Abstract

During the last decades, the World Wide Web has rapidly grown in
size and complexity. A huge amount of complex Web Applications is
available to support the fulfilment of the most diverse tasks, by
providing large amounts of information and functionality. However,
the high diversity of Web users makes difficult to identify and
provide an easy access to data and services that best fit their
individual interaction goals.

Adaptive Web Applications is a type of Web-based systems that faces
this problem, by automatically adapting the access to information
pieces, services and hyperlinks to the characteristics of users and
their interaction context. The development of these systems demands
the adoption of an engineering approach that facilitates the
specification of the required adaptive features and the user
characteristics on which the adaptation is based.

The present thesis introduces a Model-Driven approach to the
development of Adaptive Web Applications. This proposal integrates
traditional development practices of Web Engineering with proved
concepts from the Adaptive Hypermedia community. Taking as a basis
the OOWS (Object Oriented Web Solutions) development process of Web
Applications, this proposal defines a set of conceptual primitives
(called Adaptive Primitives) that allow expressing well-known
adaptive techniques at a high abstraction level. The definition of
these primitives is supported by a User Modelling proposal.
Furthermore, a set of modelling strategies offers multiple
alternatives to incorporate Adaptive Methods in OOWS navigational
schemas, based on the introduced Adaptive Primitives.

In order to support the modelling of adaptive features, a
Requirements Model is defined, allowing the specification of
Adaptivity Requirements, along with the information requirements
related to the application users. Finally, a set of transformation
rules is introduced, with the goal of facilitating the traceability
of these requirements to the conceptual modelling phase.