Describing semantic web applications through relations between data nodes

Semantic Web Applications can only be understood if the complex data flows they implement are clearly described. However, application developers have very little support at the moment for documenting such data flows and their rationale, in an appropriately formal and conceptual manner. In this paper, we propose to apply a knowledge engineering approach to the formal description of Semantic Web Applications. Following an ontology building methodology based on the analysis of several existing Semantic Web Applications, we devise an abstract, foundational model of data flow descriptions which focuses on the graph of relationships between "data objects" within the application, rather than the tasks and processes being implemented. The result is Datanode, a conceptual framework designed to describe systems by expressing relations between data nodes (objects), implemented as an ontology of the possible relationships between such data nodes. We evaluate Datanode by applying it to the description of eight recent Semantic Web Applications.