OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dynamic coordination of information management services for processing dynamic web content
Authors: In-Young Ko, Ke-Thia Yao, Robert Neches
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Dynamic Web content provides us with time-sensitive and continuously changing data. To glean up-to-date information, users need to regularly browse, collect and analyze this Web content. Without proper tool support this information management task is tedious, time-consuming and error prone, especially when the quantity of the dynamic Web content is large, when many information management services are needed to analyze it, and when underlying services/network are not completely reliable. This paper describes a multi-level, lifecycle (design-time and run-time) coordination mechanism that enables rapid, efficient development and execution of information management applications that are especially useful for processing dynamic Web content. Such a coordination mechanism brings dynamism to coordinating independent, distributed information management services. Dynamic parallelism spawns/merges multiple execution service branches based on available data, and dynamic run-time reconfiguration coordinates service execution to overcome faulty services and bottlenecks. These features enable information management applications to be more efficient in handling content and format changes in Web resources, and enable the applications to be evolved and adapted to process dynamic Web content.
Improving web performance by client characterization driven server adaptation
Authors: Balachander Krishnamurthy, Craig E. Wills
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

We categorize the set of clients communicating with a server on the Web based on information that can be determined by the server. The Web server uses the information to direct tailored actions. Users with poor connectivity may choose not to stay at a Web site if it takes a long time to receive a page, even if the Web server at the site is not the bottleneck. Retaining such clients may be of interest to a Web site. Better connected clients can receive enhanced representations of Web pages, such as with higher quality images.We explore a variety of considerations that could be used by a Web server in characterizing a client. Once a client is characterized as poor or rich, the server can deliver altered content, alter how content is delivered, alter policy and caching decisions, or decide when to redirect the client to a mirror site. We also use network-aware client clustering techniques to provide a coarser level of client categorization and use it to categorize subsequent clients from that cluster for which a client-specific categorization is not available.Our results for client characterization and applicable server actions are derived from real, recent, and diverse set of Web server logs. Our experiments demonstrate that a relatively simple characterization policy can classify poor clients such that these clients subsequently make the majority of badly performing requests to a Web server. This policy is also stable in terms of clients staying in the same class for a large portion of the analysis period. Client clustering can significantly help in initially classifying clients for which no previous information about the client is known. We also show that different server actions can be applied to a significant number of request sequences with poor performance.
Webformulate: a web-based visual continual query system
Authors: Jennifer L. Leopold, Meg Heimovics, Tyler Palmer
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Today there is a plethora of data accessible via the Internet. The Web has greatly simplified the process of searching for, accessing, and sharing information. However, a considerable amount of Internet-distributed data still goes unnoticed and unutilized, particularly in the case of frequently-updated, Internet-distributed databases. In this paper we give an overview of WebFormulate, a Web-based visual continual query system that addresses the problems associated with formulating temporal ad hoc analyses over networks of heterogeneous, frequently-updated data sources. The main distinction between this system and existing Internet facilities to retrieve information and assimilate it into computations is that WebFormulate provides the necessary facilities to perform continual queries, developing and maintaining dynamic links such that Web-based computations and reports automatically maintain themselves. A further distinction is that this system is specifically designed for users of spreadsheet-level ability, rather than professional programmers.
Improvement of HITS-based algorithms on web documents
Authors: Longzhuang Li, Yi Shang, Wei Zhang
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

In this paper, we present two ways to improve the precision of HITS-based algorithms on Web documents. First, by analyzing the limitations of current HITS-based algorithms, we propose a new weighted HITS-based method that assigns appropriate weights to in-links of root documents. Then, we combine content analysis with HITS-based algorithms and study the effects of four representative relevance scoring methods, VSM, Okapi, TLS, and CDR, using a set of broad topic queries. Our experimental results show that our weighted HITS-based method performs significantly better than Bharat's improved HITS algorithm. When we combine our weighted HITS-based method or Bharat's HITS algorithm with any of the four relevance scoring methods, the combined methods are only marginally better than our weighted HITS-based method. Between the four relevance-scoring methods, there is no significant quality difference when they are combined with a HITS-based algorithm.
Visualizing web site comparisons
Authors: Bing Liu, Kaidi Zhao, Lan Yi
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The Web is increasingly becoming an important channel for conducting businesses, disseminating information, and communicating with people on a global scale. More and more companies, organizations, and individuals are publishing their information on the Web. With all this information publicly available, naturally companies and individuals want to find useful information from these Web pages. As an example, companies always want to know what their competitors are doing and what products and services they are offering. Knowing such information, the companies can learn from their competitors and/or design countermeasures to improve their own competitiveness. The ability to effectively find such business intelligence information is increasingly becoming crucial to the survival and growth of any company. Despite its importance, little work has been done in this area. In this paper, we propose a novel visualization technique to help the user find useful information from his/her competitors' Web site easily and quickly. It involves visualizing (with the help of a clustering system) the comparison of the user's Web site and the competitor's Web site to find similarities and differences between the sites. The visualization is such that with a single glance, the user is able to see the key similarities and differences of the two sites. He/she can then quickly focus on those interesting clusters and pages to browse the details. Experiment results and practical applications show that the technique is effective.
A graphical user interface toolkit approach to thin-client computing
Authors: Simon Lok, Steven Feiner, William M. Chiong, Yoav J. Hirsch
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Network and server-centric computing paradigms are quickly returning to being the dominant methods by which we use computers. Web applications are so prevalent that the role of a PC today has been largely reduced to a terminal for running a client or viewer such as a Web browser. Implementers of network-centric applications typically rely on the limited capabilities of HTML, employing proprietary "plug ins" or transmitting the binary image of an entire application that will be executed on the client. Alternatively, implementers can develop without regard for remote use, requiring users who wish to run such applications on a remote server to rely on a system that creates a virtual frame buffer on the server, and transmits a copy of its raster image to the local client.We review some of the problems that these current approaches pose, and show how they can be solved by developing a distributed user interface toolkit. A distributed user interface toolkit applies techniques to the high level components of a toolkit that are similar to those used at a low level in the X Window System. As an example of this approach, we present RemoteJFC, a working distributed user interface toolkit that makes it possible to develop thin-client applications using a distributed version of the Java Foundation Classes.
Vocabulary development for markup languages: a case study with maritime information
Authors: Raphael M. Malyankar
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

This paper describes the process of constructing a markup language for maritime information from the starting point of ontology building. Ontology construction from source materials in the maritime information domain is outlined. The structure of the markup language is described in terms of XML schemas and DTDs. A prototype application that uses the markup language is also described.
Fast and efficient client-side adaptivity for SVG
Authors: Kim Marriott, Bernd Meyer, Laurent Tardif
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The Scalable Vector Graphics format SVG is already substantially improving graphics delivery on the web, but some important issues still remain to be addressed. In particular, SVG does not support client-side adaption of documents to different viewing conditions, such as varying screen sizes, style preferences or different device capabilities. Based on our earlier work we show how SVG can be extended with constraint-based specification of document layout to augment it with adaptive capabilities. The core of our proposal is to include one-way constraints into SVG, which offer more expressiveness than the previously suggested class of linear constraints and at the same time require substantially less computational effort.
A comparison of case-based reasoning approaches
Authors: Emilia Mendes, Nile Mosley, Ian D. Watson
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Over the years software engineering researchers have suggested numerous techniques for estimating development effort. These techniques have been classified mainly as algorithmic, machine learning and expert judgement. Several studies have compared the prediction accuracy of those techniques, with emphasis placed on linear regression, stepwise regression, and Case-based Reasoning (CBR). To date no converging results have been obtained and we believe they may be influenced by the use of the same CBR configuration.The objective of this paper is twofold. First, to describe the application of case-based reasoning for estimating the effort for developing Web hypermedia applications. Second, comparing the prediction accuracy of different CBR configurations, using two Web hypermedia datasets.Results show that for both datasets the best estimations were obtained with weighted Euclidean distance, using either one analogy (dataset 1) or 3 analogies (dataset 2). We suggest therefore that case-based reasoning is a candidate technique for effort estimation and, with the aid of an automated environment, can be applied to Web hypermedia development effort prediction.
Clarifying the fundamentals of HTTP
Authors: Jeffrey C. Mogul
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The simplicity of HTTP was a major factor in the success of the Web. However, as both the protocol and its uses have evolved, HTTP has grown complex. This complexity results in numerous problems, including confused implementors, interoperability failures, difficulty in extending the protocol, and a long specification without much documented rationale.Many of the problems with HTTP can be traced to unfortunate choices about fundamental definitions and models. This paper analyzes the current (HTTP/1.1) protocol design, showing how it fails in certain cases, and how to improve these fundamentals. Some problems with HTTP can be fixed simply by adopting new models and terminology, allowing us to think more clearly about implementations and extensions. Other problems require explicit (but compatible) protocol changes.
Improvements in practical aspects of optimally scheduling web advertising
Authors: Atsuyoshi Nakamura
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

We addressed two issues concerning the practical aspects of optimally scheduling web advertising proposed by Langheinrich et al. [5], which scheduling maximizes the total number of click-throughs for all banner advertisements. One is the problem of multi-impressions in which two or more banner ads are impressed at the same time. The other is inventory management, which is important in order to prevent over-selling and maximize revenue. We propose efficient methods which deal with these two issues.
Simulation, verification and automated composition of web services
Authors: Srini Narayanan, Sheila A. McIlraith
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Web services -- Web-accessible programs and devices - are a key application area for the Semantic Web. With the proliferation of Web services and the evolution towards the Semantic Web comes the opportunity to automate various Web services tasks. Our objective is to enable markup and automated reasoning technology to describe, simulate, compose, test, and verify compositions of Web services. We take as our starting point the DAML-S DAML+OIL ontology for describing the capabilities of Web services. We define the semantics for a relevant subset of DAML-S in terms of a first-order logical language. With the semantics in hand, we encode our service descriptions in a Petri Net formalism and provide decision procedures for Web service simulation, verification and composition. We also provide an analysis of the complexity of these tasks under different restrictions to the DAML-S composite services we can describe. Finally, we present an implementation of our analysis techniques. This implementation takes as input a DAML-S description of a Web service, automatically generates a Petri Net and performs the desired analysis. Such a tool has broad applicability both as a back end to existing manual Web service composition tools, and as a stand-alone tool for Web service developers.
EDUTELLA: a P2P networking infrastructure based on RDF
Authors: Wolfgang Nejdl, Boris Wolf, Changtao Qu, Stefan Decker, Michael Sintek, Ambjörn Naeve, Mikael Nilsson, Matthias Palmér, Tore Risch
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Metadata for the World Wide Web is important, but metadata for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks is absolutely crucial. In this paper we discuss the open source project Edutella which builds upon metadata standards defined for the WWW and aims to provide an RDF-based metadata infrastructure for P2P applications, building on the recently announced JXTA Framework. We describe the goals and main services this infrastructure will provide and the architecture to connect Edutella Peers based on exchange of RDF metadata. As the query service is one of the core services of Edutella, upon which other services are built, we specify in detail the Edutella Common Data Model (ECDM) as basis for the Edutella query exchange language (RDF-QEL-i) and format implementing distributed queries over the Edutella network. Finally, we shortly discuss registration and mediation services, and introduce the prototype and application scenario for our current Edutella aware peers.
Cooperative leases: scalable consistency maintenance in content distribution networks
Authors: Anoop George Ninan, Purushottam Kulkarni, Prashant J. Shenoy, Krithi Ramamritham, Renu Tewari
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

In this paper, we argue that cache consistency mechanisms designed for stand-alone proxies do not scale to the large number of proxies in a content distribution network and are not flexible enough to allow consistency guarantees to be tailored to object needs. To meet the twin challenges of scalability and flexibility, we introduce the notion of cooperative consistency along with a mechanism, called cooperative leases, to achieve it. By supporting Δ-consistency semantics and by using a single lease for multiple proxies, cooperative leases allows the notion of leases to be applied in a flexible, scalable manner to CDNs. Further, the approach employs application-level multicast to propagate server notifications to proxies in a scalable manner. We implement our approach in the Apache web server and the Squid proxy cache and demonstrate its efficacy using a detailed experimental evaluation. Our results show a factor of 2.5 reduction in server message overhead and a 20% reduction in server state space overhead when compared to original leases albeit at an increased inter-proxy communication overhead.
Featuring web communities based on word co-occurrence structure of communications: 736
Authors: Yukio Ohsawa, Hirotaka Soma, Yutaka Matsuo, Naohiro Matsumura, Masaki Usui
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Textual communication in message boards is analyzed for classifying Web communities. We present a communication-content based generalization of an existing business-oriented classification of Web communities, using KeyGraph, a method for visualizing the co-occurrence relations between words and word clusters in text. Here, the text in a message board is analyzed with KeyGraph, and the structure obtained is shown to reflect the essence of the content-flow. The relation of this content-flow with participants' interests is then formalized. Three structure-features of relations between participants and words, determining the type of the community, are shown to be computed and visualized: (1) centralization (2) context coherence and (3) creative decisions. This helps in surveying the essence of a community, e.g. whether the community creates useful knowledge, how easy it is to join the community, and whether/why the community is good for making commercial advertisement.
Expert agreement and content based reranking in a meta search environment using Mearf
Authors: B. Uygar Oztekin, George Karypis, Vipin Kumar
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Recent increase in the number of search engines on the Web and the availability of meta search engines that can query multiple search engines makes it important to find effective methods for combining results coming from different sources. In this paper we introduce novel methods for reranking in a meta search environment based on expert agreement and contents of the snippets. We also introduce an objective way of evaluating different methods for ranking search results that is based upon implicit user judgements. We incorporated our methods and two variations of commonly used merging methods in our meta search engine, Mearf, and carried out an experimental study using logs accumulated over a period of twelve months. Our experiments show that the choice of the method used for merging the output produced by different search engines plays a significant role in the overall quality of the search results. In almost all cases examined, results produced by some of the new methods introduced were consistently better than the ones produced by traditional methods commonly used in various meta search engines. These observations suggest that the proposed methods can offer a relatively inexpensive way of improving the meta search experience over existing methods.
The Yin/Yang web: XML syntax and RDF semantics
Authors: Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Jérôme Siméon
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

XML is the W3C standard document format for writing and exchanging information on the Web. RDF is the W3C standard model for describing the semantics and reasoning about information on the Web. Unfortunately, RDF and XML---although very close to each other---are based on two different paradigms. We argue that in order to lead the Semantic Web to its full potential, the syntax and the semantics of information needs to work together. To this end, we develop a model-theoretic semantics for the XML XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model, which provides a unified model for both XML and RDF. This unified model can serve as the basis for Web applications that deal with both data and semantics. We illustrate the use of this model on a concrete information integration scenario. Our approach enables each side of the fence to benefit from the other, notably, we show how the RDF world can take advantage of XML query languages, and how the XML world can take advantage of the reasoning capabilities available for RDF.
Probabilistic question answering on the web
Authors: Dragomir R. Radev, Weiguo Fan, Hong Qi, Harris Wu, Amardeep Grewal
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Web-based search engines such as Google and NorthernLight return documents that are relevant to a user query, not answers to user questions. We have developed an architecture that augments existing search engines so that they support natural language question answering. The process entails five steps: query modulation, document retrieval, passage extraction, phrase extraction, and answer ranking. In this paper we describe some probabilistic approaches to the last three of these stages. We show how our techniques apply to a number of existing search engines and we also present results contrasting three different methods for question answering. Our algorithm, probabilistic phrase reranking (PPR) using proximity and question type features achieves a total reciprocal document rank of .20 on the TREC 8 corpus. Our techniques have been implemented as a Web-accessible system, called NSIR.
An evaluation of TCP splice benefits in web proxy servers
Authors: Marcel-Catalin Rosu, Daniela Rosu
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

This study is the first to evaluate the performance benefits of using the recently proposed TCP Splice kernel service in Web proxy servers. Previous studies show that splicing client and server TCP connections in the IP layer improves the throughput of proxy servers like firewalls and content routers by reducing the data transfer overheads. In a Web proxy server, data transfer overheads represent a relatively large fraction of the request processing overheads, in particular when content is not cacheable or the proxy cache is memory-based. The study is conducted with a socket-level implementation of TCP Splice. Compared to IP-level implementations, socket-level implementations make possible the splicing of connections with different TCP characteristics, and improve response times by reducing recovery delay after a packet loss. The experimental evaluation is focused on HTTP request types for which the proxy can fully exploit the TCP Splice service, which are the requests for non-cacheabl.content and SSL tunneling. The experimental testbed includes an emulated WAN environment and benchmark applications for HTTP/1.0 Web client, Web server, and Web proxy running on AIX RS/6000 machines. Our experiments demonstrate that TCP Splice enables reductions in CPU utilization of 10-43% of the CPU, depending on file sizes and request rates. Larger relative reductions are observed when tunneling SSL connections, in particular for small file transfers. Response times are also reduced by up to 1.8sec.