A knowledge-based Web server as a development environment for Web-based knowledge servers

We describe LISPWEB, a development environment aimed at facilitating the task of developing Web based systems (A. Riva et al., 1998). Based on a programmable, extensible and dynamical HTTP server (A. Riva and M. Ramoni, 1996), our environment is particularly well suited to the development of Web-accessible knowledge based systems, exploiting declarative knowledge provided in the system´s knowledge base. The general idea is that, in addition to specifying the domain knowledge used by the application, the developer should include information on the structure of the system itself in the knowledge base. Using this information, LISPWEB is able to automatically generate a large part of the application and of the high level entities appearing in the user interface: hypertext links, data entry forms, object representations for output