Re-engineering Web Application towards Linked Data: a Model-Based Approach

Nowadays, Wide World Web is a wide network of information resources found in documents, such as HTML pages, PHP, etc. Most are intended for consumer uses, whether by human or machines (i.e., programs). So the Web grows with the emergence of new technologies, such as Web services, mobile applications and Web applications. These technologies manipulate data in multiple formats in a hidden or unusable way to users. In parallel, there is also another growth of desire for directly accessing data on the Web. However, the current Web cannot meet this need. So, we have for instance to switch to the semantic Web by reengineering our classic Web applications into RDF Linked data. This can be justified by the fact that (in the semantic Web) data are represented in RDF format which makes them directly available to users. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach to transform Web applications into semantic ones. This is done by extracting data from the Web applications, and transforming them into RDF format. These data are extracted from HTML files, in particularly from tables, lists and links. This engineering process is capitalized thanks to the use of model driven engineering settings. It takes as input a set of elements: (1) the input file which contains the data that we want to transform; these data are extracted from the Web application, (2) two meta-models, namely, the source meta-model (for HTML) and a target meta-model (for RDF), and (3) the transformation rules. Executing this process generates an output file in RDF format, which is one of the most important technologies of the Semantic Web, also known as Web of Data.