Mapping semantic widgets to web-based, domain-specific collections

Domain-specific, online collections and digital libraries are often composed of richly structured content and modern content management systems make it easy to define multiple heterogeneous structures with similar semantics. But developers typically write code for each structure, a repetitive perhaps difficult process. In this paper, we present canonical structures, small schema fragments, consisting of unnamed entities, relationships, and attributes that can be instantiated into domain structures by providing names for all structural elements. Domain structures represent commonly occurring patterns within a given application domain that can be mapped repeatedly, as appropriate, to local structures. We formally define canonical and domain structures, mappings to local structures, and functionality. We have implemented several, generic semantic widgets using our approach in an operational educational web repository.