Aspects based modeling of web applications to support co-evolution

Abstract

When an information system is introduced to an organisation it changes the original business environment thus changing the original requirements. This can lead to changes to processes that are supported by the information system. Also when users get familiar with the system they ask for more functionality. This gives rise to a cycle of changes known as co-evolution. One way to facilitate co-evolution is to empower end-users to make changes to the web application to accommodate the required changes while using that web application. This can be achieved through meta-design paradigm. We model web applications using high level abstract concepts such as user, hypertext, process, data and presentation. We use set of smart tools to generate the application based on this high-level specification. We developed a hierarchical meta-model where an instance represent a web application. High level aspects are used to populate the attribute values of a meta-model instance. End-user can create or change a web application by specifying or changing the high level concepts. This paper discusses these high level aspects of web information systems. We also conducted a study to find out how end-users conceptualise a web application using these aspects. We found that end-users think naturally in terms of some of the aspects but not all. Therefore, in meta-model approach we provided default values for the model attributes which users can overwrite. This approach based on meta-design paradigm will help to realise the end-user development to support co-evolution. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.