Towards A Methodology for the Development of Web-Based Systems: Models, Methods & Activities for the Conceptual Design of Large Web-Based Information Systems

E-commerce is changing the nature of business. To support 'buying and selling over digital media' for private and corporate Web users, companies need not only appropriate transaction systems, but also new information systems. While the systems development challenge for transaction systems is mostly restricted to separating access channel functionality from business transactions processing and developing systems support for new access channels, systems development needs for information systems are much more challenging since different media and different information source systems have to be integrated, novel forms navigation have to be supported, and information objects become more complex and more volatile. Based on a review of related work from hypertext design, Web site / intranet design, and database-oriented CASE environments, this paper tries to identify the " essence " of a Web-based information system and proposes an adequate conceptual model. The model is intended to capture not only hierarchical document structure and hypertext semantics, but also dynamic page generation from databases and various approaches to explicit and implicit navigation. It becomes evident that Web-based information system can be regarded as supersets of traditional information systems, thereby requiring conceptual modeling to include various additional features. The proposed model comprises several classes of information objects, various types of associations, activities for the design, and quality checks. For illustration purposes, the model is applied to an existing Web-based information system. Current Web-based information system development tools are analyzed with regard to the extent to which conceptual Web-based information system modeling is supported.