About

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OntoWeaver was an ontology-based approach that provided high-level support for website design and development. It used domain ontologies to define the semantic structure of the problem domain, guiding the design and development process. OntoWeaver developed several components to achieve this:

  • A customisation framework that allowed customisation at both design time and runtime.
  • A site view ontology for detailed modelling of user interfaces and navigation structures,
  • A presentation ontology to specify layouts and presentation styles;
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The OntoWeaver tool suite enabled site designers to create data-intensive websites without needing to program. The design process involved iterating through steps of designing and instantiating the domain ontology, specifying site views, presentations, and layouts, and defining customisation requirements.

Components

The Site View Ontology

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The site view ontology provided a set of constructs to support the specification of navigation structures. Unlike existing approaches, which did not address basic user interface elements, the site view ontology distinguished between atomic user interface elements and composite user interface elements, offering constructs to address them accordingly. This enabled a mechanism to support the composition of user interfaces.

The Presentation Ontology

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The presentation ontology offered explicit vocabularies to specify presentation instructions for the target website, addressing both layouts and presentation styles. It described a presentation instruction as a collection of templates, presentation objects, and layout objects. Templates defined presentation styles, such as backgrounds, colours, and fonts. Presentation objects specified templates for user interface elements, while layout objects provided organisation instructions. The reference to user interface elements in the presentation model was realised through their Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

The Customisation Framework

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The customisation framework relied on customisation rules to describe when and how to perform specific customisation actions, user profiles to capture user information, and a set of user group-specific site models to describe the target website. The system referenced site view elements in the specification of customisation requirements using their Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), thereby achieving a separation of customisation specification from other aspects of the target website. An inference engine was employed, which applied rules to reason on user group-specific site specifications and derived customised views for individuals based on their profiles.

Tool Suite

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As shown in the figure, the OntoWeaver tool suite provided both design and runtime tools. A knowledge warehouse stored and managed all the ontologies involved and their instantiations. Core tools included:

  • Ontology Editor, which supported the construction of domain ontologies,
  • Site Designer, which facilitated the specification of the user interface for the target website,
  • Site Mapper, which generated declarative site specifications,
  • Site Builder, which compiled site specifications into real-world dynamic websites driven by back-end ontologies,
  • Site Customiser, which allowed users to customise their declarative site specifications,
  • Customisation Engine, which enabled customization at runtime.

The OntoWeaver tool suite was implemented using Java Swing, Java Servlet, JSP, JESS, HTML, and CSS.

Publications

Y. Lei, E. Motta, and J. Domingue (2005), OntoWeaver: an Ontology-based Approach to the Design of Data-intensive Web Sites. Journal of Web Engineering, 4(3): 244-262.

Y. Lei, E. Motta, and J. Domingue (2004), OntoWeaver-S: Supporting the Design of Knowledge Portals. In Proceedings 14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2004), Whittlebury Hall, Northamptonshire, UK.

Y. Lei, E. Motta, and J. Domingue (2004), Integrating Web Services into Data-intensive Web Sites, In proceedings of the WWW 2004 Workshop on Application Design, Development and Implementation Issues in the Semantic Web.

Y. Lei, E. Motta, and J. Domingue (2004), Modelling Data-Intensive Web Sites with OntoWeaver, in proceedings of the International Workshop on Web Information Systems Modelling (WISM 2004), Riga, Latvia, 2004.

M. Dzbor, E. Motta, V. Uren, Y. Lei, and J. Domingue (2004), Reflection on the future of knowledge portals, AIS SIGSEMIS Bulletin 1(2), July 2004.

Y. Lei, E. Motta and J. Domingue (2003), Design of Customized Web Applications with OntoWeaver, In proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Capture (KCAP 2003), October, Florida, USA, 2003, pp 54-61.

Y. Lei, E. Motta and J. Domingue (2002), An Ontology-Driven Approach to Web Site Generation and Maintenance, In proceedings of 13th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Management (EKAW 2002), Spain 1-4 October 2002, pp. 219-234.

Y. Lei, E. Motta and J. Domingue (2002), IIPS: an Intelligent Information Presentation System, In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI 2002), January 2002, pp. 200-201.