OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards context-aware adaptable web services
Authors: Markus Keidl, Alfons Kemper
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

In this paper, we present a context framework that facilitates the development and deployment of context-aware adaptable Web services. Web services are provided with context information about clients that may be utilized to provide a personalized behavior. Context is extensible with new types of information at any time without any changes to the underlying infrastructure. Context processing is done by Web services, context plugins, or context services. Context plugins and context services pre- and post-process Web service messages based on the available contextinformation. Both are essential for automatic context processing and automatic adaption of Web services to new context types without the necessity to adjust the Web services themselves. We implemented the context framework within the ServiceGlobe system, our open and distributed Web service platform.
Ontalk: ontology-based personal document management system
Authors: Hak Lae Kim, Hong-Gee Kim, Kyungmo Park
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

In this paper, we present our development of a document management and retrieval tool, which is named Ontalk. Our system provides a semi-automatic metadata generator and an ontology-based search engine for electronic documents. Ontalk can create or import various ontologies in RDFS or OWL for describing the metadata. Our system that is built upon. NET technology is easily communicated with or flexibly plugged into many different programs.
A survey of public web services
Authors: Su Myeon Kim, Marcel-Catalin Rosu
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper introduces a methodology to provide the first characterization of public Web Services in terms of their evolution, location, complexity, message size, and response time.
Metadata co-development: a process resulting in metadata about technical assistance to educators
Authors: Michael B. Knapp, Sara Dexter, Robert McLaughlin
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Metadata development can be challenging because the vocabulary should be flexible and extensible, widely applicable, interoperable, and both machine and human readable. We describe how we engaged members of organizations in the field of technical assistance to educators in a process of metadata development, and the challenges we faced. The result was a an ontology for the communities of practice that is interoperable and can evolve it was then used to catalogue resources for dissemination via the Semantic Web.
VersaTutor: architecture for a constraint-based intelligent tutor generator
Authors: Viswanathan Kodaganallur, Rob R. Weitz, David Rosenthal
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Intelligent tutoring systems have demonstrated their utility in a variety of domains. However, they are notoriously resource intensive to build. We report here on the development of a software tool that enables non-software developers to declaratively create intelligent tutors. This intelligent tutor generator creates applications with rich user interaction and powerful theory-based remediation capabilities. It utilizes the Constraint Based Tutoring paradigm and is generic enough to create tutors in several domains. It is easily extensible through plug-ins.
An efficient and systematic method to generate xslt stylesheets for different wireless pervasive devices
Authors: Thomas Kwok, Thao Nguyen, Linh Lam, Kakan Roy
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

It is a tedious and cumbersome process to update directly a WML document for the wireless Web because its content composes of both data and presentation. Thus, XML is used to handle the data while its XSLT stylesheet is used to extract and format the data for presentation. However, different stylesheets have to be used for different devices. An efficient and systematic method based on the idea of generating two separate sets of rules corresponding to content extracting and formatting parts of the stylesheet is described in this paper. The data extraction part is constructed from content rules while the formatting part is constructed from presentation rules. They are then combined together to form a stylesheet by an XSLT generator. A large number of stylesheets corresponding to different devices and a number of standard DTD documents or XML schemas can be generated in this way and stored in the pool during application setup stage. They will be individually selected from the pool by an XSLT engine to produce different WML documents for different devices during run time.
Rank aggregation for meta-search engines
Authors: Ka Wai Lam, Chi Ho Leung
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

In this paper, we present an algorithm for merging results from different data sources in meta-search engine. We further extend one that has developed for ranking players of a round-robin tournament to a more general one when the ranking input is given from multiple sources. The problem in meta-search engine can be represented by a complete directed graph which can be used by the Majority Spanning Tree (MST) algorithm. It is useful especially when the system must integrate and merge the query results that are returned from various search engines in a consistent manner.
Updating pagerank with iterative aggregation
Authors: Amy Nicole Langville, Carl Dean Meyer
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

We present an algorithm for updating the PageRank vector [1]. Due to the scale of the web, Google only updates its famous PageRank vector on a monthly basis. However, the Web changes much more frequently. Drastically speeding the PageRank computation can lead to fresher, more accurate rankings of the webpages retrieved by search engines. It can also make the goal of real-time personalized rankings within reach. On two small subsets of the web, our algorithm updates PageRank using just 25% and 14%, respectively, of the time required by the original PageRank algorithm. Our algorithm uses iterative aggregation techniques [7, 8] to focus on the slow-converging states of the Markov chain. The most exciting feature of this algorithm is that it can be joined with other PageRank acceleration methods, such as the dangling node lumpability algorithm [6], quadratic extrapolation [4], and adaptive PageRank [3], to realize even greater speedups (potentially a factor of 60 or more speedup when all algorithms are combined). every few weeks. Our solution harnesses the power of iterative aggregation principles for Markov chains to allow for much more frequent updates to the valuable ranking vectors.
Compositional knowledge management for medical services on semantic web
Authors: Yugyung Lee, Chintan Patel, Soon Ae Chun, James Geller
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The vision of the Semantic Web is to reduce manual discovery and usage of Web resources (documents and services) and to allow software agents to automatically identify these Web resources, integrate them and execute them for achieving the intended goals of the user. Such a composed Web service may be represented as a workflow, called service flow. Current Web service standards are not sufficient for automatic composition. This paper presents different types of compositional knowledge required for Web service discovery and composition. As a proof of concept, we have implemented our framework in a cardiovascular domain which requires advanced service discovery and composition across heterogeneous platforms of multiple organizations.
Challenges and practices in deploying web acceleration solutions for distributed enterprise systems
Authors: Wen-Syan Li, Wang-Pin Hsiung, Oliver Po, Koji Hino, K. Selçuk Candan, Divyakant Agrawal
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

For most Web-based applications, contents are created dynamically based on the current state of a business, such as product prices and inventory, stored in database systems. These applications demand personalized content and track user behavior while maintaining application integrity. Many of such practices are not compatible with Web acceleration solutions. Consequently, although many web acceleration solutions have shown promising performance improvement and scalability, architecting and engineering distributed enterprise Web applications to utilize available content delivery networks remains a challenge. In this paper, we examine the challenge to accelerate J2EE-based enterprise web applications. We list obstacles and recommend some practices to transform typical database-driven J2EE applications to cache friendly Web applications where Web acceleration solutions can be applied. Furthermore, such transformation should be done without modification to the underlying application business logic and without sacrificing functions that are essential to e-commerce. We take the J2EE reference software, the Java PetStore, as a case study. By using the proposed guideline, we are able to cache more than 90% of the content in the PetStore and scale up the Web site more than 20 times.
XVM: a bridge between xml data and its behavior
Authors: Quanzhong Li, Michelle Y. Kim, Edward So, Steve Wood
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

XML has become one of the core technologies for contemporary business applications, especially web-based applications. To facilitate processing of diverse XML data, we propose an extensible, integrated XML processing architecture, the XML Virtual Machine (XVM), which connects XML data with their behaviors. At the same time, the XVM is also a framework for developing and deploying XML-based applications. Using component-based techniques, the XVM supports arbitrary granularity and provides a high degree of modularity and reusability. XVM components are dynamically loaded and composed during XML data processing. Using the XVM, both client-side and server-side XML applications can be developed and deployed in an integrated way. We also present an XML application container built on top of the XVM along with several sample applications to demonstrate the applicability of the XVM framework.
Dealing with different distributions in learning from
Authors: Xiaoli Li, Bing Liu
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

In the problem of learning with positive and unlabeled examples, existing research all assumes that positive examples P and the hidden positive examples in the unlabeled set U are generated from the same distribution. This assumption may be violated in practice. In such cases, existing methods perform poorly. This paper proposes a novel technique A-EM to deal with the problem. Experimental results with product page classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
On mining webclick streams for path traversal patterns
Authors: Hua-Fu Li, Suh-Yin Lee, Man-Kwan Shan
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Mining user access patterns from a continuous stream of Web-clicks presents new challenges over traditional Web usage mining in a large static Web-click database. Modeling user access patterns as maximal forward references, we present a single-pass algorithm StreamPath for online discovering frequent path traversal patterns from an extended prefix tree-based data structure which stores the compressed and essential information about user's moving histories in the stream. Theoretical analysis and performance evaluation show that the space requirement of StreamPath is limited to a logarithmic boundary, and the execution time, compared with previous multiple-pass algorithms [2], is fast.
QoS computation and policing in dynamic web service selection
Authors: Yutu Liu, Anne H. H. Ngu, Liangzhao Zeng
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The emerging Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm promises to enable businesses and organizations to collaborate in an unprecedented way by means of standard web services. To support rapid and dynamic composition of services in this paradigm, web services that meet requesters' functional requirements must be able to be located and bounded dynamically from a large and constantly changing number of service providers based on their Quality of Service (QoS). In order to enable quality-driven web service selection, we need an open, fair, dynamic and secure framework to evaluate the QoS of a vast number of web services. The fair computation and enforcing of QoS of web services should have minimal overhead but yet able to achieve sufficient trust by both service requesters and providers. In this paper, we presented our open, fair and dynamic QoS computation model for web services selection through implementation of and experimentation with a QoS registry in a hypothetical phone service provisioning market place application.
Affinity rank: a new scheme for efficient web search
Authors: Yi Liu, Benyu Zhang, Zheng Chen, Michael R. Lyu, Wei-Ying Ma
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Maximizing only the relevance between queries and documents will not satisfy users if they want the top search results to present a wide coverage of topics by a few representative documents. In this paper, we propose two new metrics to evaluate the performance of information retrieval: diversity, which measures the topic coverage of a group of documents, and information richness, which measures the amount of information contained in a document. Then we present a novel ranking scheme, Affinity Rank, which utilizes these two metrics to improve search results. We demonstrate how Affinity Rank works by a toy data set, and verify our method by experiments on real-world data sets.
The powerrank web link analysis algorithm
Authors: Yizhou Lu, Benyu Zhang, Wensi Xi, Zheng Chen, Yi Liu, Michael R. Lyu, Wei-Ying Ma
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The web graph follows the power law distribution and has a hierarchy structure. But neither the PageRank algorithm nor any of its improvements leverage these attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel link analysis algorithm "the PowerRank algorithm", which makes use of the power law distribution attribute and the hierarchy structure of the web graph. The algorithm consists two parts. In the first part, special treatment is applied to the web pages with low "importance" score. In the second part, the global "importance" score for each web page is obtained by combining those scores together. Our experimental results show that: 1) The PowerRank algorithm computes 10%-30% faster than PageRank algorithm. 2) Top web pages in PowerRank algorithm remain similar to that of the PageRank algorithm.
Integrating learning objects into an open learning environment: evaluation of learning processes in an informatics learning lab
Authors: Johannes Magenheim, Olaf Scheel
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The Didactics of Informatics research group at the University of Paderborn is involved in efforts to design implement and evaluate a web-based learning laboratory for informatics (ILL). The ILL mainly serves the purpose of an open interactive learning environment for software engineering. The poster presentation shows the main components of an ILL and the types of media that are used. A didactical concept, learning strategies and the efforts to create self-organizing learning communities in the ILL are also topics of the poster. Finally, an evaluation concept will be presented including some basic results of empirical research which was done during a seminar held in the summer term 2003.
A quality model for multichannel adaptive information
Authors: Carlo Marchetti, Barbara Pernici, Pierluigi Plebani
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The ongoing diffusion of novel and mobile devices offers new ways to provide services across a growing set of network technologies. As a consequence, traditional information systems evolve to multichannel systems in which services are provided through different channels, being a channel the abstraction of a device and a network. This work proposes a quality model suitable for capturing and reasoning about quality aspects of multichannel information systems. In particular, the model enables a clear separation of modeling aspects of services, networks, and devices. Further, it embeds rules enabling the evaluation of end-to-end quality, which can be used to select services according to the actual quality perceived by users.
The role of standards in creating community
Authors: Kathi C. Martin
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Participation in the web of communities requires a common language, a common technological structure and development of content that is relevant and captivating. This paper reports on a project that both conserves a rich regional cultural heritage and has structured the content developed during this conservation to be fluidly shared with both the domain and the broader communities. It also examines the varied degrees of acceptance within these communities.
Visualising student tracking data to support instructors in web-based distance education
Authors: Riccardo Mazza, Vania Dimitrova
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper presents a novel approach of using web log data generated by course management systems (CMS) to help instructors become aware of what is happening in distance learning classes. Specifically, techniques from Information Visualization are used to graphically render complex, multidimensional student tracking data collected by CMS. A system, called CourseVis, illustrates the proposed approach. Graphical representations from the use of CourseVis to visualise data from a java on-line distance course ran with WebCT are presented. Findings from the evaluation of CourseVis are presented, and it is argued that CourseVis can help teachers become aware of some social, behavioural, and cognitive aspects related to distance learners. Using graphical representations of student tracking data, instructors can identify tendencies in their classes, or quickly discover individuals that need special attention.
Constraint SVG
Authors: Cameron L. McCormack, Kim Marriott, Bernd Meyer
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

We believe it is important for web graphic standards such as SVG to support user interaction and diagrams that can adapt their layout and appearance to their viewing context so as to take into account viewing device charateristics and the viewer's requirements. Previously we suggested that adding expression-based attributes to SVG and using one-way constraints to evaluate these dynamically would considerably improve SVG's support for adaptive layout and user interaction. We describe a minimal backward compatible extension to SVG 1.1, called Constraint SVG (CSVG), that provides such expression-based attributes and its implementation on top of Batik. CSVG also provides another significant extension to SVG 1.1: it allows the author to define new custom elements using XSLT.
Semantic email
Authors: Luke K. McDowell, Oren Etzioni, Alon Y. Halevy, Henry M. Levy
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper investigates how the vision of the Semantic Web can be carried overto the realm of email. We introduce a general notion of semantice mail, in which an email message consists of an RDF query or update coupled with corresponding explanatory text. Semantic email opens the door to a wide range of automated, email-mediated applications with formally guaranteed properties. In particular, this paper introduces a broad class of semantic email processes. For example consider the process of sending an email to a program committee asking who will attend the PC dinner automatically collecting the responses and tallying them up. We define bothlogical and decision-theoretic models where an email process ismodeled as a set of updates to a data set on which we specify goals via certain constraints or utilities. We then describe a set ofinference problems that arise while trying to satisfy these goals and analyze their computational tractability. In particular weshow that for the logical model it is possible to automatically infer which email responses are acceptable w.r.t. a set ofconstraints in polynomial time and for the decision-theoreticmodel it is possible to compute the optimal message-handling policy in polynomial time. Finally we discuss our publicly available implementation of semantic email and outline research challenges inthis realm.
Combining link and content analysis to estimate semantic similarity
Authors: Filippo Menczer
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Search engines use content and link information to crawl, index, retrieve, and rank Web pages. The correlations between similarity measures based on these cues and on semantic associations between pages therefore crucially affects the performance of any search tool. Here I begin to quantitatively analyze the relationship between content, link, and semantic similarity measures across a massive number of Web page pairs. Maps of semantic similarity across textual and link similarity highlight the potential and limitations of lexical and link analysis for relevance approximation, and provide us with a way to study whether and how text and link based measures should be combined.
Foundations for service ontologies: aligning OWL-S to dolce
Authors: Peter Mika, Daniel Oberle, Aldo Gangemi, Marta Sabou
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Clarity in semantics and a rich formalization of this semantics are important requirements for ontologies designed to be deployed in large-scale, open, distributed systems such as the envisioned Semantic Web This is especially important for the description of Web Services, which should enable complex tasks involving multiple agents. As one of the first initiatives of the Semantic Webcommunity for describing Web Services, OWL-S attracts a lot of interest even though it is still under development. We identify problematic aspects of OWL-S and suggest enhancements through alignment to a foundational ontology. Another contribution of ourwork is the Core Ontology of Services that tries to fill the epistemological gap between the foundational ontology and OWL-S. It can be reused to align other Web Service description languages as well. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our work byaligning OWL-S' standard example called CongoBuy.
Building a companion website in the semantic web
Authors: Timothy Miles-Board, Christopher Bailey, Wendy Hall, Les Carr
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

A problem facing many textbook authors (including one of the authors of this paper) is the inevitable delay between new advances in the subject area and their incorporation in a new (paper) edition of the textbook. This means that some textbooks are quickly considered out of date, particularly in active technological areas such as the Web, even though the ideas presented in the textbook are still valid and important to the community. This paper describes our approach to building a companion website for the textbook Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach. We use Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives to critically evaluate a number of authoring and presentation techniques used in existing companion websites, and adapt these techniques to create our own companion website using Semantic Web technologies in order to overcome the identified weaknesses. Finally, we discuss a potential model of future companion websites, in the context of an e-publishing, e-commerce Semantic Web services scenario.
Smartback: supporting users in back navigation
Authors: Natasa Milic-Frayling, Rachel Jones, Kerry Rodden, Gavin Smyth, Alan F. Blackwell, Ralph Sommerer
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper presents the design and user evaluation of SmartBack, a feature that complements the standard Back button by enabling users to jump directly to key pages in their navigation session, making common navigation activities more efficient. Defining key pages was informed by the findings of a user study that involved detailed monitoring of Web usage and analysis of Web browsing in terms of navigation trails. The pages accessible through SmartBack are determined automatically based on the structure of the user's navigation trails or page association with specific user's activities, such as search or browsing bookmarked sites. We discuss implementation decisions and present results of a usability study in which we deployed the SmartBack prototype and monitored usage for a month in both corporate and home settings. The results show that the feature brings qualitative improvement to the browsing experience of individuals who use it.