Semantic Web Development with WSDM

Currently, one of the important focal points of the evolution of the World Wide Web is the semantic web: a web in which the semantics of the available content and functionality is made explicit. Web Design Methods, originally aimed at offering the designer a well-structured, systematic approach to web design, now face new opportunities and challenges: on one hand, semantic web technology can be used internally in web design methods to make the semantics of the different design models explicit, on the other hand, a major challenge for existing design methods is to (semi-) automatically generate the semantic annotations, effectively enabling the semantic web. In this paper, we describe how WSDM, one of the first web design methods, was adapted to (internally) use semantic web technology. In addition to its existing strengths (i.e. solid design support for website structure and presentation) as a traditional web design method, we show how the internal use of semantic web technology can be exploited to support the generation of semantically annotated websites.