An ontology-driven approach to web site generation and maintenance

Building and maintaining a data-intensive web site is costly and time-consuming and a number of approaches have addressed this problem using a model-based methodology. This paper presents IIPS (Intelligent Information Presentation System), a system that uses an ontology-driven approach to site generation and management. UPS provides a suite of visual tools, which make it possible to model a data-intensive web site at a conceptual level, using site, interface and domain ontologies. As a result, the site designer can focus on the conceptual structure of the target web site and associated resources, independently of its realization. UPS also provides explicit mapping mechanisms, which make it possible to generate quickly site implementations from the conceptual model. IIPS improves over existing model-based approaches to web design, by providing knowledge-level support for all aspects of web design, including site and resource specification, presentation and domain data.