good performances, access to information on the Web as a whole has still to cope with the limited capabilities of existing search engines.

In this paper we provide our general approach and discuss relevant issues in providing a dynamic user modelling approach for attending functional diversity for accessible lifelong learning (ALL) in Higher Education. Our approach to provide universal and personalized access lies on combining user modelling and machine learning techniques to cope with the needs for ALL with a pervasive support of standards and supporting the full life cycle of service adaptation. The modelling differs from others in i) coping with interactions and context of the user that can only be considered at runtime and ii) characterising interaction capabilities of different kinds of devices. Models are used to personalize and adapt learning materials, pedagogical settings and interactions in the environment to satisfy both the individual learning needs and the access preferences, taking into account the context at hand.

With the considerable amount of data and the diversity of the user’s needs, the personalization of information becomes a real challenge in web-based information systems. This paper presents a personalized access technique, based on a profile modeling. This technique requires two steps: 1) building user’s profile and 2) using profile content for filtering information. The first step consists in modeling a global profile which can be used for different and independent requirements of personalization. The profile modeling takes into account the user’s context when defining user’s profiles. We describe a global profile in three levels: meta-description level, description level for a specific domain, instances (data). The second step consists in selecting the profiles rules which correspond to the user and his current context and to filter information accordingly.

The key for providing a robust context for personalized information retrieval is to build a library which gathers the long term and the short term user’s interests and then using it in the retrieval process in order to deliver results that better meet the user’s information needs. In this paper, we present an enhanced approach for learning a semantic representation of the underlying user’s interests using the search history and a predefined ontology. The basic idea is to learn the user’s interests by collecting evidence from his search history and represent them conceptually using the concept hierarchy of the ontology. We also involve a dynamic method which tracks changes of the short term user’s interests using a correlation metric measure in order to learn and maintain the user’s interests.

In order to personalize information for a nomadic user, it is necessary to consider on the one hand, the

context of use

(which provides in particular a description of the conditions temporal, spatial, hardware,

etc

. under which users accesses the

Information Systems

), and on the other hand,

user preferences

which aim at expressing what the user would like to obtain from the system considering different aspects such as functionalities, content, display,

etc.

). We propose an approach generating a

Contextual User Profile

(

CUP

), profile which is made up only of the

user preferences

selected considering the current

context of use

. This approach proposes formalism for three different types of

user preferences

(

activity

,

result

and

display

). Additionally, this approach defines the

Contextual Matching Algorithm

which generates the

CUP

based on

user preferences

and on the

context of use

.

Over the past years, information personalization has provided several valuable achievements on the improvement and optimization of Web searching and recommendation taking into account user’s interests, preferences and contextual information. The main objective of a personalization system is to perform an information retrieval process taking into account the perception and the interest of the end-users. This paper focuses on how to model the user and his context in an extensible way that can be interpreted and used for personalization. We describe the architecture that provides personalization facilities based on the contextual user model for tourism usage.

In this paper we present our work about personalized search in digital libraries. Unlike other researches which use content-based methods, we focus on citation-based methods for this purpose. We propose a practical approach to estimate the co-citation relatedness between scientific papers using the Google search engine. We conducted some experiments to evaluate performance of different citation-based methods. The experimental results show that our approach is promising and applicable for personalized search in digital libraries.

When searching information, any user has to face huge cognitive efforts to obtain accurate and relevant results. The search task includes a set of complementary sub-tasks in which the user needs to be necessarily involved. But, the real place of the users is not obvious without an effective knowledge of their context, environment, and so on. So we assume that a better knowledge of the user and of available information should make it possible to implement techniques aimed at adapting the retrieved information contents, as well as the search process itself. This personalization mainly relies on the definition of profiles. Since applications principally manage specific user/information profiles (structure and content), we propose in this paper a generic and a flexible profile model. This latter facilitates the construction and the interoperability of various profiles coming from different applications and/or having different structure/content. This paper presents the way the different resources (user, information...) can be modeled within the information search process and its related tasks. Then, we discuss the usefulness of profiles in such processes/tasks. Finally we present the generic and the flexible profile model we propose.

A suitable navigational model, conveniently tailored for the needs and access characteristics of the intended public, is one of the basic ingredients for ensuring the usability of successful Web applications. Properly identifying the navigational requisites of large Web applications, though, is not always an easy task particularly face to structural changes introduced by Web site evolution, which is prone do deviate the effective navigational patterns from those conceived in the original model. This paper introduces an under development research tool for structural modeling and statistical navigational analysis of Web applications which traces link paths exercised by visitors and allow the identification of characteristic navigation patterns. Application in Web restructuring, pre-fetching cache techniques and adaptive content systems are discussed.

Very large, high-resolutions displays, such as tiled display walls with resolutions ranging from tens of mega pixels up to 100+ mega pixels enables visualization of data in ways never before possible. Even if the technology is still emerging and faces challenges such as interaction problems and development of rendering technology, both hardware and software, the potentials for visualizing large data sets are still very exciting. Within this thematic framework, we provide an introduction to the current state of research on use of very large, high-resolution displays and a general discussion of the role of scale/size of documents as basis for discussion and a conceptual framework for analysis of “large documents”, specifically for medical-imaging related documents.

According to recent studies, an estimated 90% of Web sites and applications suffer from usability and/or accessibility problems. As user satisfaction has increased in importance, the need for usable and accessible Web applications has become more critical. To achieve usability for a Web product (e.g., a service, a model, a running application, a portal), the attributes of Web artefacts must be clearly defined. Otherwise, assessment of usability is left to the intuition or to the responsibility of people who are in charge of the process. In this sense, usability models (describing all the usability sub-characteristics, attributes and their relationships) should be built, and Usability Evaluation Methods (UEMs) should be used during the requirements, design and implementation stages based on these models. Similarly, identifying the set of characteristics that make the Web more accessible for everybody, including those with disabilities is necessary to systematize the way practitioners face accessibility issues.

Web applications must be usable and accessible; besides, they evolve at a fast pace and it is difficult to sustain a high degree of external quality. Agile methods and continuous refactoring are well-suited for the rapid development of Web applications since they particularly support continuous evolution. However, the purpose of traditional refactorings is to improve internal quality, like maintainability of design and code, rather than usability of the application. We have defined Web model refactorings as transformations on the navigation and presentation models of a Web application. In this paper, we demonstrate how Web model refactorings can improve the usability of a Web application by using a mature quality evaluation approach (WebQEM) to assess the impact of refactoring on some defined attributes of a Web product entity. We present a case study showing how a shopping cart in an e-commerce site can improve its usability by applying Web model refactorings.

To follow accessibility standards does not guarantee complete accessible web applications. There are difficulties in web application development due to not consider accessibility in software life cycle together to forget important aspects in user interaction. A proposal to evaluate the benefits of using usability techniques with inclusion in the analysis phase of a web application development is presented.

Sign languages are visual-gestural languages developed mainly in deaf communities; their tempo-spatial nature makes it difficult to write them, yet several transcription systems are available for them. Most sign languages dictionaries interact with their users via a transcription-based inteface; thus their users need to be expert of their specific transcription system. The e-LIS dictionary is the first web bidirectional dictionary for Italian sign language-Italian; using the current interface, the dictionary users can define a sign interacting with intuitive iconic images, without knowing the underlying transcription system. Nevertheless the users of the current e-LIS dictionary are assumed to be expert of Italian sign language. The e-LIS ontology, which specifies how to form a sign, was created to allow even the non-experts of Italian sign language to use the dictionary. Here we present a prototype of a visual interface based on the e-LIS ontology for the e-LIS dictionary; the prototype is a query-oriented navigation interface; it was designed following the User Centred Design Methodology, which focuses on the user during the design, development and testing of the system.

Usability is a feature of software quality that has traditional significance in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community. Recent works that have been proposed by the Software Engineering (SE) community are intended to improve the usability of software applications. This paper combines aspects that are defined in both these communities to produce usable web applications. To achieve this goal, a well-known strategy to improve usability is used: usability patterns. However, many usability patterns and guidelines could only be applied when the final system is implemented. In this work, STATUS patterns have been chosen because they solve usability issues at conceptual level. The main purpose of this paper is to improve the usability of Web Applications automatically generated by OOWS (a model-based web engineering method) applying the STATUS patterns.

A key factor for successful Rich Internet Applications (RIA) is to provide an interface which is effective and efficient to use. This paper proposes a framework for model driven development of Adobe® Flex

TM

RIAs which uses task models and international standard task-based metrics to integrate usability characterization and evaluation from the very beginning. It supports the generation of alternative user interface versions which can be employed as prototypes in usability testing to get early user feedback.

In the paper we present how usability and accessibility requirements can be assured and validated in the whole life cycle of eLearning. On a 4-phase eLearning cycle, which includes adaptation features to cover the particular needs of each learner, we have included the evaluation of usability and accessibility requirements. We have performed this evaluation on an accessible standard-based open-source learning management system called dotLRN. The validation methodologies proposed are applied in three research projects, EU4ALL, ALPE and ADAPTAPlan.

Web accessibility rules, i.e., the conditions to be met by Web sites in order to be considered accessible for all, can be (partially) checked automatically in many different ways. Many Web accessibility evaluators have been developed during the last years. For applying the W3C guidelines, their programmers have to apply subjective criteria, thus leading to different interpretations of these guidelines. As a result, it is easy to obtain different evaluation results when different evaluation tools are applied to a common sample page. However, accessibility rules can be better expressed

formally

and declaratively in rules that assert conditions over the markup. We have found that XSLT can be used to represent templates addressing many accessibility rules involving the markup of Web pages. Even more, we have found that some specific conditions relaying in the prose of the XHTML specification not previously formalized in the XHTML grammar (the official DTD or XML Schemas) could also be formalized in XSLT rules as well. Thus, we have developed WAEX as a Web Accessibility Evaluator in a single XSLT file. Such XSLT file contains 70+ singular accessibility and XHTML-specific rules not previously addressed by the official DTDs or Schemas from W3C.

Whilst accessibility is widely agreed as an essential requirement for promoting universal access of information, many Web sites still fail to provide accessible content. This paper investigates the support given by currently available tools for taking care of accessibility at different phases of the development process. At first, we provide a detailed classification of accessibility guidelines according to several levels of automation. Then we analyze which kind of automated inspection is supported by currently available tools for building Web sites. Lately, by the means of a case study we try to assess the possibility of fixing accessibility problems at early phases of the development process. Our results provide insights for improving current available tools and for taking accessibility at all phases of development process of Web sites.

What are the quality factors that define a “good” usability evaluation method and contribute to its acceptability and adoption in a real business context? How can we measure such factors? This paper investigates these issues and proposes to decompose the broad, general concept of “methodological quality” into more measurable, lower level attributes such as

performance

,

efficiency

,

cost

effectiveness,

and

learnability.

We exemplify how to measure such attributes, reporting an empirical evaluation study of a usability inspection method for web applications called MiLE+.

As the Internet has become a ubiquitous tool in modern science, it is increasingly important to evaluate the currency of free science information on the web. However, there are few empirical studies which have specifically focused on this issue. In this paper, we used the search engines Google, Yahoo and Altavista to generate a list of web pages about 32 terms. Sample pages were examined according to the criteria which were developed in this study. Results revealed that the mean of currency of free science information on the web was 2.6482 (n=2814), only 982 (34.90%) of samples got higher mean scores than the average. Sample pages with different domain names or subjects had difference with significance (P < 0.05). In conclusion, the currency of free science information on the web is unsatisfactory. The developed criteria set here could be a useful instrument for researchers and the public to assess information currency on the web by themselves.

Simplifying the achievement of the user tasks is a factor that determines usability in Web development. In order to better reflect the best paths that may drive the user through the Web Information Systems (WISs) to search the desired information/services, navigation models have been widely adopted by the Web Engineering community. However, the design of WISs often relies only on a domain model leaving many decisions, which may directly affect usability, to the designer skills. In order to limit this arbitrarily in the navigation design process, we have proposed a hypertext modeling method (HM

3

) which explicitly bases the construction of the navigation model on the services required by the user. This way, the navigation model built with HM

3

, includes

routes

, which help the user to properly carry out the required service. The main goal of this paper is to present an experiment we carried out to corroborate the hypothesis that “using

routes

it is possible to obtain more navigable WISs”.

In recent years, the fast evolution of Internet and the Web has caused an exponential increase in the number of Web Information Systems (WIS) developed. This has led to the appearance of a new discipline, Web Engineering, which has served as a framework for the development of numerous methodologies and tools which seek to contribute to the development of WIS with the quality parameters required by their users. Among the quality attributes of a WIS are accessibility, usability and the easy of navigation offered by the system. These attributes are usually analyzed when the WIS has been developed, using strategies like the analysis of the HTML code of the WIS or the evaluation of the system by a group of users. This paper presents a proposal to extend the models used in the methodologies for WIS development and to define a set of quality metrics so that modelers can consider usability requirements during WIS modelling. The automatic support for this proposal and the metamodel extension necessary for its integration into the existing methodologies for WIS development are also presented.