Getting ready web engineering methods for the semantic web

Current Web Engineering methods develop "closed" web applications from conceptual models. This fact makes difficult the integration and the interoperability of different web applications. In this context it is necessary to establish a technological framework where the application data and functionality could be represented and shared between different web applications. Semantic web languages provide an appropriate framework to achieve these non-functional requirements. Ontologies are proliferating to enable interoperability between Internet-connected applications. Web Engineering methods should be prepared to face up this new challenge. A first attempt in this community is based on the transformation of conceptual schemas into ontologies. This strategy does not take into account navigational and presentation models. This work takes advantage from all these models (navigational and presentation) enriching the web implementations with all the knowledge gathered during the modeling and design process. Our approach provides different ontologies as a basis to enable a more fruitful interchange of knowledge between web applications. We provide a semantic representation of web applications that enables not just to merely access to static information. We also provide a navigational ontology that can be queried through the use of a semantic query language.