ActiveWeb: XML-based active rules for Web view derivations and access control

In this paper, we propose an idea of using XML-based active rules for deriving Web views and for defining access control by user access behaviors. The major objective of the proposed method is to reflect author (creator)'s intention about his/her Web data and its link structures. In our ActiveWeb, the view of a Web page including its hyperlinks is changed according to each user's browsing situation including access history or the aggregated information about all users' access histories. In order to realize the proposed Web-view derivation, first we introduce the notions of dynamic reconfiguration rules. Intuitively, each rule is predefined by its author who specifies how to reconfigure his Web pages based on each user's access histories and situations (location and date of accession). Our dynamic reconfiguration rules are also regarded as metadata by which the author regulates how his Web content to be accessed by users. In our work, those dynamic reconfiguration rules are transformed into XML-based active rules, which can be combined with original Web content. Next, we will briefly discuss our implementation of the dynamic reconfiguration rules. Since the dynamic reconfiguration rules are declaratively specified, a Web-page author does not need to have knowledge about Web programming languages and CGI. We also describe a way to implement XML-based active rules by execution of corresponding XSLs.