OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Practical semantic analysis of web sites and documents
Authors: Thierry Despeyroux
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

As Web sites are now ordinary products, it is necessary to explicit the notion of quality of a Web site. The quality of a site may belinked to the easiness of accessibility and also to other criteria such as the fact that the site is up to date and coherent. This last quality is difficult to insure because sites may be updated very frequently, may have many authors, may be partially generated and inthis context proof-reading is very difficult. The same piece of information may be found in different occurrences, but also in data ormeta-data, leading to the need for consistency checking. In this paper we make a parallel between programs and Web sites. We present some examples of semantic constraints that one would like to specify (constraints between the meaning of categories and sub-categories in a thematic directory, consistency between the organization chart and the rest of the site in an academic site). We present quickly the Natural Semantics a way to specify the semantics of programming languages that inspires ourworks. Natural Semantics itself comes from both an operational semantics and from logic programming and its implementation uses Prolog. Then we propose a specification language for semantic constraints in Web sites that, in conjunction with the well known "make" program, permits to generate some site verification tools by compiling the specification into Prolog code. We apply our method to alarge XML document which is the scientific part of our instituteactivity report, tracking errors or inconsistencies and alsoconstructing some indicators that can be used by the management of theinstitute.
Pride: peer-to-peer reputation infrastructure for decentralized environments
Authors: Prashant Dewan, Partha Dasgupta
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks use the fundamental assumption that the nodes in the network will cooperate and will not cheat. In the absence of any common goals shared by the nodes of a peer-to-peer network, external motivation to cooperate and be trustworthy is mandated. Digital Reputations can be used to inject trust among the nodes of a network. This paper presents PRIDE, a reputation system for decentralized peer-to-peer networks. PRIDE uses self-certification a scheme for identification of peers using digital certificates similar to SDSI certificates, an elicitation-storage protocol for exchange of recommendations and IP Based Safeguard (IBS) to mitigate a peer's vulnerability to 'liar farms.
Design of a crawler with bounded bandwidth
Authors: Michelangelo Diligenti, Marco Maggini, Filippo Maria Pucci, Franco Scarselli
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper presents an algorithm to bound the bandwidth of a Web crawler. The crawler collects statistics on the transfer rate of each server to predict the expected bandwidth use for future downloads. The prediction allows us to activate the optimal number of fetcher threads in order to exploit the assigned bandwidth. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
Towards a flash search engine based on expressive semantics
Authors: Dawei Ding, Jun Yang, Qing Li, Liping Wang, Wenyin Liu
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Flash, as a multimedia format, becomes more and more popular on the Web. However, previous works on Flash are totally based on low-level features, which make it unpractical to build a content-based Flash search engine. To address this problem, our paper proposes expressive semantics for bridging the gap between low-level features and user queries. To smoothly incorporate expressive semantics into a search engine, an eigenvector-based model is devised to map a user query to expressive semantics with the aid of link analysis method. Our experiment results confirm that expressive semantics is a promising approach to understanding and hence searching Flash movies more efficiently.
Personalization in distributed e-learning environments
Authors: Peter Dolog, Nicola Henze, Wolfgang Nejdl, Michael Sintek
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Personalized support for learners becomes even more important, when e-Learning takes place in open and dynamic learning and information networks. This paper shows how to realize personalized learning support in distributed learning environments based on Semantic Web technologies. Our approach fills the existing gap between current adaptive educational systems with well-established personalization functionality, and open, dynamic learning repository networks. We propose a service-based architecture for establishing personalized e-Learning, where personalization functionality is provided by various web-services. A Personal Learning Assistant integrates personalization services and other supporting services, and provides the personalized access to learning resources in an e-Learning network.
A combined approach to checking web ontologies
Authors: Jin Song Dong, Chew Hung Lee, Hian Beng Lee, Yuan-Fang Li, Hai H. Wang
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The understanding of Semantic Web documents is built upon ontologies that define concepts and relationships of data. Hence, the correctness of ontologies is vital. Ontology reasoners such as RACER and FaCT have been developed to reason ontologies with a high degree of automation. However, complex ontology-related properties may not be expressible within the current web ontology languages, consequently they may not be checkable by RACER and FaCT. We propose to use the software engineering techniques and tools, i.e., Z/EVES and Alloy Analyzer, to complement the ontology tools for checking Semantic Web documents.In this approach, Z/EVES is first applied to remove trivial syntax and type errors of the ontologies. Next, RACER is used to identify any ontological inconsistencies, whose origins can be traced by Alloy Analyzer. Finally Z/EVES is used again to express complex ontology-related properties and reveal errors beyond the modeling capabilities of the current web ontology languages. We have successfully applied this approach to checking a set of military plan ontologies.
TCOZ approach to semantic web services design
Authors: Jin Song Dong, Yuan-Fang Li, Hai H. Wang
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Complex Semantic Web (SW) services may have intricate data state, autonomous process behavior and concurrent interactions. The design of such SW service systems requires precise and powerful modelling techniques to capture not only the ontology domain properties but also the services&apos; process behavior and functionalities. In this paper we apply an integrated formal modeling language, Timed Communicating Object Z (TCOZ), to design SW services. Furthermore, the paper presents the development of the systematic translation rules and tools which can automatically extract the SW ontology and services semantic markup from the formal TCOZ design model.
Managing versions of web documents in a transaction-time web server
Authors: Curtis E. Dyreson, Hui-ling Lin, Yingxia Wang
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper presents a transaction-time HTTP server, called TTApache that supports document versioning. A document often consists of a main file formatted in HTML or XML and several included files such as images and stylesheets. A change to any of the files associated with a document creates a new version of that document. To construct a document version history, snapshots of the document's files are obtained over time. Transaction times are associated with each file version to record the version's lifetime. The transaction time is the system time of the edit that created the version. Accounting for transaction time is essential to supporting audit queries that delve into past document versions and differential queries that pinpoint differences between two versions. TTApache performs automatic versioning when a document is read thereby removing the burden of versioning from document authors. Since some versions may be created but never read, TTApache distinguishes between known and assumed versions of a document. TTApache has a simple query language to retrieve desired versions. A browser can request a specific version, or the entire history of a document. Queries can also rewrite links and references to point to current or past versions. Over time, the version history of a document continually grows. To free space, some versions can be vacuumed. Vacuuming a version however changes the semantics of requests for that version. This paper presents several policies for vacuuming versions and strategies for accounting for vacuumed versions in queries.
Digital repository interoperability: design, implementation and deployment of the ecl protocol and connecting middleware
Authors: Ty Mey Eap, Marek Hatala, Griff Richards
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper describes the design and implementation of the eduSource Communication Layer (ECL) protocol. ECL is one outcome of a pan-Canadian project called eduSource Canada to build an open network of interoperable digital repositories. The design goal was to achieve a highly flexible, easy-to-use, and platform independent communication layer protocol that allows new and existing repositories to communicate and share resources across a network. ECL conforms to IMS Digital Repository Interoperability (DRI) specifications and supports four main functions: search/expose, submit/store, gather/expose and request/deliver. The ECL protocol builds on the latest standards and is flexible with respect to metadata schemas and repository contents. To support easy adoption of the protocol we provide middleware components for connecting existing systems. The ECL is currently used in the eduSource network, and we have begun work bridging with other interoperable initiatives such as Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI). Based on our experience, ECL is truly flexible and easy to use.
A method for transparent admission control and request scheduling in e-commerce web sites
Authors: Sameh Elnikety, Erich M. Nahum, John M. Tracey, Willy Zwaenepoel
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper presents a method for admission control and request scheduling for multiply-tiered e-commerce Web sites, achieving both stable behavior during overload and improved response times. Our method externally observes execution costs of requests online, distinguishing different request types, and performs overload protection and preferential scheduling using relatively simple measurements and a straight forward control mechanism. Unlike previous proposals, which require extensive changes to the server or operating system, our method requires no modifications to the host O.S., Web server, application server or database. Since our method is external, it can be implemented in a proxy. We present such an implementation, called Gatekeeper, using it with standard software components on the Linux operating system. We evaluate the proxy using the industry standard TPC-W workload generator in a typical three-tiered e-commerce environment. We show consistent performance during overload and throughput increases of up to 10 percent. Response time improves by up to a factor of 14, with only a 15 percent penalty to large jobs.
Web-scale information extraction in knowitall: (preliminary results)
Authors: Oren Etzioni, Michael J. Cafarella, Doug Downey, Stanley Kok, Ana-Maria Popescu, Tal Shaked, Stephen Soderland, Daniel S. Weld, Alexander Yates
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Manually querying search engines in order to accumulate a large bodyof factual information is a tedious, error-prone process of piecemealsearch. Search engines retrieve and rank potentially relevantdocuments for human perusal, but do not extract facts, assessconfidence, or fuse information from multiple documents. This paperintroduces KnowItAll, a system that aims to automate the tedious process ofextracting large collections of facts from the web in an autonomous,domain-independent, and scalable manner.The paper describes preliminary experiments in which an instance of KnowItAll, running for four days on a single machine, was able to automatically extract 54,753 facts. KnowItAll associates a probability with each fact enabling it to trade off precision and recall. The paper analyzes KnowItAll's architecture and reports on lessons learned for the design of large-scale information extraction systems.
An xpath-based discourse analysis module for spoken dialogue systems
Authors: Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio, Charles Lewis
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper describes an XPath-based discourse analysis module for Spoken Dialogue Systems that allows the dialogue author to easily manipulate and query both the user input's semantic representation and the dialogue context using a simple and compact formalism. We show that, in managing the human-machine interaction, the discourse context and the dialogue history are effectively represented as Document Object Model (DOM) structures. DOM defines interfaces that dialogue scripts can use to dynamically access and update the content, the structure and the style of the documents. In general, this approach applies also to richer multimedia and multimodal interactions where the interpretation of the user input depends on a combination of input modalitie.
Dynamic assembly of learning objects
Authors: Robert G. Farrell, Soyini D. Liburd, John C. Thomas
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper describes one solution to the problem of how to select sequence, and link Web resources into a coherent, focused organization for instruction that addresses a user's immediate and focused learning need. A system is described that automatically generates individualized learning paths from a repository of XML Web resources. Each Web resource has an XML Learning Object Metadata (LOM) description consisting of General, Educational, and Classification metadata. Dynamic assembly of these learning objects is based on the relative match of the learning object content and metadata to the learner's needs, preferences, context, and constraints. Learning objects are connected into coherent paths based on their LOM topic classifications and the proximity of these topics in a Resource Description Framework (RDF) graph. An instructional sequencing policy specifies how to arrange the objects on the path into a particular learning sequence. The system has been deployed and evaluated within a corporate setting.
ResEval: a web-based evaluation system for internal medicine house staff
Authors: Henry J. Feldman, Marc M. Triola
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The evaluation and assessment of physicians-in-training (house staff) is a complex task. Residency training programs are under increasing pressure [1] to provide accurate and comprehensive evaluations of performance of resident physicians [2,3]. For many years, the Internal Medicine training program at NYU School of Medicine used a single standardized paper form for all evaluation scenarios. This strategy was inadequate as physicians train in multiple diverse settings evaluation of physicians in the intensive care unit is quite different from those in the general clinics. The paper system resulted in poor compliance by house staff and faculty in the completion of evaluations. In addition, the data being collected from the paper forms was of poor quality due to the non-specific nature of the questions. A committee was formed in 2001, which created a new strategy for evaluating the core competencies of house staff. Given the ubiquity of web accessible computers in the clinical and non-clinical areas of hospitals and the flexibility a computerized system would provide, a web-based evaluation system was designed and implemented. This system allows for on-the-spot evaluations tailored to the evaluator, evaluatee and the venue of the evaluation. During the 2002 residency year, data was collected on satisfaction and use of the system and compared with the previous paper evaluation.
Event synchronization for interactive cyberdrama generation on the web: a distributed approach
Authors: Stefano Ferretti, Marco Roccetti
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The digital generation of a story in which users have influence over the narrative is emerging as an exciting example of computer-based interactive entertainment. Interactive storytelling has existed in non digital versions for thousand of years, but with the advent of the Web the demand for enabling distributed cyberdrama generation is becoming increasingly common. To govern the complexity stemming from the distributed generation of complex plots, we have devised an event synchronization service that may be exploited to support the distribution of interactive storytelling activities over the Web. The main novelty of our approach is that the semantics of the cyberdrama is exploited to discard obsolete events. This brings to the positive result of speeding up the activity of drama generation, thus enabling an augmented interactivity among dispersed players.
Exploiting conceptual modeling for web application quality evaluation
Authors: Piero Fraternali, Pier Luca Lanzi, Maristella Matera, Andrea Maurino
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper presents an approach and a toolset for exploiting the benefits of conceptual modeling in the quality evaluation tasks that take place both before the deployment and during the operational life of a Web application. The full version of the paper is available as a technical report at the address: http://www.elet.polimi.it/upload/fraterna/FLMM2004.pdf.
Analysis of interacting BPEL web services
Authors: Xiang Fu, Tevfik Bultan, Jianwen Su
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper presents a set of tools and techniques for analyzing interactions of composite web services which are specified in BPEL and communicate through asynchronous XML messages. We model the interactions of composite web services as conversations, the global sequence of messages exchanged by the web services. As opposed to earlier work, our tool-set handles rich data manipulation via XPath expressions. This allows us to verify designs at a more detailed level and check properties about message content. We present a framework where BPEL specifications of web services are translated to an intermediate representation, followed by the translation of the intermediate representation to a verification language. As an intermediate representation we use guarded automata augmented with unbounded queues for incoming messages, where the guards are expressed as XPath expressions. As the target verification language we use Promela, input language of the model checker SPIN. Since SPIN model checker is a finite-state verification tool we can only achieve partial verification by fixing the sizes of the input queues in the translation. We propose the concept of synchronizability to address this problem. We show that if a composite web service is synchronizable, then its conversation set remains same when asynchronous communication is replaced with synchronous communication. We give a set of sufficient conditions that guarantee synchronizability and that can be checked statically. Based on our synchronizability results, we show that a large class of composite web services with unbounded input queues can be completely verified using a finite state model checker such as SPIN.
C3W: clipping, connecting and cloning for the web
Authors: Jun Fujima, Aran Lunzer, Kasper Hornbæk, Yuzuru Tanaka
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Many of today's Web applications support just simple trial-and error retrievals: supply one set of parameters, obtain one set of results. For a user who wants to examine a number of alternative retrievals, this form of interaction is inconvenient and frustrating. It can be hard work to keep finding and adjusting the parameter specification widgets buried in a Web page, and to remember or record each result set. Moreover, when using diverse Web applicationsin combination - transferring result data from one into the parameters for another - the lack of an easy way to automate that transfer merely increases the frustration. Our solution is to integrate techniques for each of three key activities: clipping elements from Web pages to wrap an application; connecting wrapped applications using spreadsheet-like formulas; and cloning the interfaceelements so that several sets of parameters and results may behandled in parallel. We describe a prototype that implements this solution, showing how it enables rapid and flexible exploration ofthe resources accessible through user-chosen combinations of Web applications. Our aim in this work is to contribute to research on making optimal use of the wealth of information on the Web, by providing interaction techniques that address very practical needs.
CC-Buddy: an adaptive framework for maintaining cache coherency using peers
Authors: Song Gao, Wee Siong Ng, Weining Qian, Aoying Zhou
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

In this paper, we propose a framework called CC-Buddy, for maintaining dynamic data coherency in peer-to-peer environment. Working on the basis of peer heterogeneity in data coherency requirement, peers in CC-Buddy cooperate with each other to disseminate the updates by pushing. Simulation results show that our solution not only improves the fidelity in data, but also reduces the workload of servers, therefore achieves high-scalability.
Next generation web technologies in content management
Authors: Norberto Fernández García, Luis Sánchez Fernández, Jesús Villamor-Lugo
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The development of information and communication technologies and the expansion of the Internet means that, nowadays, there arehuge amounts of information available via these emergent media. A number of content management systems have appeared which aim to support the management of these large amounts of content. Most of these systems do not support collaboration among several, distributed sources of managed content. In this paper we present a proposal for an architecture, Infoflex, for the efficient and flexible management of distributed content using Next Generation Web Technologies: Web Services and Semantic Web facilities.
Converting UML to OWL ontologies
Authors: Dragan Gasevic, Dragan Djuric, Vladan Devedzic, Violeta Damjanovic
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper presents automatic generation of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) from an UML model. The solution is based on an MDA-defined architecture for ontology development and the Ontology UML Profile (OUP). A conversion, that we present here, transforms an ontology from its OUP definition (i.e. XML Metadata Interchange - XMI) into OWL description. Accordingly, we illustrate how an OUP-developed ontology can be shared with ontological engineering tools (i.e. Protégé).
Surfing the web by site
Authors: David Gibson
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

We provide a system for surfing the web at a high level of abstraction, which is an analogy of the web browser, but which displays entire sites at a time. It allows a principled investigation of what is present, based on an overview of all available information. We show a site's relation to other sites, the broad nature of the information contained and how it is structured, and how it has changed over time. Our current system maintains a continuously updated archive of 40 million sites representing 1.9 billion web pages, and enables real-time navigation through the sea of web sites.