Preliminary study on design and development of a journal focused crawler system using EBD methodology: Part I — Design task and environment analysis

This paper is part one of a preliminary study on design and development of a journal focused crawler system using EBD methodology. In this paper, the authors found that the living environment of a web crawler has been widely changed and the development technology has also been greatly improved, therefore it is assumed that the focus of design and development of a web crawler system shall be different than before. Using EBD, designers can begin from recursively analysing the environment of the design task for gathering enough requirements to dig out the real intent of a design task. The question-asking techniques about the generic questions and domain questions can give designer a good practice on how to analyse the environment, it guides designer to fully consider the factors that affecting the design product. These factors may lie in each event or phase of any related lifecycle, or within any level of requirement from nature to human and built. Finally, the environment analysis will lay a foundation for later conflict identification and solution generation processes since designer have grasped the real intent of the design task to some extent.