WG3: Specification and verification of Web Sites

Objectives

The World Wide Web (WWW) began in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext project as a mean for scientists at the European Particle Physics Laboratory, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, to exchange data with other scientists around the world. Since then a lot of work has been done towards a more suitable and friendly way of data interchange which has transformed the WWW into an important public resource of information consisting of larger and larger web sites accessible by anyone.

Nowadays it is very common to find out web sites in the net made up of hundreds of HTML/XML pages, containing heterogeneous information, which are bound together by a very intricate structure (i.e. links between pages).

Description of work

The main objective of this workgroup is to develop a declarative specification language for the verification of some semantic properties (i.e. integrity constraints) of a web site, which is able to check its structure and content, that is, verifying data available in each page and how information may be browsed by following hyperlinks.

Roughly speaking, the language proposed allows us to declaratively express an intended web site specification and validate a given web site against it in an automatic way in order to recognize some possible semantic discrepancies between the intended specification and the web site to be checked.

Such a specification language can be particularly fruitful in maintaining complex web sites consisting of a large and well-connected collection of semistructured data expressed by means of HTML and XML languages.

This has an obvious immediate application to the web tools (communication technologies) which we intend to develop in our project, which are the tools which we intend to use for e-learning and education. We can check that the tools which we develop are correct and we can also check that the development of new tools which can be done as part of teaching exercises or as new tools for education are also working correctly.

Experts involved in this workgroup: 6

Deliverables

The deliverable of the project will be: scientific publications; demonstrations of prototypes.