An Approach for Mining Social Patterns in the Conceptual Schema of CMS-Based Web Applications

The advent of the emerging social technologies has transformed the Web to a place where users can turn for social interaction, content consumption and opinion making. As social networks are becoming more ubiquitous, they set new requirements to the needs of modern enterprises which now need web applications that can incorporate social networking features. This fact leads to the need for tools supporting developers during the design and development of such socially enabled applications. In this work, we focus on CMS-based web applications which exploit social networking features and propose a model-driven approach to evaluate their hypertext schema in terms of the incorporated design fragments that perform a social network related functionality. We have developed a methodology which based on the identification and evaluation of design reuse within an application’s hypertext schema detects a set of recurrent design solutions (i.e. configurations of hypertext elements) denoting either design inconsistencies or effective reusable social design structures that can be used as building blocks for implementing certain social behavior in future designs.