Traverser: A method and a tool to extract user’s traverses within web systems from ontology

Abstract

People explore specific services or information to accomplish their goals within a web system. Efficient visitors’ exploration routes must be defined as requirements to guide them through a good experience. In order to define these requirements, we focused on links from one object to another and developed a method named Traverser to guide the visitors from the starting point to the destination. In our study, these links are within the ontology of a service domain. The set of links to guide visitors from a certain object to the destination is referred to as a “traverse.” A traverse is inferred from the ontology by tracing associations and inheritance relationships between domain items, taking the rights of each user group into account. The ontology for extracting traverses is developed as a conceptual model with a class diagram of UML, while the roles of an association are diverted as a user group’s permissions. We also developed a tool to define the conceptual model and extract traverses. The effectiveness of Traverser is evaluated by comparing the requirements derived by Traverser with those of the use case approach.