|
Published Articles >> Table of Contents >> Abstract
Eighth IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications
p. 407
MSC-based Language for Specifying Automated Web Clients
Vicente Luque Centeno, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Peter T. Breuer, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Luis Sánchez Fernández, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Carlos Delgado Kloos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Juan Antonio Herráiz Pérez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Full Article Text:
  
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ISCC.2003.1214153
Send link to a friend
| Abstract |
|
Programming automated Web Navigation Assistants,
i.e., applications that automatically navigate the Web performing
specific tasks for the user, is far from easy. Since
HTML pages offered by legacy Web-based applications are
designed to be manipulated only by people using browsers,
and Web pages contain semi-structured information [3]
whose data schema may be easily changed, the creation
and, even worse, the maintenance of this kind of applications,
is very expensive. However, an increasing amount
of information sources and online applications have been
added to the Web during the last few years, so assistants
for automating tasks over those Web-enabled applications,
are more and more needed. These assistants may automate
tasks by filling in forms, following links, analyzing data embedded
in Web pages and performing computations over
those data on behalf of the user.
Software engineering techniques are clearly needed to
reduce the cost of, not just creating these programs (by significatively
reducing their time-to-market), but even more
importantly, maintaining them working properly, reducing
the cost of readapting them to Web site pages whose structure
or navigation schemes are frequently changed. This
paper proposes the well known formal method Message Sequence
Charts (MSC) [12] as a base for defining a language
for programming Web Navigation Assistants which
may navigate a Web site according to the user’s aims. This
specification language, called XPlore, is specially suited for
both requirements engineering and automatic generation of
an executable, and has been successfully tested on several
well known Web sites.
|
 Additional Information
|
Citation:
Vicente Luque Centeno, Peter T. Breuer, Luis Sánchez Fernández, Carlos Delgado Kloos, Juan Antonio Herráiz Pérez,
"MSC-based Language for Specifying Automated Web Clients,"
iscc,
p. 407,
Eighth IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications,
2003
|
|
