Modelling content aggregation for developing e-commerce web sites

Currently, e-commerce web sites are integrators of heterogeneous information and services that are oriented to providing content aggregation. From a Model-Driven perspective, e-commerce applications need conceptual mechanisms that make it easy to describe, manage and reuse contents and services in order to deal with content aggregation at a higher level of abstraction. Our work presents conceptual modeling techniques that extend the OOWS navigational modeling by refining the navigational context definition and introducing the concept of information abstraction unit to specify the contents of web applications of this kind. These new abstractions provide powerful reuse mechanisms that produce considerable benefits because both development time and effort can be reduced. Finally, the paper presents some ideas to implement content aggregation taking these enhanced navigational models as input.