Current conceptual models and methodologies for Web applications concentrate on content, navigation, and service modeling. Although some of them are meant to address semantic web applications too, they do not fully exploit the whole potential deriving from interaction with ontological data sources and and from Semantic annotations. This paper proposes an extension to Web application conceptual models toward Semantic Web. We devise an extension of the WebML modeling framework that fulfills most of the design requirements emerging for the new area of Semantic Web. We generalize the development process to cover Semantic Web and we devise a set of new primitives for ontology importing and querying. Finally, an implementation prototype of the proposed concepts is proposed within the commercial tool WebRatio.

1. Building Semantic Web Portals with WebML Marco Brambilla and Federico M. Facca ICWE 2007 Como, 20th July 2007 http://home.dei.polimi.it/mbrambil http://twitter.com/MarcoBrambi http://www.slideshare.net/mbrambil

8. Extending WebML towards Semantic Web New Advanced units for ontology querying Is x subproperty of y? Or: find subproperties/ find superproperties The list of URIs where property p has value v Or: find values/ find properties Is x property of y? Or: find the properties/ find the class Is x an instance of y? Or: find instances/ find classes Is x subclass of y? Or: find subclasses/ find superclasses

9. Extending WebML towards Semantic Web New Advanced units for ontology querying class uri instance uris instace uri classes uris instace & class uri boolean

11. Extending WebML towards Semantic Web Example of Usage of Advanced Units The value submitted in the form is passed to the HasPropertyValue unit that extracts a set of URIs of instances (albums or artists) with mm:soundsLike property equal to Val. The InstanceOf unit that checks if they are instances of the class Artist. The URIs are then shown in a list of Artists.

12. Case Study Example

14. Implementation expirience