Re-usable ODMG-based Templates for Web View Generation and Restructuring

In our emerging digital paper-less society, massive amounts of information is being maintained in on-line repositories and diverse web site representations of this information must be served over the internet to diierent user groups. E-commerce and digital libaries are two sample applications with such needs. In this paper we have presented a database-centric approach called Re-WEB that addresses this need for exible web site generation, restructuring, and maintenance simply by embracing object-oriented database technology. Namely, by associating web semantics with the modeling constructs of the ODMG object model, view schemata map to web site layouts and database objects map to actual web pages. By generating and restructuring objects views, a large class of web site layouts (web views) can thus be supported using this Re-WEB approach. And, the DBMS in Re-WEB, having full knowledge of the layout structure of web views deened over the database, can thus bring standard database techniques to bear for eeciently maintaining the web views. To ease the process of web site speciication and construction, we also propose the notion of generic web view transformations that can be encapsulated into reusable templates. Genericity and reusability of templates is achieved due to the use of named, typed transformations and the query-based access to the system dictionary, allowing the transformation to both inquire about as well as manipulate classes at the schema level at run time. We demonstrate in this paper that these generic web view transformations, if collected in a template library, have the potential to represent a valuable resource for simplifying the web generation and restructuring process. To the best of our knowledge, Re-WEB is the rst web site management system focussing on the issue of reusable view generation templates at the content and not at the presentation style level of abstraction. Thuraising at Object Design Inc. for not only software contributions but also for providing us with a customized patch of the PSE Pro2.0 system that exposed schema-related APIs needed to develop our tool.