On Generating Content and Structural Annotated Websites Using Conceptual Modeling

An important milestone in the evolution of the Web is the Semantic Web: a Web in which the semantics of the available content and functionality is made explicit. Web design methods, originally aimed at offering a well-structured, systematic approach to Web design, now face new opportunities and challenges: Semantic Web technology can be used to make the semantics of the conceptual design models explicit; however a major challenge is to (semi-) automatically generate the semantic annotations, effectively enabling the Semantic Web. In this paper, we describe how WSDM, a well-known Web design method, was adapted to use Semantic Web technology for its conceptual modeling and how this can be exploited to generate semantically annotated websites. We consider two types of semantic annotations: content-related annotations and structural annotations. The first type allows to describe the semantics of the content of the website, the latter are annotations that explicitly describe the semantics of the different structural elements used in the website.