OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Post-processing inkml for random-access navigation of voluminous handwritten ink documents
Authors: Khaireel A. Mohamed, Lioudmila Belenkaia, Thomas Ottmann
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The goal of this research is the improvement of browsing voluminous InkML data in two areas: ease of rendering continuous inkflow for replay-browsing, and ease of random access navigation in eLearning domains. The notion of real-time random access navigation in ink documents has not yet been fully exploited. Users of existing eLearning browsers are restricted to viewing static annotated slides that are inferior in quality when compared to actively replaying the same slides with sequenced ink-flow of the annotated freehand writings. We are developing a tool to investigate ways of managing massive InkML data for efficient &quot;active visible scrolling&quot; of recorded freehand writings in ink documents. This work will also develop and evaluate new post-processing techniques that take advantage of the relationship between ink volumes and active-rendering times for real-time random access navigation.
E-learning personalization based on itineraries and long-term navigational behavior
Authors: Enric Mor, Julià Minguillón
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

In this paper we describe a practical framework for studying then a navigational behavior of the users of an e-learning environment integrated in a virtual campus. The students navigate through the web based virtual campus interacting with learning resources which are structured following the SCORM e-learning standard. Our main goal is to design a usage mining tool for analyzing such user navigational behavior and for extracting relevant information that can be used to validate several aspects related to virtual campus design and usability but also to determine the optimal scheduling for each course depending on user profile. We intend to extend these quencing capabilities of the SCORM standard to include the concept of recommended itinerary, by combining teachers expertise with learned experience acquired by system usage analysis.
Cooperative middleware specialization for service oriented architectures
Authors: Nirmal Mukhi, Ravi B. Konuru, Francisco Curbera
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) will provide the basis of thenext generation of distributed software systems, and have already gained enormous traction in the industry through an XML--based instantiation, Web services. A central aspect of SOAs is the looser coupling between applications (services) that is achieved when services publish their functional and non-functional behavioral characteristics in a standardized, machine readable format. In this paper we argue that in the basic SOA model access to metadata is too static and results in inflexible interactions between requesters and providers. We propose specific extensions to the SOA model to allow service providers and requestors to dynamically expose and negotiate their public behavior, resulting in the ability to specialize and optimize the middleware supporting an interaction. We introduce a middleware architecture supporting this extended SOA functionality, and describe a conformant implementation based on standard Web services middleware. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of this approach with a detailed real world scenario.
Are web pages characterized by color?
Authors: Norifumi Murayama, Suguru Saito, Manabu Okumura
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

When human guess the content of a web page,not only the text on the page but also its appearance is an important factor.However, there have been few studies on the relationshipbetween the content and visual appearance of a web page.We investigating the tendencybetween them, especially web content and color use, we found a tendency to use color for some kinds of content pages. We think this result opens the way to estimating web content using color information.
Automatically generating metadata for digital photographs with geographic coordinates
Authors: Mor Naaman, Yee Jiun Song, Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Given location information on digital photographs, we can automatically generate an abundance of photo-related metadata using off-the-shelf and web-based data sources. These metadata can serve as additional memory cues and filters when browsing a personal or global collection of photos.
Time-based contextualized-news browser (t-cnb)
Authors: Akiyo Nadamoto, Katsumi Tanaka
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

We propose a new way of browsing contextualized-news articles. Our prototype browser system is called a Time-based Contextualized-News Browser (T-CNB). The T-CNB concurrently and automatically presents a series of related pages for one news source while browsing the user-specified page. It extracts the past related pages from a user-specified news articles on the web. The related pages outline the progress of user-specified news articles. We call the related pages 'contextual pages'.Using the T-CNB, a user only needs to specify one news article on the web. The user then automatically receives past related news articles, which provide a wider understanding of the topic. The T-CNB automatically generates and presents contextualized news articles.
Providing ranked relevant results for web database queries
Authors: Ullas Nambiar, Subbarao Kambhampati
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Often Web database users experience difficulty in articulating their needs using a precise query. Providing ranked set of possible answers would benefit such users. We propose to provide ranked answers to user queries by identifying a set of queries from the query log whose answers are relevant to the given user query. The relevance detection is done using a domain and end-user independent content similarity estimation technique.
Automatically collecting, monitoring, and mining japanese weblogs
Authors: Tomoyuki Nanno, Toshiaki Fujiki, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Manabu Okumura
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

We present a system that tries to automatically collect and monitor Japanese blog collections that include not only ones made with blog softwares but also ones written as normal web pages. Our approach is based on extraction of date expressions and analysis of HTML documents. Our system also extracts and mines useful information from the collected blog pages.
Accurate web recommendations based on profile-specific url-predictor neural networks
Authors: Olfa Nasraoui, Mrudula Pavuluri
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

We present a Context Ultra-Sensitive Approach based on two-step Recommender systems (CUSA-2-step-Rec). Our approach relies on a committee of profile-specific neural networks. This approach provides recommendations that are accurate and fast to train because only the URLs relevant to a specific profile are used to define the architecture of each network. We compare the proposed approach with collaborative filtering showing that our approach achieves higher coverage and precision while being faster, and requiring lower main memory at recommendation time. While most recommenders are inherently context sensitive, our approach is context ultra-sensitive because a different recommendation model is designed for each profile separately.
Fine-grained, structured configuration management for web projects
Authors: Tien Nhut Nguyen, Ethan V. Munson, Cheng Thao
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Researchers in Web engineering have regularly noted that existing Web application development environments provide little support for managing the evolution of Web applications. Key limitations of Web development environments include line-oriented change models that inadequately represent Web document semantics and in ability to model changes to link structure or the set of objects making up the Webapplication. Developers may find it difficult to grasp how theoverall structure of the Web application has changed over time and may respond by using ad hoc solutions that lead to problems of maintain ability, quality and reliability. Web applications are software artifacts, and as such, can benefit from advanced version control and software configuration management (SCM)technologies from software engineering. We have modified an integrated development environment to manage the evolution and maintenance of Web applications. The resulting environment is distinguished by itsfine-grained version control framework, fine-grained Web contentchange management, and product versioning configuration management, in which a Web project can be organized at the logical level and itsstructure and components are versioned in a fine-grained manner aswell. This paper describes the motivation for this environment as well as its user interfaces, features, and implementation.
Model based engineering of learning situations for adaptive web based educational systems
Authors: Thierry Nodenot, Christophe Marquesuzaà, Pierre Laforcade, Christian Sallaberry
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

In this paper, we propose an approach for the engineering of web based educational applications. The applications that we focus require advanced functionality for regulating and tutoring learners' activities (dynamics of learning). Our approach aims at proposing models, not only to describe details of such learning situations, but also to characterize the constraints that the Learning Management System exploiting such situations must satisfy in this sense, this approach also contributes to the specification of the Adaptive Web Based Educational System (AWBES) fitted to a particular learning situation. Moreover, this approach for the engineering of learning situations conforms to current software engineering research works.
What's new on the web?: the evolution of the web from a search engine perspective
Authors: Alexandros Ntoulas, Junghoo Cho, Christopher Olston
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

We seek to gain improved insight into how Web search engines shouldcope with the evolving Web, in an attempt to provide users with themost up-to-date results possible. For this purpose we collectedweekly snapshots of some 150 Web sites over the course of one year,and measured the evolution of content and link structure. Our measurements focus on aspects of potential interest to search engine designers: the evolution of link structure over time, the rate ofcreation of new pages and new distinct content on the Web, and the rate of change of the content of existing pages under search-centric measures of degree of change.Our findings indicate a rapid turnover rate of Web pages, i.e.,high rates of birth and death, coupled with an even higher rate ofturnover in the hyperlinks that connect them. For pages that persistover time we found that, perhaps surprisingly, the degree of contentshift as measured using TF.IDF cosine distance does not appear to beconsistently correlated with the frequency of contentupdating. Despite this apparent non-correlation, the rate of content shift of a given page is likely to remain consistent over time. That is, pages that change a great deal in one week will likely change by a similarly large degree in the following week. Conversely, pages that experience little change will continue to experience little change. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the potential implications ofour results for the design of effective Web search engines.
An application server for the semantic web
Authors: Daniel Oberle, Steffen Staab, Raphael Volz
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The Semantic Web relies on the complex interaction of several technologies involving ontologies. Therefore, sophisticated Semantic Web applications typically comprise more than one software module. Instead of coming up with proprietary solutions, developers should be able to rely on a generic infrastructure for application development in this context. We call such an infrastructure Application Server for the Semantic Web whose design and development are based on existing Application Servers. However, we apply and augment their underlying concepts for use in the Semantic Web and integrate semantic technology within the server itself. We provide a short overview of requirements and design issues of such a server and present our implementation and ongoing work KAON SERVER.
XQuery at your web service
Authors: Nicola Onose, Jérôme Siméon
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

XML messaging is at the heart of Web services, providing the flexibility required for their deployment, composition, and maintenance. Yet, current approaches to Web services development hide the messaging layer behind Java or C# APIs, preventing the application to get direct access to the underlying XML information. To address this problem, we advocate the use of a native XML language, namely XQuery, as an integral part of the Web services development infrastructure. The main contribution of the paper is a binding between WSDL, the Web Services Description Language, and XQuery. The approach enables the use of XQuery for both Web services deployment and composition. We present a simple command-line tool that can be used to automatically deploy a Web service from a given XQuery module, and extend the XQuery language itself with a statement for accessing one or more Web services. The binding provides tight-coupling between WSDL and XQuery, yielding additional benefits, notably: the ability to use WSDL as an interface language for XQuery, and the ability to perform static typing on XQuery programs that include Web service calls. Last but not least, the proposal requires only minimal changes to the existing infrastructure. We report on our experience implementing this approach in the Galax XQuery processor.
Experiments with persian text compression for web
Authors: Farhad Oroumchian, Ehsan Darrudi, Fattaneh Taghiyareh, Neeyaz Angoshtari
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The increasing importance of Unicode for text encoding implies a possible doubling of data storage space and data transmission time, with a corresponding need for data compression. The approach presented in this paper aims to reduce the storage and the transmission time for Persian text files in web-based applications and Internet. The basic idea here is to compute the most repetitive n-grams in the Persian text and replace them by a single character in the user-defined sections of the Unicode. The compression will be done on the server side once and the decompression process is eliminated completely. The rendering process in the browser will do the decompression. There is no need for any additional program or add-ins for decompression to be installed on the browser or client side. The user needs only to download the proper Unicode font once. A genetic algorithm is utilized to select the most appropriate n-grams. In the best case, we have achieved 52.26 % reduction of the file size. The method is general, and applies equally well to English and other languages.
Distributed location aware web crawling
Authors: Odysseas Papapetrou, George Samaras
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Distributed crawling has shown that it can overcome important limitations of the today's crawling paradigm. However, the optimal benefits of this approach are usually limited to the sites hosting the crawler. In this work, we propose a location-aware method, called IPMicra, that utilizes an IP address hierarchy, and allows crawling of links in a near optimal location aware manner.
Enforcing strict model-view separation in template engines
Authors: Terence John Parr
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The mantra of every experienced web application developer is the same: thou shalt separate business logic from display. Ironically, almost all template engines allow violation of this separation principle, which is the very impetus for HTML template engine development. This situation is due mostly to a lack of formal definition of separation and fear that enforcing separation emasculates a template's power. I show that not only is strict separation a worthy design principle, but that we can enforce separation while providing a potent template engine. I demonstrate my StringTemplate engine, used to build jGuru.com and other commercial sites, at work solving some nontrivial generational tasks.My goal is to formalize the study of template engines, thus, providing a common nomenclature, a means of classifying template generational power, and a way to leverage interesting results from formal language theory. I classify three types of restricted templates analogous to Chomsky's type 1..3 grammar classes and formally define separation including the rules that embody separation.Because this paper provides a clear definition of model-view separation, template engine designers may no longer blindly claim enforcement of separation. Moreover, given theoretical arguments and empirical evidence, programmers no longer have an excuse to entangle model and view.
Meaning and the semantic web
Authors: Bijan Parsia, Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The meaning of names (URI references) is a contentious issue in the Semantic Web. Numerous proposals have been given for how to provide meaning for names in the Semantic Web, ranging from a strict localized model-theoretic semantics to proposals for a unified single meaning. We argue that a slight expansion of the standard model-theoretic semantics for names is sufficient for the present, and can easily be augmented where necessary to allow communities of interest to strengthen this spartan theory of meaning.
Meteor-s web service annotation framework
Authors: Abhijit A. Patil, Swapna A. Oundhakar, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The World Wide Web is emerging not only as an infrastructure for data, but also for a broader variety of resources that are increasingly being made available as Web services. Relevant current standards like UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP are in their fledgling years and form the basis of making Web services a workable and broadly adopted technology. However, realizing the fuller scope of the promise of Web services and associated service oriented architecture will requite further technological advances in the areas of service interoperation, service discovery, service composition, and process orchestration. Semantics, especially as supported by the use of ontologies, and related Semantic Web technologies, are likely to provide better qualitative and scalable solutions to these requirements. Just as semantic annotation of data in the Semantic Web is the first critical step to better search, integration and analytics over heterogeneous data, semantic annotation of Web services is an equally critical first step to achieving the above promise. Our approach is to work with existing Web services technologies and combine them with ideas from the Semantic Web to create a better framework for Web service discovery and composition. In this paper we present MWSAF (METEOR-S Web Service Annotation Framework), a framework for semi-automatically marking up Web service descriptions with ontologies. We have developed algorithms to match and annotate WSDL files with relevant ontologies. We use domain ontologies to categorize Web services into domains. An empirical study of our approach is presented to help evaluate its performance.
Clustering e-commerce search engines
Authors: Qian Peng, Weiyi Meng, Hai He, Clement T. Yu
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

In this paper, we sketch a method for clustering e-commerce search engines by the type of products/services they sell. This method utilizes the special features of interface pages of such search engines. We also provide an analysis of different types of ESE interface pages.
SEMPL: a semantic portal
Authors: Matthew Perry, E. Stiles
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Semantic Web technology is intended for the retrieval, collection, and analysis of meaningful data with significant automation afforded by machine understandability of data [1]. As one illustration of semantic web technology in action, we present SEMPL, a semantic web portal for the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems lab (LSDIS) at the University of Georgia. SEMPL, which is powered by a state of the art commercial system, Semagix Freedom [7], uses an ontology-driven approach to provide semantic browsing, linking, and contextual querying of content within the portal. By using the ontology based information integration technique, SEMPL can specify the context of a particular piece of research information, annotate web pages, and provide links to semantically related areas enabling a rich contextual retrieval of information.
Distribution of relevant documents in domain-level aggregates for topic distillation
Authors: Vassilis Plachouras, Iadh Ounis
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

In this paper, we study the distribution of relevant documents in aggregates, formed by grouping the retrieved documents according to their domain. For each aggregate, we take into account its size, and a measure of the correlation between its incoming and outgoing hyperlinks. We report on a preliminary experiment with two TREC topic distillation tasks, where we find that larger aggregates, or those aggregates with correlated hyperlinks, are more likely to contain relevant documents. This result shows that the distribution of domain-level aggregates is potentially useful for finding relevant documents.
Ontological representation of learning objects: building interoperable vocabulary and structures
Authors: Jian Qin, Naybell Hernández
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

The ontological representation of learning objects is a way to deal with the interoperability and reusability of learning objects (including metadata) through providing a semantic infrastructure that will explicitly declare the semantics and forms of concepts used in labeling learning objects. This paper reports the preliminary result from a learning object ontology construction project, which includes an in-depth study of 14 learning objects and over 500 components in these learning objects. An analysis of the types of components and terms used in these objects reveals that most terms fell into the form and subject categories few pedagogical terms were used. Drawing findings from literature and case study, the authors use a matrix to show relationships in learning objects and relevant knowledge and technologies. Strategies and methods in ontology development and implementation are also discussed.
Interpreting distributed ontologies
Authors: Yuzhong Qu, Zhiqiang Gao
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

Semantic Web is challenged by the URI meaning issues arising from putting ontologies in open and distributed environments. As a try to clarify some of the meaning issues, this paper proposes a new approach to interpreting distributed ontologies, it's built on the top of local models semantics, and extends it to deal with the URI sharing by harmonizing the local models via agreement on vocabulary provenance. The commitment relationship is presented to allow the URI sharing between ontologies with richer semantics.
OREL: an ontology-based rights expression language
Authors: Yuzhong Qu, Xiang Zhang, Huiying Li
Venue: WWW
Year: 2004

This paper proposes an Ontology-based Rights Expression Language, called OREL. Based on OWL Web Ontology Language, OREL allows not only users but also machines to handle digital rights at semantics level. The ontology-based rights model of OREL is also presented. The usage of OREL and its advantages against existing RELs are discussed.