Design and maintenance of data-intensive web sites [chapter]

Paolo Atzeni, Giansalvatore Mecca, Paolo Merialdo
1998 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
Many W eb sites include signi cant and substantial pieces of information, in a way that is often di cult to share, correlate and maintain. In many cases the management o f a W eb site can greatly bene t from the adoption of methods and techniques borrowed from the database eld. This paper introduces a methodology for designing and maintaining large Web sites based on the assumption that data to be published in the site are managed using a DBMS. We see the process of designing the site as the
more » ... ult of two i n tertwined activities: the database design and the hypertext design. Each of these is further divided in a conceptual design phase and a logical design phase, based on speci c data models. A new logical data model, called adm, is used to describe the structure of a Web hypertext. It is page-oriented, in the sense that the main construct is the one of page-scheme, providing an intensional description of a class of pages in the site. Based on the adm scheme of the site, we i n troduce a language, called Penelope, that allows to automatically generate HTML pages starting from the database content. Penelope is also able to correlate di erent pages in a complex hypertext using a suitable URL invention mechanism to guarantee reference integrity. adm and Penelope strongly support site maintenance: the rst provides a concise description of the site structure it allows to reason about the overall organization of pages in the site, in order to evaluate the e ectiveness and e ciency of the chosen structure, and possibly to restructure it at the same time, Penelope alleviates the burden of managing HTML les by hand, and guarantees link consistency in presence of updates and reorganizations.
doi:10.1007/bfb0101001 fatcat:udj232edhzb43g6skk4jmcatrm