OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Lessons for the World Wide Web from the Text Encoding Initiative
Authors: David T. Barnard, Lou Burnard, Steven J. DeRose, David G. Durand, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

Although HTML is widely used, it suffers from a serious limitation: it does not clearly distinguish between structural and typographical information. In fact, it is impossible to have a single simple standard for document encoding that can effectively satisfy the needs of all users of the World Wide Web. Multiple views of data, and thus multiple DTDs, are needed. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has produced a complex and sophisticated DTD that makes contributions both in terms of the content that it allows to be encoded and in the way that the DTD is structured. In particular, the TEI DTD provides a mechanism for describing hypertextual links that balances power and simplicity; it also provides the means for including information that can be used in resource description and discovery. The TEI DTD is designed as a number of components that can be assembled using standard SGML techniques, giving an overall result that is modular and extensible.
Interface-Parasite Gateways
Authors: Robert A. Barta, Manfred Hauswirth
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

Apart from challenging new possibilities in resource discovery and retrieval, WWW gives the opportunity to provide legacy applications with a new look and feel and to add functionality without having to change the software itself. We describe problems and possible solutions in the area of connecting legacy software based on terminal sessions to WWW, especially focusing on the problems that arise from adapting stateful interactive services to the stateless HTTP. As a case study we present a WWW gateway to a stateful legacy application (Austrian national academic OPAC) by encapsulating it within a CGI conformant gateway.
IAFA Templates in Use as Internet Metadata
Authors: David Beckett
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

Recently, there has been a growing need for a metadata standard for the Internet. The files that are available on ftp and WWW sites can be difficult to search if they are enclosed in a container format (e.g., tar), and bibliographical data can be deeply embedded in documentation. This paper describes how IAFA Templates[1] have been used in a real archive to store the metadata of lots of different types of documents and software and to derive WWW, gopher, and text indices from them.
Supporting Collaborative Information Sharing with the World Wide Web: The BSCW Shared Workspace System
Authors: Richard Bentley, Thilo C. Horstmann, Klaas Sikkel, Jonathan Trevor
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web (W3) offers a great deal of potential for the developers of collaborative technologies, both as an enabling infrastructure and a platform for integration with existing end-user environments. This paper describes a system which attempts to exploit that potential by extending the W3 to provide a set of basic facilities for collaborative information sharing. The BSCW Shared Workspace system was conceived as an alternative to tools which currently support collaborative working for widely dispersed working groups such as electronic mail and ftp. We report on the design and implementation of our system, the problems we encountered, and the benefits accruing from our choice of the W3 as an enabling platform. Our experiences suggest how recent developments in the W3 point the way to more suitable and powerful mechanisms to support the development of collaborative systems.
Application-Specific Proxy Servers as HTTP Stream Transducers
Authors: Charles L. Brooks, Murray S. Mazer, W. Scott Meeks, Jim Miller
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

If one wishes to execute specialized processing on the HTTP requests and responses that flow between WWW clients and servers, one can add the processing in the clients, in the servers, or between them. We describe a novel approach to the latter; we generalize the notion of proxy servers to construct application-specific proxies that act as transducers on the HTTP stream. We have built a sample set of transducers to demonstrate the idea and an initial toolkit to ease the task of constructing these transducers and attaching them to the HTTP stream.
The Distributed Link Service: A Tool for Publishers, Authors, and Readers
Authors: Leslie Carr, David De Roure, Wendy Hall, Gary Hill
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

The World Wide Web is a distributed service for hypermedia document retrieval. Adding a complementary hypermedia link service, from which clients can make enquiries of distributed sets of link databases, provides extra functionality for users: readers gain more subject-specific content-based media-independent links, authors gain freedom and flexibility in creating, composing, and reusing their resources, and publishers can repurpose their information assets for different audiences. This paper describes a hypermedia link service that is based entirely on standard Web browsers and servers and is being used successfully in a spectrum of Web projects.
A Generic Map Interface to Query Geographic Information Using the World Wide Web
Authors: David Crossley, Tony Boston
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

Environmental information is intrinsically geographically-related. It pertains to a specific region of the earth. Users of such information require answers to questions that have a geographic basis. The Environmental Resources Information Network [8] Unit has developed a generic WWW map interface using a collection of simple map images and a standard lookup table to provide visual interactive access to geographically-related information. The map interface provides a generic mechanism to define a region of interest before selecting from various online forms interfaces to geographic information such as biological species distributions, a spatial data set directory, project information, bibliographies, and general textual indices of WWW documents.
Commercial Hypertext Publishing: Electronic Books Using Trails and the Author-Publisher-Reader Model
Authors: Leslie D. Cuff
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

Commercial hypertext publishing is presented with the author-publisher-reader model (APR). Two commercial products, ebooks and trails, are presented with mechanisms for their creation and delivery which support licensing and copy protection. Trails are used both in production and for overcoming reader disorientation during navigation. A hypertext composition system is described which translates Layman's Hypertext (LHT) into HTML file structures. LHT supports typed links, users, and context which are grafted into the World Wide Web hypertext model.
Mobile GUI on the Web
Authors: Daniel Dardailler
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

This article presents an architecture allowing network graphical applications, such as X Window clients, to be activated and render themselves directly onto World Wide Web browser screens. The intention is both to offer Web information providers better and finer control over the exact presentation of their documents, and to provide the ability to demonstrate real applications or products over the Web. After presenting some rationales and requirements for this work, the paper explores the set of issues that need to be resolved to implement such a system.
Jasper: Communicating Information Agents for WWW
Authors: John Davies, Richard Weeks, Mike Revett
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

This paper discusses a distributed system of intelligent agents for performing information tasks over the Internet World Wide Web (W3) on behalf of a user or community of users. We describe how agents are used to store, retrieve, summarize and inform other agents about information found on W3. Most current W3 clients (Mosaic, Netscape, and so on) provide some means of storing pages of interest to the user. Typically, this is done by allowing the user to create a (possibly hierarchical) menu of names associated with particular uniform resource locators (URLs). While useful, this quickly becomes unwieldy when a reasonably large number of W3 pages are involved. The solution we adopt to this problem is to allow the user to access information by a much richer set of metainformation than simply names assigned to particular URLs. Given the vast amount of information available on W3, it is preferable to avoid the copying of information from its original location to a local server. The local storage of only relevant metainformation also addresses this issue. The metainformation used includes automatically extracted keywords and summary, as well as the document title, URL and date and time of access. This metainformation is then used to index on the actual information when a retrieval request is made. When an agent stores a page, it will also automatically inform other users who it considers will be interested in the page's discovery via an email message. Thus Jasper is a small step towards automating the original vision for W3 as a network which supports cooperative working and the sharing of information. In addition, Jasper agents will modify a user's profile as the type of information the user is accessing changes. Pages stored in Jasper can be posted to interest groups, creating shared information resources about specific topics.
Structured Cooperative Authoring on the World Wide Web
Authors: Dominique Decouchant, Vincent Quint, Manuel Romero Salcedo
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

In this paper we present Alliance, a groupware application that allows several users located on different Web sites to cooperatively produce documents in a structured way. In addition to the local editing functions made available on each site by a structured editor, the application provides such basic functionalities as management of document storage and remote access to distributed documents. It offers services for handling user interaction and cooperation, for dynamically distributing roles to users, for showing documents through multiple views, for controlling the consistency of modifications, and for updating all copies of shared documents.
RMC: A Tool to Design WWW Applications
Authors: Alicia Díaz, Tomás Isakowitz, Vanesa Maiorana, Gabriel Gilabert
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

We present the design of a computer-aided environment, RMCase, to support the design and construction of WWW applications. RMCase supports hypermedia design and development activities and produces HTML code. Support for cognitive design processes is achieved through three fundamental premises at the foundation of RMCase: (1) fluid feedback loops between the various methodological stages, (2) manipulation of objets at the instance level, and (3) lightweight prototyping. As a result, RMCase will support bottom-up, top-down, and middle-out software development styles.
The Boomerang White Paper: A Page as You Like It
Authors: Curtis E. Dyreson, Anthony M. Sloane
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

Boomerang is a dynamic HTML page reconfiguration system. A user accesses Boomerang via the Common Gateway Interface. The user supplies a page name and a template, Boomerang fetches the requested page and uses the template to reconfigure it. The template is a sequence of string manipulation rules. The rules are written in a simple regular expression-based pattern matching language. Boomerang also parses HTML variables informs and query strings and makes those variables available in the template. By taking advantage of Boomerang's dynamic page reconfiguration features, users can easily add navigational links, suppress images, redefine HTML tags, and reshape a page as desired. Since Boomerang is reached through the Common Gateway Interface and understands HTML variables, Boomerang can also be used as a general form-handling script. Several examples are given to show the utility of Boomerang. Boomerang is compatible with existing browsers and servers and does not compromise their security.
Ingrid: A Self-Configuring Information Navigation Infrastructure
Authors: Paul Francis, Takashi Kambayashi, Shin-Ya Sato, Susumu Shimizu
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

This paper presents Ingrid, an architecture for a fully distributed, fully self configuring information navigation infrastructure that is designed to scale to global proportions. Unlike current designs, Ingrid is not a hierarchy of large index servers. Rather, links are automatically placed between individual resources based on their topic similarity in such a way that clusters of term combinations are formed. The resulting topology can potentially be searched and browsed by a robot efficiently. This paper describes the fundamentals of Ingrid---the topology design and the algorithms for creating and searching the topology. It discusses the scaling characteristics of Ingrid, and gives the scaling results of a limited experiment.
WebMap: Concept Mapping on the Web
Authors: Brian R. Gaines, Mildred L. G. Shaw
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

Concept maps have long provided visual languages widely used in many different disciplines and application domains. This article reports experience in taking an existing open architecture concept mapping tool and making it available on the Web in a number of ways: as a client helper downloading and uploading concept maps; as an active controller of the browser, indexing multimedia material through URLs embedded in concept maps; as a concept map creator controlled by the browser, generating concept maps through the browsing process; and as an auxiliary HTTP server making concept maps available as clickable maps for users who do not have the client helper or want to use active concept maps embedded in documents.
Data Transport within the Distributed Oceanographic Data System
Authors: James Gallagher, George Milkowski
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

The Distributed Oceanographic Data System (DODS) is a client-server system which enables existing data analysis programs to be transformed from software, which is limited to accessing local data, to clients, which can access data from any of a large number of data servers. This is done without requiring modification to the existing software's source code by reimplementing the data access API libraries used by those programs. Once a given API library is modified to read from a DODS data server, any program which uses that library as its sole means of accessing data can be relinked with the new implementation and can function as a client within DODS. Data servers which can be accessed by these clients are built using filter programs and one or more httpd Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs. Data sets made available are thus accessible via URLs. While the data servers' principal function is to provide the client programs with values from the data sets, they also make available, as text, information about the variables in the data set and their data types. This information can be accessed by any WWW browser.
The Millicent Protocol for Inexpensive Electronic Commerce
Authors: Steven C. Glassman, Mark S. Manasse, Martín Abadi, Paul Gauthier, Patrick Sobalvarro
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

Millicent is a lightweight and secure protocol for electronic commerce over the Internet. It is designed to support purchases costing less than a cent. It is based on decentralized validation of electronic cash at the vendor's server without any additional communication, expensive encryption, or offline processing. The key innovations of Millicent are its use of brokers and of scrip. Brokers take care of account management, billing, connection maintenance, and establishing accounts with vendors. Scrip is digital cash that is only valid for a specific vendor. The vendor locally validates the scrip to prevent customer fraud, such as double spending.
CyberProf: An Intelligent Human-Computer Interface for Asynchronous Wide Area Training and Teaching
Authors: Alfred W. Hübler, Andrew M. Assad
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

We introduce CyberProf, a robust software package which utilizes the full capabilities of a World Wide Web server as an intelligent human-computer interface for grading, creating, and presenting educational course materials. Students can solve course problems presented with text, graphics, animations, and sound on the Web and can receive instant feedback from a sophisticated grading package which makes use of the latest complex systems data analysis tools to handle ambiguous input in an intelligent manner. Fully integrated lecture notes and help files are hyperlinked to assist the student in solving an exercise. Instructors can make use of built-in problem set and lecture notes editors to create an entire online course customized for their needs. Early results of the system are promising. In the first university course in which CyberProf was used, class attendance rates were significantly higher, dropout rates were lower, and grade distributions were higher when compared to figures from the same course in previous semesters.
Swoop: An Application Generator for ORACLE/WWW Systems
Authors: Andrew Hunter, R. Ian Ferguson, Steven Hedges
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

The development of a software package named Swoop is described. Swoop is designed to support the generation and maintenance of WWW information systems which store information in ORACLE databases: a so-called hyperbase program. The biggest problem with hyperbases is that they require a sophisticated program to interpret Forms, query appropriate databases, and merge information into hypertext. There is a clear need for application-generator tools which allow hyperbase programs to be constructed with minimal expertise on the part of the designer. It is this problem which Swoop addresses.
W3Objects: Bringing Object-Oriented Technology to the Web
Authors: David B. Ingham, Mark C. Little, Steve J. Caughey, Santosh K. Shrivastava
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

In this paper we discuss some of the problems of the current Web and show how the introduction of object-orientation provides flexible and extensible solutions. Web resources become encapsulated as objects, with well-defined interfaces through which all interactions occur. The interfaces and their implementations can be inherited by builders of objects, and methods (operations) can be redefined to better suit the object. New characteristics, such as concurrency control and persistence, can be obtained by inheriting from suitable base classes, without necessarily requiring any changes to users of these resources. We describe the W3Object model which we have developed based upon these ideas, and show, through a prototype implementation, how we have used the model to address the problems of referential integrity and transparent object (resource) migration. We also give indications of future work.
Securing the World Wide Web: Smart Tokens and Their Implementation
Authors: Michael F. Jones, Bruce Schneier
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

This paper introduces Smart Tokens, discusses some of their basic properties, and outlines their general role in securing software applications on the World Wide Web. In addition, the completed hardware and software architecture of a current implementation is described. Finally, an electronic commerce application for Smart Tokens involving major U.S. financial institutions is discussed.
A Schema-Based Approach to HTML Authoring
Authors: Marcus Kesseler
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

This paper presents a novel approach to high-productivity authoring of large, regularly structured hypertexts. By explicitly representing the objects in the hypertext and the relationships between them in a schema, it is possible to create, manipulate, and maintain large hyperdocuments with high efficiency. In the implementation, called the HSDL, all such schema operations are performed on a graphical user interface (GUI). Special attention has been given to the problem of schema evolution. In HSDL, the author can do nontrivial schema update operations even if classes have already been instantiated. The mapping from the schema to HTML, called compilation, is done by a series of programs in the programming language Scheme. These programs, called expanders, are integral parts of every schema. Although the default set of expanders will already provide fairly sophisticated HTML layout, users may easily adapt them to suit their special needs. A built-in, schema-aware HTML editor allows the integration of links defined in the schema into the HTML contents of a node.
Multi-Head Multi-Tail Mosaic
Authors: Brian C. Ladd, Michael V. Capps, P. David Stotts, Rick Furuta
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

The explosive growth of the World Wide Web is attributable, in large part, to the simplicity of the distributed graph model it uses for information storage and retrieval. The model is simple, general, and ubiquitous; the reader may choose almost any browsing path. Information providers, though, then use every trick at their disposal in an attempt to increase their power over how readers browse their pages. Two major shortcomings of current Web protocols are lack of support for concurrent browsing and synchronization of multiple browsing paths. This paper presents a computer-aided instruction scenario where the author (instructor) must overcome these weaknesses. In traditional hypermedia systems, a link relates a single source node to a single destination node. Projects such as Xanadu [3] and Trellis [6] previously generalized links to allow connection of multiple source nodes to multiple destination nodes. This generalization, which we term a Multi-Head/Multi-Tail (MHMT) link, allows an author to create concurrent browsing paths in a document, and to synchronize those concurrent paths if desired. This has applications to groupware as well as to documents browsed by single users. We describe our solution embodied in MHTML as a straightforward extension to HTML for defining multi-head/multi-tail links and an experimental browser called MMM that implements the extensions.
Programming the Web: An Application-Oriented Language for Hypermedia Service Programming
Authors: David A. Ladd, J. Christopher Ramming
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

MAWL is an application language for programming interactive World Wide Web services. The language is small, because no construct was introduced without compelling justification; as with yacc [9], general-purpose computation is done in a host language. MAWL offers conveniences such as control abstraction, persistent state management, synchronization, and shared memory. In addition, the MAWL compiler performs static checking designed to prevent common Web programming errors. In this paper we discuss the design and engineering of MAWL in the context of our general language design philosophy. We also include an appendix of commentary on several short MAWL programs.
Toward a New Educational Environment
Authors: Ming-Chih Lai, Bih-Horng Chen, Shyan-Ming Yuan
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

There are two major problems when we first try to construct a campus wide educational environment on top WWW. First, interactions between teachers and students are basically one-way. Teachers put materials into the information store and students retrieve them. Secondly students often get lost when navigating in hypermedia documents. In order to improve the interaction between teachers and students, we make use of the existing communication facilities in Internet like electronic mail, text talk, and our newly designed communication facility, Notebook. In order to prevent students getting lost in hyperspace, we add two new navigation facilities to the current WWW system: Overview map and Guider.
Not Just Decoration: Quality Graphics for the Web
Authors: Chris Lilley
Venue: WWW
Year: 1995

In some applications, high quality graphics are essential. This paper reviews factors affecting the display of accurate graphical information in a heterogenous networked environment, concentrating on the areas that must be addressed to implement Web user agents which offer good color fidelity. Image rendition strategies for a color-scarce environment are described and the color allocation strategies of several popular Web browsers are examined. Given current trends in provision of device independent color, projected future needs for Web user agents are described. Lastly, the implications of embedded image metadata are discussed.