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WSDM (Web Site Developement Method)

Introduction

   

     De Troyer was one of my teachers at the VUB (Vrij Universiteit Brussels), was who introduced together with Leune in 1998 the WSDM. At that time the acronym stood for Web Site Design Method and only targeted information-providing web sites. In the meantime, the method has evolved a lot and now also allows designing traditional web applications as well as semantic web applications, hence the renaming of the method into Web Semantics Design Method.

 

More than other web design methods, WSDM is a methodology, i.e. it not only provides modeling primitives that allow a web developer to construct models that describe the eb site/application from different perspectives and at different levels of abstraction, but it also provides a systematic way to develop the web application. Developing a web site/application with WSDM starts with the formulation of the so-called “Mission Statement” and follows a well-defined design philosophy that offers the designer the   necessarily support to structure the web site. The method consists of a sequence of phases. Each phase has a well-defined output. 
  
 
For each phase, a (sub) method describing how to derive the output from its input is provided. The output of one phase is the input of a following phase. As already indicated, currently the method allows developing web sites as well as web applications. For the sake of simplicity, we will use the term “web systems” to indicate both web sites and web applications. It is also important to notice that WSDM allows developing web systems that are semantically annotated, in this way effectively enabling the Semantic Web. Content-related (semantic) annotations as well as structural annotations can be generated. Content-related annotations make the semantics of the content explicit. Structural annotations are annotations that explicitly describe the semantics of the different structural elements of the web systems. Structural annotations can be exploited by third parties to transcode the web system to a different format, for example to formats appropriate for a screen reader, or they can be exploited by search engines for their page segmentation (see e.g., (Deng Cai et al., 2004) for an overview of page segmentation by search engines). WSDM follows an audience-driven design approach. An audience-driven design philosophy means that the different target audiences (visitors) and their requirements are taken as starting point for the design and that the main structure of the web site is derived from this. Concretely, this results in different navigation paths (called audience tracks) offered from the homepage, one for each different kind of  visitor.
 
 
  
 

 

In the first phase of the method, the Mission Statement Specification, the mission statement for the web system is formulated. The goal of this phase is to identify the  urpose of the web system, as well as the subject and the target users. Without giving due consideration to the purpose, there is no proper basis for making design decisions, or for evaluating the effectiveness of the web system. The target users are the users that we want to address or that will be interested in the web system. The subject of the web system is of course related to the purpose and the target users of the web system. The subject must allow fulfilling the purpose of the web system and it must be adapted for the target users. The output of this phase is the mission statement. It is formulated in natural language and must describe the purpose, subject and target users of the web systems. In fact, the mission statement establishes the borders of the design process. It allows (in the following phases) deciding which information or  unctionality to include or exclude, how to structure it and how to present it. The next phase is the Audience Modeling phase. The target users identified in the mission tatement are refined into so-called audience classes. This means that the different types of users are further identified and classified into audience classes. The classification is based on the requirements of the different users. Users with the same information and functional requirements become members of the same audience class. Users with additional requirements form audience subclasses. In this way a hierarchy of audience classes is constructed. For each audience class relevant characteristics (e.g., age,  experience level) are given. The next phase, the Conceptual Design is used to specify the information, functionality and structure of the web system at a conceptual level. A 
conceptual design makes an abstraction from any implementation technology or target platform. The information and functionality are specified during the Task & Information Modeling sub phase. The overall conceptual structure including the navigational possibilities for each audience class is specified during the Navigational Design sub phase.
 
 
 
During the Implementation Design phase, the conceptual design models are complemented with information required for an actual implementation. It consists of three sub phases: Site Structure Design, Presentation Design and Logical Data Design. During Site Structure Design, the conceptual structure of the web system is mapped onto pages, i.e. it is decided which components (representing information and functionality) and links will be grouped onto web pages. For the same Conceptual Design, different site structures can be defined, targeting different devices, contexts or platforms. The Presentation Design is used to define the look and feel of the web system as well as the layout of the pages. The Logical Data Design is only needed for data-intensive web systems. In case the data will be maintained in a database, a database schema is  instructed (or an existing one can be used) and the mapping between the conceptual data model and the actual data source is created. Evidently, other types of data sources are possible (XML, RDF, OWL, …). The last phase is the Implementation. The actual implementation can be generated automatically from the information collected during the previous phases.
 
Note: this text is from the WSDM: WEB SEMANTICS DESIGN METHOD by O. De Troyer, Sven Casteleyn, and Peter Plessers