Extracting Model Clones from Conceptual Schemas

The paper presents an overview of techniques and tools that enable the effective evaluation and refactoring of a Web application’s conceptual schema. Moreover, based on the introduction of the notion of model clones, as partial conceptual schemas that are repeated within a broader application model and the notion of model smells, as certain blocks in the Web applications model that imply the possibility of refactoring, this paper illustrates a methodology and a tool for detecting and evaluating the existence of potential model clones, in order to identify problems in an application’s conceptual schema by means of efficiency, consistency, usability and overall quality. The proposed methodology can be deployed either in the process of designing an application or in the process of re-engineering it. Evaluation is performed according to a number of inspection steps, starting from a first level evaluation of the compositions used in the hypertext design and proceeding to a second level evaluation concerning data manipulation and presentation to the user.