Representing Web Applications As Knowledge Graphs

TL;DR

This work models each node in a graph as a structured representation of the application's current state, with edges reflecting user-initiated actions or transitions, enabling a more comprehensive and functional understanding of web applications.

Abstract

Traditional methods for crawling and parsing web applications predominantly rely on extracting hyperlinks from initial pages and recursively following linked resources. This approach constructs a graph where nodes represent unstructured data from web pages, and edges signify transitions between them. However, these techniques are limited in capturing the dynamic and interactive behaviors inherent to modern web applications. In contrast, the proposed method models each node as a structured representation of the application's current state, with edges reflecting user-initiated actions or transitions. This structured representation enables a more comprehensive and functional understanding of web applications, offering valuable insights for downstream tasks such as automated testing and behavior analysis.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: System Overview of the Proposed Methodology
• Figure 2: Functionality Inferring Module
• Figure 3: Comparison of traditional parsers (Figure 3a) vs. our proposed solution (Figure 3b) for modeling web application behavior