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Thesis full text (PDF) - Politecnico di Milano

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1. Introduction<br />

At present the Web applications involve more in terms of explicitly declared semantics of<br />

published and managed data, because of increasing demands for information integration and<br />

exploitation. Typically, the con<strong>text</strong>, and the content of the Web applications assembled from<br />

several heterogeneous sources, on which no assumption of common terminology can be done.<br />

Recent evolutions of Web applications involve abstruse demands in the explicitly declared<br />

meaning of managed data in terms of real-world entities. Data and its non-ambiguous<br />

interpretation must be shared between involved parties. In this setting, applications do need to<br />

know the meaning of the shared data that we reference in the rest of the article as data semantics.<br />

Once such knowledge is formalized and explicitly integrated into the system, it may be<br />

interpreted and managed with application-dependent means for delivering the system services<br />

and products.<br />

The aforementioned limitations can be overcome by representing Web data semantics using the<br />

UML class <strong>di</strong>agrams. We are using an existing framework [1] to serve this purpose which can<br />

check the consistency of a knowledge base represented by a UML class <strong>di</strong>agram, and can make<br />

inferences upon the UML objects derive new associations between Web data. We have<br />

developed a model-driven knowledge-intensive web application with recommendation feature.<br />

1.1 Motivation<br />

Tra<strong>di</strong>tional Web applications aim at offering information to users in terms of contents that can be<br />

browsed, searched, and mo<strong>di</strong>fied through navigational links. But unfortunately, the<br />

implementation techniques that are currently used for Web applications suffer of several<br />

impuissances:<br />

• Semantics of data and navigation is conveyed only within design documents that are not<br />

usually available along with the Web data at runtime, thus making it impossible to grasp<br />

the meaning of the implemented data structures.<br />

• Tra<strong>di</strong>tional Web applications are not rich enough to cover commonly required aspects of<br />

data semantics representation, like generalization hierarchies with overlapping<br />

5

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