AriadneTool: A Design Toolkit for Hypermedia Applications

Susana Montero, Paloma Díaz, Juan Manuel Dodero and Ignacio Aedo
Laboratorio DEI. Dpto. de Informática, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid,
Avda. de la Universidad 30. 28911 Leganés, Spain
Email: smontero@inf.uc3m.es, pdp@inf.uc3m.es, dodero@inf.uc3m.es, aedo@ia.uc3m.es; Web: http://www.dei.inf.uc3m.es

Abstract

The increasing size and complexity of hypermedia and Web applications puts stress on the need for using design models and methods whenever quality, usability, maintainability or reusability are critical. Moreover, to make the tasks of developers and designers more straightforward and effective, such models and methods should be supported by software tools providing explicit guidance during the development process as well as fast-prototyping. The paper introduces a design environment called AriadneTool that assumes the Ariadne Development Method (ADM). ADM proposes a systematic, iterative and user-centered approach to develop hypermedia and Web applications that deals with six design perspectives in an integrated way: navigation, presentation, structure, behavior, processes and access. The AriadneTool toolkit automates the ADM development process, offering interfaces to create the different products of the method. It also incorporates the use of ontologies to facilitate semantic support that allows for checking the consistency of modelling and for improving the users' understanding of the method. Once the designer has created the specifications of the system, the toolkit makes it possible to generate documentation concerning the system design, to validate the different products or to produce HTML, XML, SMIL and RDF implementation templates automatically.

1 Introduction

Demand for hypermedia systems, and in particular Web applications, has risen quickly in different areas over a short period of time. This rush has led most developers to skip the conceptual design and go directly to the implementation, producing applications of poor quality, usability and maintainability. The majority of these designs have been implemented with tools such as NetObjects Fusion or DreamWeaver, that allow automated implementation driven by contents and easy set-up (Fraternali 1999), but do not pay attention to the intrinsic features of hypermedia systems such as: sophisticated navigational structures; interactive behaviors; multimedia compositions that have to be usable and harmonic at the same time. More recently, security issues have become a key feature insofar as hypermedia applications and Web applications in particular are increasingly accessed by different users with different purposes and responsibilities (Aedo et al. 2003).

As a result, it is now widely recognized there is a need to apply a software engineering perspective in the development of hypermedia and Web applications (Lowe and Hall 1999), especially for large-scale applications with a long lifespan. Consequently, the development process has to be addressed by design methods rather than by technical issues. Most of the existing hypermedia methods, such as RMM (Isakowitz et al. 1998), OOHDM (Schwabe and Rossi 1998), WSDM (De Troyer and Leune 1998), WebML (Ceri et al. 2000), OO-H (Gómez et al. 2001) and UWE (Knapp et al. 2003), provide mechanisms to deal with some of the aforementioned design concerns. However, not all these methods include software tools to make the tasks of developers and designers more straightforward and effective, providing explicit guidance during the development process and fast-prototyping. Among these methods only WebML , OO-H and UWE are supported by software tools. In practice, they provide only partial solutions for the design process as well as for hypermedia modelling (Montero et al. 2003). On the one hand, these methods only focus on conceptual modelling, defining a sequence to proceed throughout the design phase, but hypermedia applications by their nature are concerned with human-computer interaction and, therefore, their utility, usability and aesthetic should be taken into account. Thus, an evaluation activity and a more flexible development process are required to assess the application utility and usability (Nanard and Nanard 1995). On the other hand, only the more representative hypermedia features are considered (i.e. logic structure of the application, navigation options and presentation features), but they do not properly address issues such as multimedia compositions (including time-based and space-based constraints), the modelling of the system users or the specification of access rules oriented towards defining personalization, adaptation and security policies.

This paper presents a software environment called AriadneTool that supports the conceptual design and fast-prototyping of hypermedia applications, having as methodological foundation the Ariadne Development Method (ADM) (Díaz et al. 2001a). ADM proposes a hypermedia engineering approach combining a systematic, flexible and user-centered design process with the integration of different design views (structure, navigation, presentation, behavior, processes and access), each of which is faced from different abstraction levels by means of a number of design artefacts.

The main motivation of AriadneTool is to enhance the communication process among the heterogeneous members of a hypermedia project, including authors, designers, artists and engineers (Deshpande and Hansen 1998), who have different levels of knowledge and skills. With this purpose, a graphical design environment is provided to produce the different ADM design artefacts corresponding to a specific development project. Additional tasks that are automated to simplify the design process include: checking correctness, completeness and integrity of the modelling with respect to the method semantics, generating documentation about the design project and creating prototypes that can be used for usability evaluation.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the ADM, focusing on the design process and the activities and products suggested by the method to deal with specific hypermedia design issues. Section 3 presents the functionality and the architecture of AriadneTool. Section 4 describes how to specify the system requirements to generate a fast-prototype using this tool. Section 5 analyzes related work. Finally, some concluding remarks and future work are outlined.

2 AriadneTool foundation: the Ariadne Development Method

The fundamental idea behind the ADM is to gather efforts from the software and hypermedia engineering fields into a method devoted to the development of large- and medium-scale hypermedia applications. On the one hand, the experience gained in years of research in the software engineering field can help to improve the hypermedia development process (Lowe and Hall 1999). On the other hand, hypermedia application development poses very specific problems that do not appear in other software applications, and hypermedia developers need specific mechanisms to face them (Díaz et al. 1999).

The next sub-sections enumerate the cornerstones of the ADM according to both approaches: as a software engineering method and as a hypermedia/Web method. For a more detailed description of the ADM method see Díaz et al. (2001a). Section 4 provides a running example that illustrates how the main ADM design products are used to model a specific Web site.

2.1 Software engineering approach

The ADM development process is based on the following software engineering requirements (Sommerville and Sawyer 1997):

Figure 1

Figure 1. The ADM development process


2.2 Hypermedia modelling approach

In the ADM, a hypermedia application is seen from several complementary design perspectives which can be applied in conceptual modelling as far as they are independent of any features concerning the implementation or distribution platform:

  1. Navigation design. In hypermedia applications, information is split into a number of self-contained and unstructured nodes that are connected to related nodes by means of links. Therefore, the design of this browsing structure, including navigation tools to avoid disorientation, is a critical concern in hypermedia design.

  2. Presentation design. Nodes include multimedia content that needs to be organized and harmonized in different dimensions such as time and two- or three-dimensional space. Thus, the way these multimedia contents are related to each other can determine the system utility and usability (Johnson and Nemetz 1998). 

  3. Structure design. Some hyperdocuments such as books, dictionaries, digital libraries, and so on, have an intrinsic hierarchical structure. Moreover, the use of data models can help to analyze the universe of discourse and to acquire a deeper knowledge of it.

  4. Behavior design. Hypermedia systems are highly interactive, including such dynamic aspects as the system reaction to particular events, access to external applications such as databases or inference engines or the inclusion of virtual objects and structures that are created or modified at runtime. Therefore, modelling such a reaction is a relevant design concern.

  5. Processes design. Besides navigation functionalities, hypermedia applications now include more and more no-navigation functions such as business processes, search engines or personalization and customization functionalities. Thus, process models can represent how the system works.

  6. Access design. Due to the proliferation of multi-user hypermedia applications, the need to preserve the security of the information is increasing as well as to adapt the system to the user needs and preferences. With this purpose, security and access rules have to be analyzed and formally specified in terms of entities of the domain, that is, nodes, links or contents.

For a more thorough discussion of these design issues see Díaz et al. (1999).

To capture properly all six design views enumerated above, the ADM provides a number of design artefacts and mechanisms to deal with them from different abstraction levels. Table 1 summarises the activities performed in each phase, the design products associated with each activity and the design concerns referring to the views described above. Again, the ordering of the activities does not have implications in the development sequence.

Table 1. Phases, activities, products and design concerns of the ADM


CONCEPTUAL DESIGN


Activity 

Products 

Design Concern 

Definition of 
the logical structure 

Structural Diagram

Structure: Structural relationships among nodes

Study of the 
system function 

Navigation Diagram 

Navigation: Navigation paths and tools

Functional Specifications 

Processes: No-navigation services

Specification 
of entities 

Internal Diagrams 

Spatial Diagram

Presentation: The node visualization area
Structure: Composite content structure

TimeLine 

Presentation: Node evolution throughout a time interval 

Attributes Catalogue 

Structure, Presentation, Navigation, Behavior, Processes: Properties that can be used with different purposes 

Events Catalogue 

Behavior, Processes: Behaviors that can be associated with processes 

User Modelling 

User Diagram 

Access, Navigation, Presentation, Behavior: Expected types of users (roles or stereotypes) that can be used to support security rules or personalized/adaptive hypermedia 

Definition of the 
security policy 

Categorization Catalogue 

Access: Security category for each hypermedia object 

Access Table 

Access, Navigation, Presentation, Behavior: Access permissions that determine the contents, links and services offered to the user 

DETAILED DESIGN


Activity 

Products 

Design Concern 

Identification of instances 

Node Instances 

Structure: Instances of the abstract elements or structures

Instanced Users Diagram 

Access, Navigation, Presentation, Behavior: Instances of user structures

Specification of functions 

Specifications of Access Structures 

Navigation: Low-level description of navigation aids

Detailed Specification of Functions 

Processes: Low-level description of each function

Specification of instances 

Detailed Internal Diagrams 

Structure, Presentation, Navigation, Behavior, Processes: More detailed information of nodes and contents

Authorization Rules 

Access, Navigation, Presentation, Behavior: Concrete access rights

Users Allocation 

Access: Specific users assigned to roles and stereotypes

Definition of the presentation features 

Presentation Specifications 

Presentation: Presentation properties for nodes and contents

EVALUATION


Activity 

Products 

Design Concern

Development of a prototype 

Prototype 

All: Interface mock-up

Evaluation 

Evaluation Document 

All: Report about the evaluation process

Conclusions Report 

All: Conclusions to improve the system


The ADM is flexible as designers can decide to begin at any of the phases and any of the activities in a phase, depending on the modelling habits, skills, preferences, the available resources or the constraints and features of the project being developed.

Moreover, the ADM is not oriented towards supporting only a specific implementation technology but to offer general design products that can be translated to different implementation environments. With this purpose, we propose a design framework consisting of a two-level hierarchy of design entities:

Table 2 shows the relationship between the ADM products and the Labyrinth model. For this purpose, only Conceptual Design products are considered as those of the Detailed Design are equivalent but specified from a lower-level of abstraction. For example, a node in the Structural Diagram of the Conceptual Design that represents a node-type can be transformed into several concrete nodes in the Detailed Design.

Table 2. Relationship between Labyrinth and the ADM products of the Conceptual Design


ADM product 

Labyrinth component/construct 

AriadneTool graphical representation 

STRUCTURAL DIAGRAM

Node (simple/composite) 

inline image Simple node

inline image Composite node 

inline image External node for which more details are not provided 

Aggregation 

inline image 1:N Relationship among nodes

Generalization 

inline image 1:N Relationship among nodes 

NAVIGATION DIAGRAM

Node (simple/composite) 

Simple and composite node (see above) 

inline image Simple node acting as navigation tool 

inline image Composite acting as navigation tool 

Link 

inline image Uni- or bi-directional link 

FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATION 

Event 

Form-based representation 

INTERNAL DIAGRAMS

Spatial Diagram 

Node 

Working area of the internal diagram 

Content 

inline image Simple content 

Location 

Explicit position of the content in the working area 

Alignment 

Form-based representation. Position of the target is dynamically set according to the spatial-based constraint defined 

Attributes List 

Form-based representation 

Events List 

Form-based representation 

Aggregation 

inline image 1:N Relationship among contents

Generalization 

inline image 1:N Relationship among contents 

Time Line 

Node

Working area of the internal diagram 

Content 

inline image Simple content 

Location Function 

Explicit position of the content in the working area 

Synchronism

Form-based representation. Position of the target is dynamically set according to the time-based constraint defined 

Events List 

Form-based representation 

ATTRIBUTES CATALOGUE

Attribute 

Form-based representation 

EVENTS CATALOGUE

Event 

Form-based representation 

USERS DIAGRAM

Users (role/team) 

inline image Role: kind of user 

inline image Team: group of kinds of users 

Aggregation 

inline image 1:N Relationship among users

Generalization 

inline image 1:N Relationship among users 

CATEGORIZATION CATALOGUE

Node category
Content category 

Form-based representation 

ACCESS TABLE

Negative access list 
Abilities 

Form-based representation 


3 AriadneTool toolkit

AriadneTool is an environment devoted to the development of hypermedia applications based upon the design process described in the previous section. Currently, this design toolkit automates all the phases of the ADM Conceptual Design and most phases of the ADM Detailed Design. This automation software tool also supports fast-prototyping in HTML, XML, SMIL and RDF, as well as automatic generation of documentation about the design process. Moreover, AriadneTool also incorporates the use of ontologies for checking completeness, consistency and correctness of the design with respect to the ADM semantics and thus improving the user's understanding of its use.

The software tool is being developed following a user-centered design approach and implemented using JDK1.4. Every year since the first prototype was deployed, the toolkit has been subjected to evaluation by students in a course on hypermedia design following the evaluation process and criteria stated in section 4.3.2 to improve its utility and usability. Moreover, Java technology allows us to obtain an independent operation platform and to add easily collaborations with other Java technology-based applications, as explained below.

Each hypermedia or Web system developed with AriadneTool corresponds to a project. Figure 2 shows the graphical user interface offered to manage the design project.

Figure 2

Figure 2. AriadneTool front-end (full-size figure available)

The AriadneTool front-end is divided into four main areas:

Other helpful functionalities of AriadneTool are contextual menus, toolbars and help that provide immediate assistance to users without leaving the context in which they are working.

The components over which the AriadneTool front-end is built are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Figure 3. AriadneTool architecture (full-size figure available)


4 Developing a Web site using AriadneTool

A Web site about rural houses and holiday homes is used as a case to demonstrate the capability of AriadneTool as a tool for the design and generation of implementation templates for different platforms. The Web site provides information about houses, their equipment, booking and prices as well as places to visit or activities offered. The site will be accessed by different users:

Navigation tools to access all this information should be offered to all these users. Figure 4 shows the rural houses home page.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Rural houses Web site

Taking this example site as a starting point, we will go through the phases of the ADM method showing how to generate some of its products. Some products are illustrated by both the Web site and a screenshot of the particular design product. Grey lines crossing both parts are added to put stress on relationships between the prototype and the design. The meaning of the graphical elements can be found in Table 2.

4.1 Conceptual Design

During Conceptual Design phase, the website is approached from a high level of abstraction where structure, navigation, processes, presentation, behavior and access are properly combined to capture the domain semantics in terms of expected types of elements.

4.1.1 Structural diagram

Figure 5 shows the structural relationships that appear in the application domain by means of composite nodes that are connected to their components (simple or composite) using two abstraction mechanisms: aggregation, that refers to a set of nodes as a whole, and generalisation, that represents an inclusion relation involving inheritance mechanisms (Díaz et al. 2001). The structure of our example is defined as an aggregation of a presentation node, which is the entry point to the Web site (shown in Figure 4), and the main composite node which aggregates the index and the information nodes. The aim of this structure is to represent the fact that the Web site is made up of two frames, as pointed out in Figure 5. One frame holds the index node and the other holds the information node. This latter node generalises different kinds of information offered to visitors, such as how to get to a house, or features of the houses.

Figure 5

Figure 5. Structural diagram (full-size figure available)

4.1.2 Navigation diagram

Figure 6 illustrates the navigation paths and tools the Web site offers to users. Navigation paths are settled among nodes using tagged links which can be uni- or bi-directional and n-ary. For example, from the presentation node we browse both the index and houses node. Since information is a generalisation composite, all its components (such as houses, location, and so on) inherit the information link and, therefore, the index node has turned into a navigation tool, tagged with an NT. Moreover, we can define other navigation paths to external nodes of our application as, for instance, the payment link, used when paying for the booking, to access the payment gateway, verify the Visa card number, and return to reservation node.

Figure 6

Figure 6. Navigation diagram (full-size figure available)

4.1.3 Internal diagrams

To provide more information about the nodes defined in the structural and navigation diagrams, an internal diagram is created for each node where contents, anchors, attributes and events can be placed. This diagram consists of two subdiagrams. The spatial diagram is a two-dimensional space that represents the node visualisation area where contents are placed (Figure 7). For instance, our presentation node has two contents, the house logo and a waterfall animation. Moreover, the waterfall animation is coloured blue because it acts as source anchor for information and index links. Finally, to create more harmonic presentations, space relationships can be set among contents. For example, the waterfall content will be always below the logo content.

Figure 7

Figure 7. Spatial diagram (full-size figure available)

The timeline diagram (Figure 8) represents how the node evolves throughout a time interval. In this case new content is added, a sound that is played while the node is browsed. Moreover, to create more dynamic presentations, time relationships can be set among contents. In this case the waterfall animation is shown first, and the logo content appears at the end of the animation (e.g. the respective synchronization relationship in SMIL would be <seq> <waterfallanimation/> <logo/> </seq>).

Figure 8

Figure 8. Timeline diagram (full-size figure available)

4.1.4 Users diagram

Figure 9 illustrates the expected types of users of the application. Users are grouped within roles and teams, with no individual users. A role represents a job function or responsibility, such as the customer role that represents registered users. A team is a group of roles or users who will have some common goal without functional implications, e.g. the user team gathers all roles of the system. Such a structure sets the basis of the access policy, explained in next sub-section (4.1.5).

Figure 9

Figure 9. Users diagram (full-size figure available)

4.1.5 Categorisation catalogue and access table

The categorisation catalogue and access table define who can do what in the system. The categorisation catalogue holds the access category assigned to each node or content, defining the most permissive operation to be performed. These categories, that make up a relationship order where each category adds privileges to the previous one, are: browsing, personalising and editing (Aedo et al. 2003). In this case the category for all nodes and contents is browsing, that is, all nodes can be read but not modified. The access table allows the access policies to be defined following an RBAC (Role Based Access Control) approach, assigning a manipulation category to each role for each node and content. For example (see Figure 10), the offer node can only be accessed by customers, so the anonymous role has a 'no access'. Therefore, the users diagram in combination with these two products make it possible to define user-dependent presentations as well as personalised hyperdocuments as in Montero et al. (2002). For instance, only users that belong to the customer role will have access to offers, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 10

Figure 10. Categorisation catalogue and access table (full-size figure available)

A more detailed description of the access definition using the ADM can be found in Aedo et al. (2003).

4.1.6 Validation and integrity rules

AriadneTool helps the designer or developer to keep the design consistent and complete with respect to the method semantics. Some of the constraints of the ADM are constantly enforced by the tool. For instance, in the internal diagram, alignment and synchronization relationships between contents are checked during their definition; thus the user cannot create an alignment between a content and itself. The other constraints have to be launched by the user. The tool provides three ways to initiate validation processes:

  1. Intra-validation, which validates a specific product, checking if it is well-formed and semantically correct according to the ADM (e.g. in the users diagram (Figure 9). If the visitor role is specialized into a customer role, and at the same time that customer role is specialized into a visitor role, the tool notifies there is a cycle between both elements).

  2. Inter-validation, which validates the relationships among several products, checking if each entity of the product is fully described through its appropriate diagrams (e.g. if the link leaving the presentation node depicted in Figure 6 is not assigned to a specific content of such a node in its internal diagram, the tool notifies that an anchor should be specified for that link).

  3. Full-validation, which validates each design product and its relationships with other products.

To support this validation process, the Labyrinth reference model was rewritten using an ontology language as DAML+OIL (Montero et al. 2003b). The inherent constraints of the model are defined with the Labyrinth Ontology named Syntactic Rules. The constraints both for well-formed products and for good semantic design of the ADM are specified apart as Semantic Rules. Figure 11 shows how the design elements stored in the Dynamic Repository are turned into an instance of the Labyrinth Ontology (i.e. facts) to be introduced into the Inference Engine. Then, several rules are executed over the instance to detect possible errors. For each error or warning detected, an entry in the validation panel is introduced, with a short message. For more information about the problem and how to resolve it, the user can use the magnifying glass icon.

Figure 11

Figure 11. Validation module architecture (full-size figure available)

Since the Inference Engine chosen for running the validation is DAMLJessKB 1 , Semantic Rules are written in Jess 2 . A rule example to check that a team has to be made up of at least one role is shown below.

(defrule team-whitout-roles
(declare (salience -150))
(PropertyValue http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type ?t http://ariadne/validator/laby#Team)
(not (PropertyValue http://ariadne/validator/laby#Valido ?t http://ariadne/validator/laby#Team))
=> (assert (PropertyValue http://ariadne/validator/laby#Error ?t No/relationship)))

4.2 Detailed Design

During the Detailed Design phase, the abstract entities and functions specified in the previous phase are instanced into concrete elements. Specific elements can be defined in a declarative way (e.g. using an identifier, URL or URI) or in a procedural way (e.g. by means of scripts or database queries). If the information given in this phase is more concrete, the relation between design and implementation will be made more explicit to the developer. For fast-prototyping, we specify the products Node Instances and Detailed Internal Diagrams. The rest of products of this phase are shown in Table 1.

4.2.1 Node instances

From the structural diagram defined in Figure 5 a number of nodes instances are specified that can refer both to composite and to simple nodes. In this way, the whole structural diagram can be replicated and reused for other rural houses Web sites, or as shown in Figure 12a the house node can be turned into a multi-instance node to create as many instances as needed to represent each rural house held in the Web site. The rest of the nodes are considered mono-instance, that is, the Web site will hold a unique instance of them.

4.2.2 Detailed internal diagrams

Finally, to generate a fast-prototype of the rural houses Web site, only concrete contents have to be associated with each content defined in the internal diagrams of this project. For example, in the instance of the presentation node, resources that represent the house logo and the waterfall animation are attached to their respective contents. Figure 12b illustrates the detailed internal diagram for the house node. As the Web site holds information about three different rural houses, three instances of house node are created. For each one, we need to provide a specific source (i.e. audio, image, text, video or others). If contents are mono-instance, all instances share the same source.

Figure 12a Figure 12b

Figure 12. a, Node instances diagram (full-size figure available); b, Detailed internal diagram (full-size figure available)

4.3 Evaluation

Since hypermedia systems are highly interactive, prototypes have to be developed to perform an evaluation of the potential usability of the system. Thus, the development method provides a user-centered process.

The next sub-sections describe how AriadneTool generates a prototype from the design described in previous sections and how the evaluation process is accomplished according to usefulness and usability criteria. The result of the evaluation may imply modifications in the design products.

4.3.1 Fast-prototyping

After the requirements of our Web site have been modeled, each available resource has been attached to its own content, and even the inter- and intra-validation rules have been executed, we can launch the AriadneTool wizard to produce a prototype of our application.

To accomplish the code generation the builder pattern (Gamma et al. 1995) was implemented for the Prototype Generator module. This pattern allows us to separate the construction of the prototype from its representation in different languages so that the same construction process can create different representations. Figure 13 depicts the class diagram for the builder pattern applied to our context.

Figure 13

Figure 13. Builder pattern applied to the prototype generator module (full-size figure available)

During this process the declarative specifications of our project according to the ADM rationale have to be translated into the selected target languages including the resolution of conflicts between the conceptual modelling and the technology (e.g. n-ary links are not supported by Web technology), thus sometimes users will have to take part. Therefore, the AriadneReader class initiates the construction process from the low-level entities retrieved from the Dynamic Repository. The Converter interface specifies an abstract interface for creating parts of a prototype. Each target language constructs and assembles parts of the prototype by implementing the Converter interface, producing files that contain low-level entities encoded and assembled among them according to each technology. For now, AriadeTool generates light prototypes in SMIL, RDF/RDFS and XML. HTML is generated from XML and a series of stylesheets using the XT 3 processor that is an implementation in Java of XSL Transformations (XSLT). Figure 14a shows some pieces of the resulting code for our example in RDF/RDFS. RDFS is used to describe the underlying structure specified in the Conceptual Design, and RDF to represent the concrete resources attached in the Detailed Design. Moreover, in this process an application domain ontology is also generated in DAML+OIL. For more detail about this mapping see Montero et al. (2003b). Figure 14b depicts an example of SMIL source code for the presentation node. Each alignment and synchronization ADM relationship is translated to the respective SMIL one.

Figure 14a Figure 14b

Figure 14. a, Example code in RDF/RDFS (full-size figure available); b, example code in SMIL (full-size figure available)

The AriadneTool design toolkit is independent of any platform and language, allowing fast-prototyping to perform an evaluation of the potential usability of the system. Therefore, no runtime environments are included with the tool and the execution of the prototype in a static or dynamic way depends on resources provided by the designer, either in a declarative way (e.g. using an identifier, URL or URI) or in a procedural way (e.g. by means of scripts or database queries).

4.3.2 Evaluation process

Evaluation is aimed at providing information about the potential usability of a system in order either to improve features and interaction mechanisms of an interface or to assess a completed interface. The first step is to prepare an Evaluation Document including the following sections:

  1. Evaluation objective. Precise, accurate, clear and measurable goals have to be established.

  2. Evaluation method. An appropriate evaluation technique depending on the available resources and the development stage selected. For information on different evaluation techniques see Preece et al. (1994)

  3. Profile of evaluators. Select the people who will take part in the evaluation, for which developers should take into account the objectives, the selected evaluation method and the available resources.

  4. Data to be collected. Parameters like those listed in Table 3 can be used, establishing which criteria and which parameters for each criteria make sense according to the evaluation goals as well as a metric for each parameter and criteria. Parameters and criteria in Table 3 are based on the work reported in Diaz (2003), where a complete description of each parameter and criteria can be found.

  5. Tasks. Developers should establish a set of tasks to be performed to be sure that evaluators will analyze all the features and tools of the hypermedia system. Different sets of tasks can be proposed for evaluators playing different roles. Moreover, it has to be tested that tasks make it possible to collect information on the criteria that have to be assessed.

  6. Recording mechanisms. Required to collect data. Data can be obtained from each task execution using, for example, log mechanisms, interviews and questionnaires.

  7. Evaluation planning. Evaluation has to be carefully prepared and planned since the results are used to understand the users needs. Developers should establish a plan to conduct evaluation and obtain useful results. For example, biased data can be obtained if evaluation sessions take too long and evaluators are tired and did not pay attention when answering the last questions or performing the last tasks.

Table 3. Evaluation goals, parameters and criteria


Evaluation goal


Evaluation parameter


Examples of evaluation criteria


Usefulness


Richness

  • Information volume

  • Access richness

  • Diversity of presentation and interaction styles

  • Kinds of interactive activities

  • Scope

Completeness

  • Services supported

  • Authoring support

  • Communication support

  • Collaboration support


Motivation

  • Self-motivation mechanisms

  • Feedback

  • Contextualization

  • Adaptivity

Hypertext structure

  • Connectivity

  • Modularity

  • Hierarchical structure

  • Balance

Autonomy

  • Interaction freedom

  • Help mechanisms

  • Degrees of autonomy

Competence

  • Use levels

  • Help mechanisms

  • Adaptivity

Flexibility

  • Accessibility

  • Modularity and structure of the architecture

Usability


Aesthetic

  • Legibility

  • Rhythm of presentation

  • Density

  • Appropriateness

Consistency

  • Interface areas 

  • Labels and messages

  • Buttons, icons and menu items

  • Interface clues

Self-evidence

  • Metaphors

  • Self-contained pages

  • Multimedia expressiveness

  • Adequacy of links

  • Meaningful naming

Naturalness of metaphors

  • Conceptual appropriateness

  • Effectiveness

Predictability

  • Task predictability


Once evaluation has been performed, the results are analyzed to derive conclusions to improve the system. These conclusions, summarized in the Conclusions Report, can imply modifications in the products generated throughout the design, whether Conceptual or Detailed, or just in the prototype
itself.

5 Related work

Many methods for the development of hypermedia and Web applications have been proposed. The most relevant examples are RMM (Isakowitz et al. 1998), OOHDM (Schwabe and Rossi 1998), WSDM (De Troyer and Leune 1998), WebML (Ceriet al. 2000), OO-H (Gómez et al. 2001) and UWE (Knapp et al. 2003). A comparative study of these methods is presented in Montero et al. (2003a) according to a reference framework based on software and hypermedia engineering requirements. From this survey, some contributions to the ADM are worth mentioning:

Only some of these methods have implemented a CASE-tool: tools such as WebRatio 4 , VisualWADE 5 and ArgoUWE 6 support WebML, the OO-H method and the UWE methodology, respectively. With respect to the aforementioned contributions, some of the methods include the function of checking the correctness of design aspects of an application project with technologies by means of XSL and OCL. In contrast, our approach uses ontologies, like ICOM 7 or OntoWebber 8 , for this purpose. Ontologies allow formal validation of conceptual modelling because they describe the essential concepts and constraints of a specific domain with an underlying formal logic. Moreover, with respect to the semantic Web, they can help hypermedia methods to provide semantic contents to Web pages generated and contextual information about the domain knowledge involved (Montero et al. 2003b). Finally, all these tools provide automatic code generation capabilities and rapid prototyping. WebRatio and VisualWade can be considered the most advanced tool-support for methods that generate real Web applications automatically.

6 Conclusions and future work

This paper has presented an environment, AriadneTool, that supports the design and development of hypermedia applications where the methodological foundation is the Ariadne Development Method (ADM). Some important aspects of the ADM that make it suitable for designing hypermedia applications are:

  1. description of process and subprocess that can be tied to links by means of events to manage no-navigation functions, i.e. business process;

  2. special notation to define space- and time-based constraints among multimedia contents to create more harmonic and dynamic presentations;

  3. users structure based on roles and teams that can be used to support personalization and security aspects;

  4. definition of the security and access requirements assuming a high-level security model (Aedo et al. 2003).

One of the strongest motivations for the development of AriadneTool is to bring the method closer to its users. For that, the tool provides users with explicit guidance for the development process, enabling only those operations allowed and notifying the designer of any mistake, warning or problems related to the completeness and correctness of the design. Moreover, it produces application prototypes dynamically from system requirements conceptualized in a declarative way.

We are working on supporting the rest of the Detailed Design products to enhance the generated prototypes and to produce a runtime environment for the RDF/RDFS application templates. We are extending the use of ontologies to support new tasks such as hypermedia design patterns (Montero et al. 2003b) and user requirements. Using an ontology-based approach, we are going towards Semantic Design Environments that would enable integration or cooperation with other systems and tools or interoperable software components, since ontologies enable interoperability between heterogeneous information, in this case hypermedia methods. A module integrated into a well known Web server like Apache (Díaz et al. 2004) is being implemented to process the access rules defined in the ADM design products, thus enabling user-dependent presentations as well as personalised hyperdocuments.

Finally, we have evaluated AriadneTool by collecting feedback from students who used it to model their projects in a course on hypermedia design. This feedback has been positive, and a large majority believed the tool supported well the method tasks and made using the ADM much easier.

The tool has also been used in a research project named ARCE, a Web-based system envisaged to cope with the lack of synchronism among requests for assistance in a multinational environment, where the main goal is to offer an efficient and reliable communication channel between different agents involved in a disaster mitigation procedure (Aedo et al. 2002), making communication easier among different stakeholders.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jose Ángel Cruz, Juan Francisco Arévalo and Antonio Boris Cumbrado for their cooperation in the development of AriadneTool. This toolkit is part of the Ariadne project funded by "Dirección General de Investigación del Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología" (TIC2000-0402). The work on design patterns is funded by Dirección General de Investigación de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid and Fondo Social Europeo (CAM and FSE) (07T/0024/2003 1).

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Notes

  1. DAMLJessKB http://edge.cs.drexel.edu/assemblies/software/damljesskb/damljesskb.html

  2. Jess, the Rule Engine for the Java Platform http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/jess/index.shtml

  3. XT http://www.blnz.com/xt/index.html

  4. WebRatio http://www.webratio.com/

  5. VisualWADE http://www.visualwade.com/

  6. ArgoUWE, CASE Tool for Modeling Web Applications http://www.pst.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/projekte/argouwe/

  7. ICOM, A Tool for Intelligent Conceptual Modelling http://www.inf.unibz.it/~franconi/icom/

  8. OntoWebber: A Web Site Management System http://www-db.stanford.edu/OntoAgents/OntoWebber/