Section: Application Domains

Introduction

A number of evolutions have changed the face of information systems in the past decade but the advent of the Web is unquestionably a major one and it is here to stay. From an initial wide-spread perception of a public documentary system, the Web as an object turned into a social virtual space and, as a technology, grew as an application design paradigm (services, data formats, query languages, scripting, interfaces, reasoning, etc.). The universal deployment and support of its standards led the Web to take over nearly all of our information systems. As the Web continues to evolve, our information systems are evolving with it.

Today in organizations, not only almost every internal information system is a Web application, but these applications also more and more often interact with external Web applications. The complexity and coupling of these Web-based information systems call for specification methods and engineering tools. From capturing the needs of users to deploying a usable solution, there are many steps involving computer science specialists and non-specialists.

We defend the idea of relying on Semantic Web formalisms to capture and reason on the models of these information systems supporting the design, evolution, interoperability and reuse of the models and their data as well as the workflows and the processing.