Conceptual modeling of data-intensive Web applications

Many of the Web applications around us are data-intensive; their main purpose is to present a large amount of data to their users. Most online trading and e-commerce sites fall into this category, as do digital libraries and institutional sites describing private and public organizations. Several commercial Web development systems aid rapid creation of data-intensive applications by supporting semiautomatic data resource publishing. Automatic publishing is typically subject to the constraints of database schemas, which limit an application designer's choices. Thus, Web application development often requires adaptation through programming, and programs end up intricately mixing data, navigation, and presentation semantics. Presentation is often a facade for elements of structure, composition, and navigation. Despite this frequently unstructured development process, data-intensive applications, based on large data sets organized within a repository or database, generally follow some typical patterns and rules. We describe these patterns and rules using WebML as a conceptual tool to make such notions explicit. WebML is a conceptual Web modeling language that uses the entity-relationship (ER) model for describing data structures and an original, high-level notation for representing Web content composition and navigation in hypertext form.