Enforcing Policies and Guidelines in Web Portals: A Case Study

Customizability is generally considered a desirable feature of web portals. However, if left uncontrolled, customizability may come at the price of lack of uniformity or lack of maintainability. Indeed, as the portal content and services evolve, they can break assumptions made in the definition of customized views. Also, uncontrolled customization may lead to certain content considered important by the web portal owners (e.g. advertisements), to not be displayed to end users. Thus, web portal customization is hindered by the need to enforce customization policies and guidelines with minimal overhead. This paper presents a case study where a combination of techniques was employed to semi-automatically enforce policies and guidelines on community-built presentation components in a web portal. The study shows that a combination of automated verification and semantics extraction techniques can reduce the amount of manual checks required to enforce these policies and guidelines.