Conceptual modelling of web sites for end-users

Internet and the WWW more and more play an important role in our information society. It is now one of the major sources of information in every rank of our society. The overwhelming accessibility to data, on a global scale, does not necessarily translate to widespread utility of data. We often find that we are drowning in data, with few tools to help managing relevant data for our various activities. In this paper, we argue that the WWW and its end-users could benefit from the existence of a conceptual web site schema. We propose such a conceptual web site schema that describes what information is available in a web site and how this information is structured into pages and links. To allow to communicate this information through the web, we developed an XML Document Type Definition (DTD) for this conceptual web site schema. We also illustrate the feasibility of the approach by a simple application program developed using the XML Document Object Model (DOM). © 2000, Kluwer Academic Publishers.