Automated end user-centred adaptation of web components through automated description logic-based reasoning

Context This paper addresses one of the major end-user development (EUD) challenges, namely, how to pack today’s EUD support tools with composable elements. This would give end users better access to more components which they can use to build a solution tailored to their own needs. The success of later end-user software engineering (EUSE) activities largely depends on how many components each tool has and how adaptable components are to multiple problem domains. Objective A system for automatically adapting heterogeneous components to a common development environment would offer a sizeable saving of time and resources within the EUD support tool construction process. This paper presents an automated adaptation system for transforming EUD components to a standard format. Method This system is based on the use of description logic. Based on a generic UML2 data model, this description logic is able to check whether an end-user component can be transformed to this modelling language through subsumption or as an instance of the UML2 model. Besides it automatically finds a consistent, non-ambiguous and finite set of XSLT mappings to automatically prepare data in order to leverage the component as part of a tool that conforms to the target UML2 component model. Results The proposed system has been successfully applied to components from four prominent EUD tools. These components were automatically converted to a standard format. In order to validate the proposed system, rich internet applications (RIA) used as an operational support system for operators at a large services company were developed using automatically adapted standard format components. These RIAs would be impossible to develop using each EUD tool separately. Conclusion The positive results of applying our system for automatically adapting components from current tool catalogues are indicative of the system’s effectiveness. Use of this system could foster the growth of web EUD component catalogues, leveraging a vast ecosystem of user-centred SaaS to further current EUSE trends.