Reverse engineering of Web Applications to abstract user-centered conceptual models

Abstract

The ubiquitous Web applications (UWA) Hyperbase model is a user-centered conceptual model representing the contents of a Web application, their organization in terms of entities and components, and the semantic associations between entities from which navigation paths are derived. Such a model may provide useful support for the software engineer during maintenance and evolution tasks. This paper presents a strategy for the semi-automatic abstraction of UWA Hyperbase models from existing Web applications. The results from a case study, involving four applications from real world, carried out to assess the effectiveness of the strategy are also presented and discussed.