In our emerging digital paper-less society, massive amount of information is being maintained in on-line repositories and diverse web site representations of this information must be served over the Internet to different user groups. E-commerce and digital libraries are two representative sample applications with such needs. In this paper we present a database-centric approach called Re-Web that addresses this need for flexible web site generation, restructuring, and maintenance. ReWeb is based on two key ideas. First, we exploit the web site structure by associating web semantics (XML equivalents) with the modeling constructs of the ODMG object model to aid the web site generation process. By capturing the logical structure of web views within the OODB system, we can efficiently maintain the web views using standard database techniques. Secondly, to ease the process of specification and construction of multiple customized web view sites, we also propose the notion of generic web view transformations that are encapsulated into reusable templates. Thus desired new web view sites can be generated simply by applying the corresponding transformations on the underlying database to produce web view classes and then by applying the web semantics on the newly built view classes. The Re-Web system has been implemented using PSE by Object Design Inc. as object repository, ODMG as object model, OQL as transformation language, SERF as OODB evolution facility and IBM XML parser and LotusXSL processor to aid the web site generation. A case study using Re-Web is also presented to illustrate the working of the system. To the best of our knowledge, Re-Web is the first web site management system focusing on the issue of reusable view generation templates at the content and not at the presentation style level of abstraction.
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Kajal Claypool, Jin Jing and Elke Rundensteiner. SERF: Schema Evolution through an Extensible, Re-usable and Flexible Framework, International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management"}, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, November 1998.
Kajal Claypool, Elke Rundensteiner, Li Chen and Bhupesh Kothari. Re-usable ODMG-based Templates for Web View Generation and Restructuring, Workshop on Web Information and Data Management Novemeber 1998