Modular design of complex Web-applications with W3DT

We describe W3DT (World Wide Web Design Technique), a new approach for the design of Web-based hypermedia applications. The proposed methodology consists of a modeling technique as well as a computer based design environment, which completely supports the graphical notation and facilitates the generation of a working prototype at every step of the design process. The authors focus on the collaborative design of distributed Web sites. In the case of large WWW applications several designers are often planning different aspects of the overall system of an organization. Also locally distributed systems often require submodels for each location. In order to allow a collaborative design process it is useful to integrate submodels into a unified organization-wide model. W3DT is not only suited to the design of single-server based Web-sites, but also the design of large organization-wide systems covering various aspects like distributed locations or the different organizational units