Understanding and restructuring Web sites with ReWeb
Filippo Ricca, Paolo Tonella · IEEE Multimedia · 2001
The authors investigated automatic and semiautomatic Web site analysis with our tool ReWeb, focusing on a site's architecture and evolution. A case study demonstrates how ReWeb addresses the need to support Web site maintenance and evolution while retaining and possibly improving quality. Although not definitive, the case study described confirms that an automatic or semiautomatic tool can help developers understand and maintain Web sites. High-level views, describing the overall site architecture, are very useful, and detailed analyses can help with a site's enclosed subparts. Specifically, we based restructuring on the reaching frames, dominators, and shortest path analyses. In fact, they highlight structural and navigation problems before restructuring and their absence after the intervention. We devote future work to improving the ReWeb's robustness, widening the spectrum of analyzable sites, and enriching its set of analyses and facilities. We would also like to add abstraction techniques to support a high-level view of the site and to partially automate input selection in the presence of dynamic pages.