A semantic web enabled approach to reuse functional requirements models in web engineering

Abstract

Web engineering has emerged as a new software discipline to specifically address the challenges and complexities of developing high quality web applications. A main theme in different web engineering methodologies is to employ model driven development approaches. This increases the level of abstraction and formalism to the extent that machines can better involve in the development process and provide more automation, e.g. automatic code generation from the models. Despite their benefits, a main problem of these model-driven methodologies is that developing each new web application implies creating a probably large number of models from scratch. Hence, model reuse can be considered as the main solution to this problem. In this paper, a semantic web enabled approach is proposed for reusing models, specifically functional requirements models. It takes the brief description of the functional requirements of a new web application in terms of UML use case diagram, and semi-automatically generates the draft of the corresponding detailed description in terms of a set of UML activity diagrams. This is performed by utilizing a repository which contains semantic representation of the models of the previous web applications. The proposed approach is based on novel algorithms for annotating activity diagrams, measuring similarity of use cases, and adapting activity diagrams. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed approach is promising, and it has good precision and effectiveness.