Software Engineering for Adaptive Hypermedia Applications

The Programming and Software Engineering Research Group of the Institute of Computer Science of the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich is focusing on software engineering for hypermedia and Web applications in general and, particularly, for adaptive applications. One main goal of the software engineering discipline is to find techniques that support the development process of software applications. Our goal is to find, between others, appropriate analysis and design techniques that support development and authoring of adaptive hypermedia and Web applications. General object-oriented software engineering approaches, such as the Unified Process (Jacobson, Booch & Rumbaugh, 1999) or specific methodologies for hypermedia like RMM (Isakowitz, Stohr & Balasubramanian, 1995), OOHDM (Schwabe & Rossi, 1998), and HFPM (Olsina, 1998) are not sufficient. They do not cover aspects relevant to personalization, i.e. user modeling and adaptation issues. A significant contribution in this field is AHAM (De Bra, Houben & Wu, 1999). AHAM is an application model for adaptive hypermedia that describe such applications from the authors’ point of view. We propose the UML-based Web Engineering approach (UWE) (Koch, 2000 & Koch et. al, 2001). UWE includes a design method for adaptive hypermedia applications and a development process for such applications. UWE is a systematic and object-oriented – in this way they differ from AHAM – design and development approach. We propose an integrated methodology for object-oriented development of adaptive hypermedia (Web) applications by presenting an extension to the Unified Modeling Language (UML). As basis for the software engineering approach we have developed the Munich Reference Model, i.e. a Dexter-based reference model which is formally specified using UML and OCL (Koch, 2000).