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Rule-based verification of Web sites

  • Special Section on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods
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Abstract

In this paper, we develop a framework for the automated verification of Web sites, which can be used to specify integrity conditions for a given Web site, and then automatically check whether these conditions are fulfilled. First, we provide a rewriting-based, formal specification language which allows us to define syntactic as well as semantic properties of the Web site. Then, we formalize a verification technique which detects both incorrect/forbidden patterns as well as lack of information, that is, incomplete/missing Web pages inside the Web site. Useful information is gathered during the verification process which can be used to repair the Web site. Our methodology is based on a novel rewriting-based technique, called partial rewriting, in which the traditional pattern matching mechanism is replaced by tree simulation, a suitable technique for recognizing patterns inside semistructured documents. The framework has been implemented in the prototype GVerdi, which is publicly available.

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Alpuente, M., Ballis, D. & Falaschi, M. Rule-based verification of Web sites. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 8, 565–585 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-006-0009-7

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