Specification framework for engineering adaptive web applications

Abstract

The growing demand for data-driven Web applications has led to the need for a structured and controlled approach to the engineering of such applications. Both designers and developers need a framework that in all stages of the engineering process allows them to specify the relevant aspects of the application. This paper concentrates on Web applications that automatically generate hypermedia presentations for their output. Typically, these applications retrieve their data from a heterogeneous set of Web data sources, and they respond to a user's request for information by providing the user with a hypermedia presentation for the requested data. Many classes of Web-based information systems are of this nature. Because of this aspect of automated presentation generation, (the support of) the engineering process for these applications is far from trivial. The engineering becomes even more complicated when we include notions of adaptivity. Here, we address both adaptation during the presentation generation for the sake of personalization (to reflect e.g. user preferences or platform used), as well as adaptation within the generated presentation (generating adaptive hypermedia). The