OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Web service interfaces
Authors: Dirk Beyer, Arindam Chakrabarti, Thomas A. Henzinger
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

We present a language for specifying web service interfaces. A web service interface puts three kinds of constraints on the users of the service. First, the interface specifies the methods that can be called by a client, together with types of input and output parameters; these are called signature constraints. Second, the interface may specify propositional constraints on method calls and output values that may occur in a web service conversation; these are called consistency constraints. Third, the interface may specify temporal constraints on the ordering of method calls; these are called protocol constraints. The interfaces can be used to check, first, if two or more web services are compatible, and second, if a web service A can be safely substituted for a web service B. The algorithm for compatibility checking verifies that two or more interfaces fulfill each others' constraints. The algorithm for substitutivity checking verifies that service A demands fewer and fulfills more constraints than service B.
News in the age of the web
Authors: Krishna Bharat
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

One of the most exciting and successful examples of the Web impacting society is online news. The history of the news industry from print to the online medium is an interesting journey. Broadcast news transformed society by making news available instantly rather than once a day. While more channels became available, barriers to entry remained high and mainstream opinions continued to dominate. News on the net has brought in a number of valuable transformations, allowing news to be made (potentially) more accessible, diverse, democratic, personalized and interactive than before. Blogging has now made "citizen reporting" possible. As with any disruptive technology online news has both positive and negative implications, such as the threat of disinformation. Computer assisted news is a fun area of research that draws upon prior work in information retrieval, data mining and user interfaces. Given the volume of online news being generated today, the ability to find news and related facts quickly and with high relevance affects both readers and journalists. The talk will address the social implications as well as the technical challenges in the dissemination of online news, with a focus on Google News. Google News is an automated service that makes over 4,500 online, English sources searchable and browseable in real time, with an emphasis on breadth of coverage.
WAND: a meta-data maintenance system over the internet
Authors: Anubhav Bhatia, Saikat Mukherjee, Saugat Mitra, Srinath Srinivasa
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

WAND is a meta-data management system that provides a file-system tree for users of an internet based P2P network. The tree is robust and retains its structure even when nodes (peers) enter and leave the network. The robustness is based on a concept of virtual folders that are automatically created to retain paths to lower level folders whenever a node hosting a higher-level folder moves away. Other contributions of the WAND system include its novel approach towards managing root directory information and handling network partitions.
Ensuring required failure atomicity of composite Web services
Authors: Sami Bhiri, Olivier Perrin, Claude Godart
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

The recent evolution of Internet, driven by the Web services technology, is extending the role of the Web from a support of information interaction to a middleware for B2B interactions. Indeed, the Web services technology allows enterprises to outsource parts of their business processes using Web services. And it also provides the opportunity to dynamically o#er new value-added services through the composition of pre-existing Web services.
A publish and subscribe collaboration architecture for web-based information
Authors: M. Brian Blake, David H. Fado, Gregory A. Mack
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

Markup languages, representations, schemas, and tools have significantly increased the ability for organizations to share their information. Languages, such as the Extensible Markup Language (XML), provide a vehicle for organizations to represent information in a common, machine-interpretable format. Although these approaches facilitate the collaboration and integration of inter-organizational information, the reality is that the schema representations behind these languages are reasonably difficult to learn, and automated schema integration (without semantics or ontology mappings) is currently an open problem. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and service-oriented infrastructure to facilitate organizational collaboration that combines the push features of the publish/subscribe protocol with storage of distributed registry capabilities.
AVATAR: an approach based on semantic reasoning to recommend personalized TV programs
Authors: Yolanda Blanco-Fernández, José Juan Pazos-Arias, Alberto Gil-Solla, Manuel Ramos Cabrer, Ana Fernández Vilas, Rebeca P. Díaz Redondo, Martín López Nores, Ana Belén Barragáns-Martínez
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

In this paper a TV recommender system called AVATAR (AdVAnce Telematic search of Audiovisual contents by semantic Reasoning) is presented. This tool uses the experience gained in the field of the Semantic Web to personalize the TV programs shown to the end users. The main contribution of our system is a process of semantic reasoning carried out on the descriptions of the TV contents ---provided by means of metainformation--- and on the viewer preferences --- contained in personal profiles. Such process allows to diversify the offered suggestions maintaining the personalization, given that the aim is to find contents appealing for the users, which are related semantically to their programs of interest.Here the framework proposed for this reasoning is introduced, by including (i) the OWL ontology chosen to represent the knowledge of our application domain, (ii) the organization of the user profiles, (iii) the query language LIKO, which is intended to browse the ontology and (iv) the semantic relations inferred from the system knowledge base.
TotalRank: ranking without damping
Authors: Paolo Boldi
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

PageRank is defined as the stationary state of a Markov chain obtained by perturbing the transition matrix of a web graph with a damping factor α that spreads part of the rank. The choice of α is eminently empirical, but most applications use α = 0.85; nonetheless, the selection of α is critical, and some believe that link farms may use this choice adversarially. Recent results [1] prove that the PageRank of a page is a rational function of α, and that this function can be approximated quite efficiently: this fact can be used to define a new form of ranking, TotalRank, that averages PageRanks over all possible α's. We show how this rank can be computed efficiently, and provide some preliminary experimental results on its quality and comparisons with PageRank.
On optimal service selection
Authors: Piero A. Bonatti, Paola Festa
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

While many works have been devoted to service matchmaking and modeling nonfunctional properties, the problem of matching service requests to offers in an optimal way has not yet been extensively studied. In this paper we formalize three kinds of optimal service selection problems, based on different criteria. Then we study their complexity and implement solutions. We prove that one-time costs make the optimal selection problem computationally hard; in the absence of these costs the problem can be solved in polynomial time. We designed and implemented both exact and heuristic (suboptimal) algorithms for the hard case, and carried out a preliminary experimental evaluation with interesting results.
XSLT by example
Authors: Daniele Braga, Alessandro Campi, Roberto Cappa, Damiano Salvi
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

XQBE (XQuery By Example, [1]), a visual dialect of XQuery, uses hierarchical structures to express transformations between XML documents. XSLT, the standard transformation language for XML, is increasingly popular among programmers and Web developers for separating the application and presentation layers of Web applications. However, its syntax and its rule-based execution paradigm are rather intricate, and the number of XSLT experts is limited; the availability of easier "dialects" could be extremely valuable and may contribute to the adoption of XML for developing data-centered Web applications and services. With this motivation in mind, we adapted XQBE to serve as a visual interface for expressing XML-to-XML transformations and generate the XSLT code that performs such transformations.
Exception handling in workflow-driven Web applications
Authors: Marco Brambilla, Stefano Ceri, Sara Comai, Christina Tziviskou
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

As the Web becomes a platform for implementing B2B applications, the need arises of Web conceptual models for describing Web oriented workflow applications implementing business processes. In this context, new problems about process correctness arise, due to the loose control of Web applications upon the behavior of their Web clients. Indeed, incoherent user's behavior can lead to inconsistent processes.This paper presents a high level approach to the management of exceptions that occur during the execution of processes on the Web. We present a classification of exceptions that can be raised inside workflow-driven Web applications, and recovery policies to retrieve coherent status and data after an exception. We devise these concepts at high level and then we exploit them using a Web modeling language (WebML) that in turn provides development facilities like automatic code generation, validation of hypertext models, and so on. An industrial implementation experience is briefly presented too.
The case for technology for developing regions
Authors: Eric A. Brewer
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

Moore's Law and the wave of technologies it enabled have led to tremendous improvements in productivity and the quality of life in the industrialized world. Yet, technology has had almost no effect on the four billion people that make less US$2000/day. In this talk I argue that the decreasing costs of computing and wireless networking make this the right time to spread the benefits of technology, and that the biggest missing piece is a lack of focus on the problems that matter, including health, education, and government. After covering some example applications that have shown very high impact, I take an early look at the research agenda for developing regions. Finally, I examine some of the pragmatic issues required to make progress on these very challenging problems. My goal is to convince high-tech researchers that technology for developing regions is an important and viable research topic.
Current trends in the integration of searching and browsing
Authors: Andrei Z. Broder, Yoëlle S. Maarek, Krishna Bharat, Susan T. Dumais, Steve Papa, Jan O. Pedersen, Prabhakar Raghavan
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

Searching and browsing are the two basic information discovery paradigms, since the early days of the Web. After more than ten years down the road, three schools seem to have emerged: (1) The search-centric school argues that guided navigation is superfluous since free form search has become so good and the search UI so common, that users can satisfy all their needs via simple queries (2) The taxonomy navigation school claims that users have difficulties expressing informational needs and (3) The meta-data centric school advocates the use of meta-data for narrowing large sets of results, and is successful in e-commerce where it is known as "multi faceted search". This panel brings together experts and advocates for all three schools, who will discuss these approaches and share their experiences in the field. We will ask the audience to challenge our experts with real information architecture problems.
eBag: a ubiquitous Web infrastructure for nomadic learning
Authors: Christina Brodersen, Bent Guldbjerg Christensen, Kaj Grønbæk, Christian Dindler, Balasuthas Sundararajah
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

This paper describes the eBag infrastructure, which is a generic infrastructure inspired from work with school children who could benefit from a electronic schoolbag for collaborative handling of their digital material. The eBag infrastructure is utilizing the Context-aware HyCon framework and collaborative web services based on WebDAV. A ubiquitous login and logout mechanism has been built based on BlueTooth sensor networks. The eBag infrastructure has been tried out in field tests with school kids. In this paper we discuss experiences and design issues for ubiquitous Web integration in interactive school environments with multiple interactive whiteboards and workstations. This includes proposals for specialized and adaptive XLink structures for organizing school materials as well as issues in login/logout based on proximity of different display surfaces.
OWL DL vs. OWL flight: conceptual modeling and reasoning for the semantic Web
Authors: Jos de Bruijn, Rubén Lara, Axel Polleres, Dieter Fensel
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

The Semantic Web languages RDFS and OWL have been around for some time now. However, the presence of these languages has not brought the breakthrough of the Semantic Web the creators of the languages had hoped for. OWL has a number of problems in the area of interoperability and usability in the context of many practical application scenarios which impede the connection to the Software Engineering and Database communities. In this paper we present OWL Flight, which is loosely based on OWL, but the semantics is grounded in Logic Programming rather than Description Logics, and it borrows the constraint-based modeling style common in databases. This results in different types of modeling primitives and enforces a different style of ontology modeling. We analyze the modeling paradigms of OWL DL and OWL Flight, as well as reasoning tasks supported by both languages. We argue that different applications on the Semantic Web require different styles of modeling and thus both types of languages are required for the Semantic Web.
Hardening Web browsers against man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks
Authors: Xia Brustoloni, José Carlos Brustoloni
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

Existing Web browsers handle security errors in a manner that often confuses users. In particular, when a user visits a secure site whose certificate the browser cannot verify, the browser typically allows the user to view and install the certificate and connect to the site despite the verification failure. However, few users understand the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks and the principles behind certificate-based authentication. We propose context-sensitive certificate verification (CSCV), whereby the browser interrogates the user about the context in which a certificate verification error occurs. Considering the context, the browser then guides the user in handling and possibly overcoming the security error. We also propose specific password warnings (SPW) when users are about to send passwords in a form vulnerable to eavesdropping. We performed user studies to evaluate CSCV and SPW. Our results suggest that CSCV and SPW can greatly improve Web browsing security and are easy to use even without training. Moreover, CSCV had greater impact than did staged security training.
Processing link structures and linkbases on the web
Authors: François Bry, Michael Eckert
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

Hyperlinks are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, highly responsible for its success. XLink improves on HTML's linking capabilities in several ways. In particular, links after XLink can be "out-of-line" (i.e., not defined at a link source) and collected in (possibly several) linkbases, which considerably ease building complex link structures.Modeling of link structures and processing of linkbases under the Web's "open world linking" are aspects neglected by XLink. Adding a notion of "interface" to XLink, as suggested in this work, considerably improves modeling of link structures. When a link structure is traversed, the relevant linkbase(s) might become ambiguous. We suggest three linkbase management modes governing the binding of a linkbase to a document to resolve this ambiguity.
CaTTS: calendar types and constraints for Web applications
Authors: François Bry, Frank-André Rieß, Stephanie Spranger
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

Data referring to cultural calendars such as the widespread Gregorian dates but also dates after the Chinese, Hebrew, or Islamic calendars as well as data referring to professional calendars like fiscal years or teaching terms are omnipresent on the Web. Formalisms such as XML Schema have acknowledged this by offering a rather extensive set of Gregorian dates and times as basic data types. This article introduces into CaTTS, the <u>C</u>alendar <u>a</u>nd <u>T</u>ime <u>T</u>ype <u>S</u>ystem. CaTTS goes far beyond predefined date and time types after the Gregorian calendar as supported by XML Schema. CaTTS first gives rise to declaratively specify more or less complex cultural or professional calendars including specificities such as leap seconds, leap years, and time zones. CaTTS further offers a tool for the static type checking (of data typed after calendar(s) defined in CaTTS). CaTTS finally offers a language for declaratively expressing and a solver for efficiently solving temporal constraints (referring to calendar(s) expressed in CaTTS). CaTTS complements data modeling and reasoning methods designed for generic Semantic Web applications such as RDF or OWL with methods specific to the particular application domain of calendars and time.
Persistence in web based collaborations
Authors: Nick Bryan-Kinns, Patrick G. T. Healey, J. Lee
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

We outline work on web based support for group creativity. We focus on a study of the effect persistence of participants' musical contributions has on their mutual engagement.
Car racing through the streets of the web: a high-speed 3D game over a fast synchronization service
Authors: Stefano Cacciaguerra, Stefano Ferretti, Marco Roccetti, Matteo Roffilli
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

The growth of the Internet brought a new age for game developers. New exciting, highly interactive Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) may be now deployed on the Web, thanks to new scalable distributed solutions and amazing 3D graphics systems plugged directly into standard browsers. Along this line, taking advantage of a mirrored game server architecture, we developed a 3D car racing multiplayer game for use over the Web, freely inspired to Armagetron. Game servers are kept synchronized through the use of a fast synchronization scheme which is able to drop obsolete game events to uphold the playability degree while preserving the game state consistency. Preliminary results confirm that smart 3D spaces may be created over the Web where the magic of gaming is reproduced for the pleasure of a huge number of players. This result may be obtained only by converging highly accurate event synchronization technologies with 3D scene graph based rendering software.
A search engine for natural language applications
Authors: Michael J. Cafarella, Oren Etzioni
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

Many modern natural language-processing applications utilize search engines to locate large numbers of Web documents or to compute statistics over the Web corpus. Yet Web search engines are designed and optimized for simple human queries---they are not well suited to support such applications. As a result, these applications are forced to issue millions of successive queries resulting in unnecessary search engine load and in slow applications with limited scalability.In response, this paper introduces the Bindings Engine (BE), which supports queries containing typed variables and string-processing functions. For example, in response to the query "powerful ‹noun›" BE will return all the nouns in its index that immediately follow the word "powerful", sorted by frequency. In response to the query "Cities such as ProperNoun(Head(‹NounPhrase›))", BE will return a list of proper nouns likely to be city names.BE's novel neighborhood index enables it to do so with O(k) random disk seeks and O(k) serial disk reads, where k is the number of non-variable terms in its query. As a result, BE can yield several orders of magnitude speedup for large-scale language-processing applications. The main cost is a modest increase in space to store the index. We report on experiments validating these claims, and analyze how BE's space-time tradeoff scales with the size of its index and the number of variable types. Finally, we describe how a BE-based application extracts thousands of facts from the Web at interactive speeds in response to simple user queries.
Migrating web application sessions in mobile computing
Authors: Gerardo Canfora, Giuseppe Di Santo, Gabriele Venturi, Eugenio Zimeo, Maria Vittoria Zito
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

The capability to change user agent while working is starting to appear in state of the art mobile computing due to the proliferation of different kinds of devices, ranging from personal wireless devices to desktop computers, and to the consequent necessity of migrating working sessions from a device to a more apt one. Research results related to the hand-off at low level are not sufficient to solve the problem at application level. The paper presents a scheme for session hand-off in Web applications which, by exploiting a proxybased architecture, is able to work without interventions on existing code.
Automating metadata generation: the simple indexing interface
Authors: Kris Cardinaels, Michael Meire, Erik Duval
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

In this paper, we focus on the development of a framework for automatic metadata generation. The first step towards this framework is the definition of an Application Programmer Interface (API), which we call the Simple Indexing Interface (SII). The second step is the definition of a framework for implementation of the SII. Both steps are presented in some detail in this paper. We also report on empirical evaluation of the metadata that the SII and supporting framework generated in a real-life context.
Using XForms to simplify Web programming
Authors: Richard Cardone, Danny Soroker, Alpana Tiwari
Venue: WWW
Year: 2005

The difficulty of developing and deploying commercial web applications increases as the number of technologies they use increases and as the interactions between these technologies become more complex. This paper describes a way to avoid this increasing complexity by re-examining the basic requirements of web applications. Our approach is to first separate client concerns from server concerns, and then to reduce the interaction between client and server to its most elemental: parameter passing. We define a simplified programming model for form-based web applications and we use XForms and a subset of J2EE as enabling technologies. We describe our implementation of an MVC-based application builder for this model, which automatically generates the code needed to marshal input and output data between clients and servers. This marshalling uses type checking and other forms of validation on both clients and servers. We also show how our programming model and application builder support the customization of web applications for different execution targets, including, for example, different client devices.