Rethinking Web Design Models:Requirements for Addressing the ContentArouna Woukeu, Leslie Carr, Gary Wills, Wendy HallIntelligence, Agent, Multimedia GroupDepartment of Electronics and Computer ScienceUniversity of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UKTel: +44 (0)23 8059 3255Technical Report Number: ECSTR-IAM03 -002ISBN: 0854327940© University of SouthamptonAbstractThe objective of hypermedia design models is to produce a well-organised web site. The organisation is undertaken at the level of a particular building-block – an abstract data unit which may match a frame, paragraph or region on a Web page. The increasing sophistication of these models allows the designer to deal with interaction and personalisation, but precludes one of the basic features of hypertext – the text itself. This paper argues that this oversight remains a fundamental problem because the component of content production for many web sites is not an abstract data unit but the concepts embedded in the paragraphs, sentences and words of the content regions. Consequently there is a gap between the organisation of material and the origination of material that is not well-addressed by current design methods. The paper considers the problem of concept modelling in the Semantic Web, its implementation in various hypertext environments and whether this approach can inform the current generation of hypermedia design models.General TermsDocumentation, Design.KeywordsWeb Design Methods, Hypermedia Design, Open Hypermedia, Semantic Web.1 IntroductionHypermedia design models have been principally aimed at public, data-rich web sites [9] which are part of the so-called deep web, that is, those sites which are visible manifestations of large databases. Although these have been typically characterized by e-commerce-style catalogs such as Amazon, CD-Now or Google, it is the case that content- and community- oriented digital library and portal sites are increasingly being dealt with [10].These kinds of sites provide different kinds of information for the user in the form of more complex content (e.g. articles, mail messages) rather than easily-processed data. However, even the ‘data-oriented’ Web sites show the challenge of content – consider the web page shown in1

Rethinking Web Design Models Requirements for Addressing the Content