OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Personalized pocket directories for mobile devices
Authors: Doron Cohen, Michael Herscovici, Yael Petruschka, Yoëlle S. Maarek, Aya Soffer
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

In spite of the increase in the availability of mobile devices in the last few years, Web information is not yet as accessible from PDAs or WAP phones as it is from the desktop. In this paper, we propose a solution for supporting one of the most popular information discovery mechanisms, namely Web directory navigation, from mobile devices. Our proposed solution consists of caching enough information on the device itself in order to conduct most of the navigation actions locally (with subsecond response time) while intermittently communicating with the server to receive updates and additional data requested by the user. The cached information is captured in a "directory capsule". The directory capsule represents only the portion of the directory that is of interest to the user in a given context and is sufficiently rich and consistent to support the information needs of the user in disconnected mode. We define a novel subscription model specifically geared for Web directories and for the special needs of PDAs. This subscription model enables users to specify the parts of the directory that are of interest to them as well as the preferred granularity. We describe a mechanism for keeping the directory capsule in sync over time with the Web directory and user subscription requests. Finally, we present the Pocket Directory Browser for Palm powered computers that we have developed. The pocket directory can be used to define, view and manipulate the capsules that are stored on the Palm. We provide several usage examples of our system on the Open Directory Project, one of the largest and most popular Web directories.
Choosing reputable servents in a P2P network
Authors: Fabrizio Cornelli, Ernesto Damiani, Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati, Stefano Paraboschi, Pierangela Samarati
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Peer-to-peer information sharing environments are increasingly gaining acceptance on the Internet as they provide an infrastructure in which the desired information can be located and downloaded while preserving the anonymity of both requestors and providers. As recent experience with P2P environments such as Gnutella shows, anonymity opens the door to possible misuses and abuses by resource providers exploiting the network as a way to spread tampered with resources, including malicious programs, such as Trojan Horses and viruses.In this paper we propose an approach to P2P security where servents can keep track, and share with others, information about the reputation of their peers. Reputation sharing is based on a distributed polling algorithm by which resource requestors can assess the reliability of perspective providers before initiating the download. The approach nicely complements the existing P2P protocols and has a limited impact on current implementations. Furthermore, it keeps the current level of anonymity of requestors and providers, as well as that of the parties sharing their view on others' reputations.
Web page scoring systems for horizontal and vertical search
Authors: Michelangelo Diligenti, Marco Gori, Marco Maggini
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Page ranking is a fundamental step towards the construction of effective search engines for both generic (horizontal) and focused (vertical) search. Ranking schemes for horizontal search like the PageRank algorithm used by Google operate on the topology of the graph, regardless of the page content. On the other hand, the recent development of vertical portals (vortals) makes it useful to adopt scoring systems focussed on the topic and taking the page content into account.In this paper, we propose a general framework for Web Page Scoring Systems (WPSS) which incorporates and extends many of the relevant models proposed in the literature. Finally, experimental results are given to assess the features of the proposed scoring systems with special emphasis on vertical search.
A probabilistic approach to automated bidding in alternative auctions
Authors: Marlon Dumas, Lachlan Aldred, Guido Governatori, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Nick Russell
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

This paper presents an approach to develop bidding agents that participate in multiple alternative auctions, with the goal of obtaining an item at the lowest price. The approach consists of a prediction method and a planning algorithm. The prediction method exploits the history of past auctions in order to build probability functions capturing the belief that a bid of a given price may win a given auction. The planning algorithm computes the lowest price, such that by sequentially bidding in a subset of the relevant auctions, the agent can obtain the item at that price with an acceptable probability. The approach addresses the case where the auctions are for substitutable items with different values. Experimental results are reported, showing that the approach increases the payoff of their users and the welfare of the market.
Building voiceXML browsers with openVXI
Authors: Brian S. Eberman, Jerry Carter, Darren Meyer, David Goddeau
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The OpenVXI is a portable open source based toolkit that interprets the VoiceXML dialog markup language. It is designed to serve as a framework for system integrators and platform vendors who want to incorporate VoiceXML into their platform. A first version of the toolkit was released in the winter of 2001, with a second version released in September of 2001. A number of companies and individuals have adopted the toolkit for their platforms. In this paper we discuss the architecture of the toolkit, the architectural issues involved with implementing a framework for VoiceXML, performance results with the OpenVXI, and future directions for the toolkit.
A web-based resource migration protocol using WebDAV
Authors: Michael P. Evans, Steven Furnell
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The web's hyperlinks are notoriously brittle, and break whenever a resource migrates. One solution to this problem is a transparent resource migration mechanism, which separates a resource's location from its identity, and helps provide referential integrity. However, although several such mechanisms have been designed, they have not been widely adopted, due largely to a lack of compliance with current web standards. In addition, these mechanisms must be updated manually whenever a resource migrates, limiting their effectiveness for large web sites. Recently, however, new web protocols such as WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) have emerged, which extend the HTTP protocol and provide a new level of control over web resources. In this paper, we show how we have used these protocols in the design of a new Resource Migration Protocol (RMP), which enables transparent resource migration across standard web servers. The RMP works with a new resource migration mechanism we have developed called the Resource Locator Service (RLS), and is fully backwards compatible with the web's architecture, enabling all web servers and all web content to be involved in the migration process. We describe the protocol and the new RLS in full, together with a prototype implementation and demonstration applications that we have developed. The paper concludes by presenting performance data taken from the prototype that show how the RLS will scale well beyond the size of today's web.
A pragmatic application of the semantic web using SemTalk
Authors: Christian Fillies, Gay Wood-Albrecht, Frauke Weichhardt
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The is a new layer of the Internet that enables semantic representation of the contents of existing web pages. Using common ontologies, human users sketch out the most important facts in models that act as intelligent whiteboards. Once models are broadcasted to the Internet, new and intelligent search engines, "ambient" intelligent devices and agents would be able to exploit this knowledge network. [1].The main idea of SemTalk is to empower end users to contribute to the Semantic Web by offering an easy to use -based graphical editor to create RDF-like schema and workflows. Since the modeled data is found by Microsoft's SmartTags, users can benefit from these Semantic Webs as part of their daily work with other Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel or Outlook.SemTalk's graphically configurable meta model also extends the functionality of the Visio modeling tool because it makes it easy to configure Visio to different modeling worlds such as Business Engineering and CASE methodologies but also to these features can be applied to any other Visio drawings.Ontology Project: Department-wide information modeling at the Credit Suisse Bank. Main emphasis was on linguistic standardization of terms. Based on a common central glossary, local knowledge management teams were able to develop specialized models for their decentralized departments. As part of the knowledge management process local glossaries were continually carried over into a common shared model.Business Process Management Project: Distributed process modeling of the Bausparkasse Deutscher Ring, a German financial institution. Several groups of students from the Technical University FH Brandenburg explored how to develop and apply an industry-specific Semantic Web to Business Process Modeling.
Extracting query modifications from nonlinear SVMs
Authors: Gary William Flake, Eric J. Glover, Steve Lawrence, C. Lee Giles
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

When searching the WWW, users often desire results restricted to a particular document category. Ideally, a user would be able to filter results with a text classifier to minimize false positive results; however, current search engines allow only simple query modifications. To automate the process of generating effective query modifications, we introduce a sensitivity analysis-based method for extracting rules from nonlinear support vector machines. The proposed method allows the user to specify a desired precision while attempting to maximize the recall. Our method performs several levels of dimensionality reduction and is vastly faster than searching the combination feature space; moreover, it is very effective on real-world data.
Law-governed peer-to-peer auctions
Authors: Marcus Fontoura, Mihail F. Ionescu, Naftaly H. Minsky
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

This paper proposes a flexible architecture for the creation of Internet auctions. It allows the custom definition of the auction parameters, and provides a decentralized control of the auction process. Auction policies are defined as laws in the Law Governed Interaction (LGI) paradigm. Each of these laws specifies not only the auction algorithm itself (e.g. open-cry, dutch, etc.) but also how to handle the other parameters usually involved in the online auctions, such as certification, auditioning, and treatment of complaints. LGI is used to enforce the rules established in the auction policy within the agents involved in the process. After the agents find out about the actions, they interact in a peer-to-peer communication protocol, reducing the role of the centralized auction room to an advertising registry, and taking profit of the distributed nature of the Internet to conduct the auction. The paper presents an example of an auction law, illustrating the use of the proposed architecture.
Using web structure for classifying and describing web pages
Authors: Eric J. Glover, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis, Steve Lawrence, David M. Pennock, Gary William Flake
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The structure of the web is increasingly being used to improve organization, search, and analysis of information on the web. For example, Google uses the text in citing documents (documents that link to the target document) for search. We analyze the relative utility of document text, and the text in citing documents near the citation, for classification and description. Results show that the text in citing documents, when available, often has greater discriminative and descriptive power than the text in the target document itself. The combination of evidence from a document and citing documents can improve on either information source alone. Moreover, by ranking words and phrases in the citing documents according to expected entropy loss, we are able to accurately name clusters of web pages, even with very few positive examples. Our results confirm, quantify, and extend previous research using web structure in these areas, introducing new methods for classification and description of pages.
Streaming speech3: a framework for generating and streaming 3D text-to-speech and audio presentations to wireless PDAs as specified using extensions to SMIL
Authors: Stuart Goose, Sreedhar Kodlahalli, William Pechter, Rune Hjelsvold
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

While monochrome unformatted text and richly colored graphical content are both capable of conveying a message, well designed graphical content has the potential for better engaging the human sensory system. It is our contention that the author of an audio presentation should be afforded the benefit of judiciously exploiting the human aural perceptual ability to deliver content in a more compelling, concise and realistic manner. While contemporary streaming media players and voice browsers share the ability to render content non-textually, neither technology is currently capable of rendering three dimensional media. The contributions described in this paper are proposed 3D audio extensions to SMIL and a server-based framework able to receive a request and, on-demand, process such a SMIL file and dynamically create the multiple simultaneous audio objects, spatialize them in 3D space, multiplex them into a single stereo audio and prepare it for transmission over an audio stream to a mobile device. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first reported solution for delivering and rendering on a commercially available wireless handheld device a rich 3D audio listening experience as described by a markup language. Naturally, in addition to mobile devices this solution also works with desktop streaming media players.
Authoring and annotation of web pages in CREAM
Authors: Siegfried Handschuh, Steffen Staab
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Richly interlinked, machine-understandable data constitute the basis for the Semantic Web. We provide a framework, CREAM, that allows for creation of metadata. While the annotation mode of CREAM allows to create metadata for existing web pages, the authoring mode lets authors create metadata --- almost for free --- while putting together the content of a page.As a particularity of our framework, CREAM allows to create relational metadata, i.e. metadata that instantiate interrelated definitions of classes in a domain ontology rather than a comparatively rigid template-like schema asm Dublin Core. We discuss some of the requirements one has to meet when developing such an ontology-based framework, e.g. the integration of a metadata crawler, inference services, document management and a meta-ontology, and describe its implementation, viz. Ont-O-Mat, a component-based, ontology-driven Web page authoring and annotation tool.
Translating XSLT programs to Efficient SQL queries
Authors: Sushant Jain, Ratul Mahajan, Dan Suciu
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

We present an algorithm for translating XSLT programs into SQL. Our context is that of virtual XML publishing, in which a single XML view is defined from a relational database, and subsequently queried with XSLT programs. Each XSLT program is translated into a single SQL query and run entirely in the database engine. Our translation works for a large fragment of XSLT, which we define, that includes descendant/ancestor axis, recursive templates, modes, parameters, and aggregates. We put considerable effort in generating correct and efficient SQL queries and describe several optimization techniques to achieve this efficiency. We have tested our system on all 22 SQL queries of the TPC-H database benchmark which we represented in XSLT and then translated back to SQL using our translator.
Flash crowds and denial of service attacks: characterization and implications for CDNs and web sites
Authors: Jaeyeon Jung, Balachander Krishnamurthy, Michael Rabinovich
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The paper studies two types of events that often overload Web sites to a point when their services are degraded or disrupted entirely - flash events (FEs) and denial of service attacks (DoS). The former are created by legitimate requests and the latter contain malicious requests whose goal is to subvert the normal operation of the site. We study the properties of both types of events with a special attention to characteristics that distinguish the two. Identifying these characteristics allows a formulation of a strategy for Web sites to quickly discard malicious requests. We also show that some content distribution networks (CDNs) may not provide the desired level of protection to Web sites against flash events. We therefore propose an enhancement to CDNs that offers better protection and use trace-driven simulations to study the effect of our enhancement on CDNs and Web sites.
RQL: a declarative query language for RDF
Authors: Gregory Karvounarakis, Sofia Alexaki, Vassilis Christophides, Dimitris Plexousakis, Michel Scholl
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Real-scale Semantic Web applications, such as Knowledge Portals and E-Marketplaces, require the management of large volumes of metadata, i.e., information describing the available Web content and services. Better knowledge about their meaning, usage, accessibility or quality will considerably facilitate an automated processing of Web resources. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) enables the creation and exchange of metadata as normal Web data. Although voluminous RDF descriptions are already appearing, sufficiently expressive declarative languages for querying both RDF descriptions and schemas are still missing. In this paper, we propose a new RDF query language called RQL. It is a typed functional language (a la OQL) and relies on a formal model for directed labeled graphs permitting the interpretation of superimposed resource descriptions by means of one or more RDF schemas. RQL adapts the functionality of semistructured/XML query languages to the peculiarities of RDF but, foremost, it enables to uniformly query both resource descriptions and schemas. We illustrate the RQL syntax, semantics and typing system by means of a set of example queries and report on the performance of our persistent RDF Store employed by the RQL interpreter.
The social contract core
Authors: James H. Kaufman, Stefan Edlund, Daniel Alexander Ford, Calvin Powers
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The information age has brought with it the promise of unprecedented economic growth based on the efficiencies made possible by new technology. This same greater efficiency has left society with less and less time to adapt to technological progress. Perhaps the greatest cost of this progress is the threat to privacy we all face from unconstrained exchange of our personal information. In response to this threat, the World Wide Web Consortium has introduced the "Platform for Privacy Preferences" (P3P) to allow sites to express policies in machine-readable form and to expose these policies to site visitors [1]. However, today P3P does not protect the privacy of individuals, nor does its implementation empower communities or groups to negotiate and establish standards of behavior. We propose a privacy architecture we call the Social Contract Core (SCC), designed to speed the establishment of new "Social Contracts" needed to protect private data. The goal of SCC is to empower communities, speed the "socialization" of new technology, and encourage the rapid access to, and exchange of, information. Addressing these issues is essential, we feel, to both liberty and economic prosperity in the information age[2].
Price modeling in standards for electronic product catalogs based on XML
Authors: Oliver Kelkar, Jörg Leukel, Volker Schmitz
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

The fast spreading of electronic business-to-business procurement systems has led to the development of new standards for the exchange of electronic product catalogs (e-catalogs). E-catalogs contain various information about products, essential is price information. Prices are used for buying decisions and following order transactions. While simple price models are often sufficient for the description of indirect goods (e.g. office supplies), other goods and lines of business make higher demands. In this paper we examine what price information is contained in commercial XML standards for the exchange of product catalog data. For that purpose we bring the different implicit price models of the examined catalog standards together and provide a generalized model.
Aliasing on the world wide web: prevalence and performance implications
Authors: Terence Kelly, Jeffrey C. Mogul
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Aliasing occurs in Web transactions when requests containing different URLs elicit replies containing identical data payloads. Conventional caches associate stored data with URLs and can therefore suffer redundant payload transfers due to aliasing and other causes. Existing research literature, however, says little about the prevalence of aliasing in user-initiated transactions, or about redundant payload transfers in conventional Web cache hierarchies.This paper quantifies the extent of aliasing and the performance impact of URL-indexed cache management using a large client trace from WebTV Networks. Fewer than 5% of reply payloads are aliased (referenced via multiple URLs) but over 54% of successful transactions involve aliased payloads. Aliased payloads account for under 3.1% of the trace's "working set size" (sum of payload sizes) but over 36% of bytes transferred. For the WebTV workload, roughly 10% of payload transfers to browser caches and 23% of payload transfers to a shared proxy are redundant, assuming infinite-capacity conventional caches. Our analysis of a large proxy trace from Compaq Corporation yields similar results.URL-indexed caching does not entirely explain the large number of redundant proxy-to-browser payload transfers previously reported in the WebTV system. We consider other possible causes of redundant transfers (e.g., reply metadata and browser cache management policies) and discuss a simple hop-by-hop protocol extension that completely eliminates all redundant transfers, regardless of cause.
Implementing physical hyperlinks using ubiquitous identifier resolution
Authors: Tim Kindberg
Venue: WWW
Year: 2002

Identifier resolution is presented as a way to link the physical world with virtual Web resources. In this paradigm, designed to support nomadic users, the user employs a handheld, wirelessly connected, sensor-equipped device to read identifiers associated with physical entities. The identifiers are resolved into virtual resources or actions related to the physical entities - as though the user 'clicked on a physical hyperlink'. We have integrated identifier resolution with the Web so that it can be deployed as ubiquitously as the Web, in the infrastructure and on wirelessly connected handheld devices. We enable users to capture resolution services and applications as Web resources in their local context. We use the Web to invoke resolution services, with a model of 'physical' Web form-filling. We propose a scheme for binding identifiers to resources, to promote services and applications linking the physical and virtual worlds.