Data-Driven, One-To-One Web Site Generation for Data-Intensive Applications

A data-driven approach can be fruitfully used in the speci cation and automatic generation of data-intensive Web applications, i.e., applications which make large amounts of data available on the Web. We present a multi-level architecture based on orthogonal abstractions for the de nition of the structure, derivation, navigation, composition, and presentation of Web sites; then we show how these ingredients are used in Torii, a tool environment for the speci cation and automatic generation of Web sites, currently developed in the context of a large Esprit project. By means of design tools, speci cations are collected in a design repository, which is next used for Web page generation. This dynamic, data-centered approach opens up opportunities for personalizations: each user can be mapped to an individual hypertextual view of the Web site (called site view), and business rules may be used to change site views, both statically and dynamically. We argue that personalization of Web access (also called oneto-one Web delivery) is naturally supported by the proposed data-driven approach, and is We acknowledge the support of ESPRIT Project 28771 W3I3, MURST Project Interdata, CNR-CESTIA, and the HP Internet Philanthropic Initiative. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 25th VLDB Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1999. at the same time a key ingredient of the Web applications of the near future.