Ontology driven Websites - Metamorphosis: a framework to specify and manage ontology driven websites

Abstract

Website development has always been an hard task: it consumes time and resources. What is new today is normally taken as granted tomorrow by users. This is to say that users always want more. Today they want up to date information and they want to access it according to their point of view or particular preferences.To cope with these demands, websites must be dynamic and must be able to reconfigure automatically their structure, content and appearance. This scenery has favored the creation of tools for automatic generation and management websites. In this paper we propose not a new tool of this kind but a new approach to the problem. In our approach we consider two layers. A physical layer that we call the resources layer, composed by databases, XML documents, directory subtrees, and the whole sort of files you can think of to represent your information. A metadata layer called the ontology layer, that provides a view to those resources.Our framework consists of several parts. In this paper the focus will be the navigation component.This component takes an ontology and uses it to navigate through the resources layer.We are using XML technology to implement the whole framework and this component is implemented through an XML transformation process.