(De-)composing web augmenters

Abstract

Immersed in social and mobile Web, users are expecting personalized browsing experiences, based on their needs, goals, and preferences. This may be complex since the users’ Web navigations usually imply several (related) Web applications. A very popular technique to tackle this challenge is Web augmentation. Previously, we presented an approach to orchestrate user tasks over multiple websites, creating so-called procedures. However, these procedures are not easily editable, and thus not reusable and maintainable. In this paper, we present a complementary model-based approach, which allows treating procedures as (de)composable activities for improving their maintainability and reusability. For this purpose we introduce a dedicated UML profile for Activity Diagrams (ADs) and translators from procedures to ADs as well as back-translators to execute new compositions of these procedures. By combining benefits of end-user development for creation and model-driven engineering for maintenance, our approach proposes to have the best of both worlds as is demonstrated by a case study for trip planning.