Reusable Navigation Templates to Support Navigation Design in Hera

Reuse is a fundamental concept of software design. It has many aspects and can be applied at various levels of abstraction. In this paper we focus on the reuse of high level (design model) specifications of software components for the Web. Concretely, we discuss the reuse of (parts of) navigation models that can be deployed in different application domains based on different data sources: navigation templates. At the same time, such components should be specified in a way that allows easy deployment. In this paper we propose a solution to this apparent contradiction using a component specific conceptual model. By applying a mapping from this model to a concrete domain model, an automatic deployment of the navigation templates can be performed. The process of navigation template design and deployment (including the process of defining the mapping) is explained and demonstrated on two examples using the Hera design methodology.