E-tourism portal: A case study in ontology-driven development

Abstract

Software development is a fairly complex activity, that is both labour-intensive and knowledge-rich, and systematically delivering high-quality software that addresses the users' needs, on-time, and within budget, remains an elusive goal. This is even more true for internet applications presents additional challenges, including, 1) a predominance of the highly volatile interaction logic, and 2) stronger time-to-market pressures. Model-driven development purports to alleviate the problem by slicing the development process into a sequence of semantics-preserving transformations that start with a computation-independent model, through to an architecture-neutral platform independent model (PIM), all the way to platform-specific model or code at the other end. That is the idea(l). In general, however, the semantic gap between the CIM and PIM is such that the transition between them is hard to formalize. In this paper, we present a case study where we used an ontology to drive the development of an e-tourism portal. Our project showed that it is possible to drive the development of an internet application from a semantic description of the business entities, and illustrated the effectiveness of this approach during maintenance. It also highlighted the kinds of trade-offs we needed to make to reconcile somewhat lofty design principles with the imperative of producing a product with reasonable quality. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.