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Providing resilient XPaths for external adaptation engines

Published: 13 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Approaches to Web application adaptation can be classified based on whether the application is aware of the adaptation or not. In the latter case, adaptation is referred to as external. External adaptation requires the use of addressing patterns that locate the target portion/data on the application pages to be adapted. Unfortunately, changes on the application normally also require updates to the addressing patterns. This raises pattern robustness as a main concern. This papers focuses on the (semi) automatic generation of change-resilience XPath patterns. Two different categories of changes are addressed, i.e. in space (e.g., different personalizations of a page) and in time (e.g., site upgrades), by exploiting two different techniques: induction and simulated annealing. These techniques permit to obtain XPath patterns "resilient-enough" to a "controlled set of page designs". SiSy, a tool that assists the user in obtaining resilient XPath expressions, was born out of this approach. The approach is tested for two websites (www.yahoo.com and www.elmundo.es), identifying 23 updates to which XPath expressions were resilient to 62% of the undertaken changes.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HT '10: Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
June 2010
328 pages
ISBN:9781450300414
DOI:10.1145/1810617
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 13 June 2010

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Author Tags

  1. change resilience
  2. evolution
  3. external adaptation
  4. xpath

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HT '10
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HT '10: 21st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia
June 13 - 16, 2010
Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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