A Rewriting-based Framework for Web Sites Verification

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 obtains the requirements not fulfilled by the Web site, and helps to repair the errors by finding out incomplete information and/or missing pages. 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 Web verification system Verdi which is publicly available.