Model Driven Development of Search Based Web Applications
Staff - Faculty of Informatics
Start date: 15 September 2009
End date: 16 September 2009
The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Alessandro Bozzon
DATE: Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 15.30
ABSTRACT:
Search-Based Application (SBA) are a class of applications where searching over collections of heterogeneous data constitutes the predominant user interaction paradigm. SBAs are mostly tailor-made solutions, which integrate a complex front-end (devoted to query expression and result presentation) with a complex back-end (specialized in content provisioning, annotation, indexing, and distributed query execution). The trait d'union of these apparently dissimilar focuses is the fact that both embody data-intensive and process-intensive tasks. The design and implementation of SBAs imply a high intrinsic complexity, which still involves low productivity in the implementation phase: current practices lack in formalized design approaches, and rely either on very simple models or on the programming skills of the developers.
In this talk we present an approach for SBA design and development based on the usage of Model Driven Development and of Model. Transformations to structure the life-cycle of search-based applications, considered as process- and data-intensive applications. In particular, we propose a top-down design approach that combines the benefits of business process design with the advantages of a domain specific language for the Web. We advocate the use of a process model as the starting point of SBA specification. Such process model can be semi-automatically transformed into an Application Model, encoded using a Web modeling language. The resulting application model caters for both the front-end and the back-end business logics and also incorporates the user interface needed for human-directed activities.
The proposed approach has been first implemented in a commercial tool for the model driven development of Web applications, and then it has been validated and evaluated in the context of an European research project, where several showcase applications have been developed.
BIO:
Alessandro Bozzon is currently a research assistant at Politecnico di Milano. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, with a thesis focused on model driven approaches for the design, development and automatic code generation of Search Based Applications (SBA). He also collaborates in several research projects related to innovative multi-domain and audiovisual search platforms, Web technologies, and Web architectures for embedded systems. Alessandro Bozzon is also member of the WebML research group, created by researchers in the data base group of the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione at Politecnico di Milano. His current research interests are in multi-domain search and multimedia content indexing, querying and retrieval.
HOST: Prof. Mauro Pezzè
