Vol.9 No.4 December 1, 2010

Research Articles: 

Web Site Metadata (pp283-301)
        Erik Wilde and Anuradha Roy
The currently established formats for how a Web site can publish metadata about a site's pages, the \code{robots.txt} file and sitemaps, focus on how to provide information to crawlers about where to not go and where to go on a site. This is sufficient as input for crawlers, but does not allow Web sites to publish richer metadata about their site's structure, such as the navigational structure. This paper looks at the availability of Web site metadata on today's Web in terms of available information resources and quantitative aspects of their contents. Such an analysis of the available Web site metadata not only makes it easier to understand what data is available today; it also serves as the foundation for investigating what kind of information retrieval processes could be driven by that data, and what additional data could be provided by Web sites if they had richer data formats to publish metadata.

An i*-based Approach for Modeling and Testing Web Requirements (pp302-326)
        Esteban Robles Luna, Irene Garrigos, Jose-Norberto Mazon, Juan Trujillo, and Gustavo Rossi
Web designers usually ignore how to model real user expectations and goals, mainly due to the large and heterogeneous audience of the Web. This fact leads to websites which are difficult to comprehend by visitors and complex to maintain by designers; these problems could be ameliorated if users are able to evaluate the application under development providing their feedback. To this aim, in this paper we present an approach for using the i* framework for modeling users' goals with mockups and WebSpec diagrams for detailing the specification of Web requirements, in such a way that the process of evaluating i* models for Web applications can be automated thus improving users' feedback during the development process. Also, as part of our development approach, we derive the domain and navigational models by defining a set of automatic transformations to a specific Web modeling method. Finally, we illustrate our approach with a case study to show its applicability and describe a prototype tool that supports the process.

A QOS Enhanced Framework and Trust Model for Effective Web Services Selection (pp327-346)
        Zhedan Pan and Jongmoon Baik
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become a promising paradigm for software development. One of the most important research topics in SOA is Web service selection which means to identify best services among a bunch of services with same or similar functions but having different QoS (Quality of Service). Many previous approaches, such as QoS models with quality criteria and selection algorithm, have been proposed to optimize Web service selection. However, in current research, quality values normally come from service providers, who have high possibility to exaggerate these values for advertisement. It is also argued that reputation based on an average user rating is not enough to indicate the trust degree of Web services and service provider. In addition, handling dynamic nature of Web services is still a challenging problem for dynamical Web service selection. In this paper, these problems are focused. First a QoS enhanced framework for effective Web service selection is proposed. Then a Trust model is built, which is composed of TQoS model, Decision model and Trust correction. It is claimed that a Web service can be regarded as trustful if QoS values received by consumers and tested by registry are no less than QoS values promised by providers. A prototype of the proposed framework is implemented, including SC agent, SR agent and QoS Enhanced SR. In addition, a scenario about a Tour agency’s Web service selection according to its business process is implemented. To validate effectiveness of proposed approach, we compared it with other approaches, such as Euclid approach and Fuzzy approach. Numerical simulation shows that proposed approach performances better other approaches in terms of obtained quality values.

Visual Web Mining for Website Evaluation (pp347-368)
        Victor Pascual-Cid, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, and J. Carlos Dursteler
In this paper we present an interactive system named Website Exploration Tool (WET) that aims at supporting the evaluation of websites through the exploration of web data. Our prototype offers a set of coordinated visual abstractions in the form of interactive graphs and trees to analyse data graphs within meaningful contexts such as the website structure and users' flow. Apart from classical approaches, our highly interactive system introduces a wide variety of information visualisation techniques that provide visual cues to assist in the process of digging into usage data. Among them, we present a new hierarchical approach for characterising users' flow which simplifies the intricate graphs generated by real users browsing, and a technique for extracting contextual subgraphs simplifying the task of visualising very large websites. The interface of the system has been evaluated with expert analysts that validated the usefulness of the tool for analysing a wide variety of websites.

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