Engineering semantic-based interactive multi-device web applications

Abstract

To build high-quality personalized Web applications developers have to deal with a number of complex problems. We look at the growing class of personalized Web Applications that share three characteristic challenges. Firstly, the semantic problem of how to enable content reuse and integration. Another problem is how to move away from a sluggish static interface to a responsive dynamic one as seen in regular desktop applications. The third problem is adapting the system into a multi-device environment. For this class of personalized Web applications we look at an example application, a TV recommender called SenSee, in which we solve these problems in a metadata-driven way. We go into depth in the techniques we used to create a solution for these given problems, where we particularly look at utilizing the techniques of Web Services, Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. Moreover, we show how these techniques can also be used to improve the core personalization functionality of the application. In this paper we present our experience with SenSee to demonstrate general engineering lessons for this type of applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.