OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The distribution of pageRank follows a power-law only for particular values of the damping factor
Authors: Luca Becchetti, Carlos Castillo
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

The empirical distribution of PageRank in a large sample of Web pages does not follow a powerlaw except for particular choices of the damping factor. The tail, comprising 5%10 % of the nodes, always follows a power law, but the distribution for the remaining 90%95 % of pages varies. This was observed in several Web samples having from 1 to 50 million pages with damping factors from 0.1 to 0.9 and the resulting behavior was very similar, specially if we restrict the sample to the main strongly connected component. DoublePareto Model As in [Mitzenmacher 2003], we can fit the powerlaw to the body and the tail of the distribution separately, as in the figure on the right. Given that the minimum value of PageRank is the baseline probability (1-α / N) if we assume the following: (i) The exponent of the body is equal to the exponent of the tail (ii)The distribution is normalized to 1, as in the case of PageRank (iii) N&gt;&gt; 1... we can show that the intersection point of the first figure, 1-F(1/N) does Conjecture not depend on N: 1-F(1/N) ≃ (1-α) θ-1 In a graph with powerlaw exponent θ for the indegree, calculating PageRank with: If we accept the hypothesis in [Pandurangan et al. 2002], that is, the powerlaw exponent for the distribution of the tail of the PageRank values is the same as for the indegree of pages, then: α = 1 θ – 1 In our collection of 1 million nodes with θ=2.2 and α=0.85, the Yields a powerlaw over the entire range of values value predicted for 1F(1/N) is 0.10 and the observed 0.12 In the WebBase collection of 130 million documents with θ=2.07 and α=0.85 the predicted value is 0.13, and the 0.16 Examples: θ=2.1, then α=0.90 yields a powerlaw θ=2.2, then α=0.83 yields a powerlawLognormal + Baseline Model Let X be a random variable distributed according to a lognormal distribution. We propose the following model for the PageRank distribution: X + (1-α)/N To obtain the lognormal parameters, we fit this to the distribution of PageRank with α=0.99. Then using the same parameters, we can fit the PageRank distribution obtained with other damping factors with high precision. Fit with our model: Fit with a powerlaw:
Detecting nepotistic links by language model disagreement
Authors: András A. Benczúr, István Bíró, Károly Csalogány, Máté Uher
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

In this short note we demonstrate the applicability of hyperlink downweighting by means of language model disagreement. The method filters out hyperlinks with no relevance to the target page without the need of white and blacklists or human interaction. We fight various forms of nepotism such as common maintainers, ads, link exchanges or misused affiliate programs. Our method is tested on a 31 M page crawl of the .de domain with a manually classified 1000-page random sample.
BuzzRank ... and the trend is your friend
Authors: Klaus Berberich, Srikanta J. Bedathur, Michalis Vazirgiannis, Gerhard Weikum
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

Ranking methods like PageRank assess the importance of Web pages based on the current state of the rapidly evolving Web graph. The dynamics of the resulting importance scores, however, have not been considered yet, although they provide the key to an understanding of the Zeitgeist on the Web. This paper proposes the BuzzRank method that quantifies trends in time series of importance scores and is based on a relevant growth model of importance scores. We experimentally demonstrate the usefulness of BuzzRank on a bibliographic dataset.
Bootstrapping semantics on the web: meaning elicitation from schemas
Authors: Paolo Bouquet, Luciano Serafini, Stefano Zanobini, Simone Sceffer
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

In most web sites, web-based applications (such as web portals, e-marketplaces, search engines), and in the file systems of personal computers, a wide variety of schemas (such as taxonomies, directory trees, thesauri, Entity-Relationship schemas, RDF Schemas) are published which (i) convey a clear meaning to humans (e.g. help in the navigation of large collections of documents), but (ii) convey only a small fraction (if any) of their meaning to machines, as their intended meaning is not formally/explicitly represented. In this paper we present a general methodology for automatically eliciting and representing the intended meaning of these structures, and for making this meaning available in domains like information integration and interoperability, web service discovery and composition, peer-to-peer knowledge management, and semantic browsers. We also present an implementation (called CtxMatch2) of how such a method can be used for semantic interoperability.
Capturing RIA concepts in a web modeling language
Authors: Alessandro Bozzon, Sara Comai, Piero Fraternali, Giovanni Toffetti Carughi
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

This work addresses conceptual modeling and automatic code generation for Rich Internet Applications, a variant of Web-based systems bridging the gap between desktop and Web interfaces. The approach we propose is a first step towards a full integration of RIA paradigms into the Web development process, enabling the specification of complex Web solutions mixing HTTP+HTML and Rich Internet Applications, using a single modeling language and tool.
Meaning on the web: evolution vs intelligent design?
Authors: Ron Brachman, Dan Connolly, Rohit Khare, Frank Smadja, Frank van Harmelen
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

It is a truism that as the Web grows in size and scope, it becomes harder to find what we want, to identify like-minded people and communities, to find the best ads to offer, and to have applications work together smoothly. Services don't interoperate; queries yield long lists of results, most of which seem to miss the point. If the Web were a person, we would expect richer and more successful interactions with it - interactions that were, quite literally, more meaningful. That's because in human discourse, it is shared meaning that gives us real communication. Yet with the current Web, meaning cannot be found.Much recent work has aspired to change this, both for human-machine interchange and machine-machine synchronization. Certainly the "semantic web" looks to add meaning to our current simplistic matching of mere strings of characters against mere "bags" of words. But can we legislate meaning from on high? Isn't meaning organic and determined by use, a moving and context-dependent target? But if meaning is an evolving organic soup, how are humans able to get anything done with one another? Don't we love to "define our terms"? But then again, is real definition even possible?These questions have daunted philosophers for years, and we probably won't solve them here. But we'll try to understand what's at the root of our own current religious debate: should meaning on the Web be evolutionary, driven organically through the bottom-up human assignment of tags? Or does it need to be carefully crafted and managed by a higher authority, using structured representations with defined semantics? Without picket signs or violence (we hope), our panelists will explore the two extreme ends of the spectrum - and several points in between.
The new economy: an engineer's perspective
Authors: David Brown
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

From his twin perspectives as a career-long telecommunications engineer and Chairman of one of the UK's largest electronics companies, Sir David Brown will reflect on whether and when the New Economy, seemingly so long coming, will finally arrive. He will begin by exploring how the prospect of everything being digital; everyone having broadband; and intelligence being everywhere is changing our understanding of mobility. Then he will comment on the economic effects of that changed understanding under three headings - the macroeconomy, microeconomy and socioeconomy - before suggesting the criteria we might use to decide when the New Economy has arrived.
Reappraising cognitive styles in adaptive web applications
Authors: Elizabeth J. Brown, Tim J. Brailsford, Tony Fisher, Adam Moore, Helen Ashman
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

The mechanisms for personalisation used in web applications are currently the subject of much debate amongst researchers from many diverse subject areas. One of the most contemporary ideas for user modelling in web applications is that of cognitive styles, where a user's psychological preferences are assessed stored in a database and then used to provide personalised content and/or links. We describe user trials of a case study that utilises visual-verbal preferences in an adaptive web-based educational system (AWBES). Students in this trial were assessed by the Felder-Solomon Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS) instrument, and their preferences were used as a means of content personalisation.Contrary to previous findings by other researchers, we found no significant differences in performance between matched and mismatched students. Conclusions are drawn about the value and validity of using cognitive styles as a way of modelling user preferences in educational web applications.
Status of the African Web
Authors: Rizza Camus Caminero, Pavol Zavarsky, Yoshiki Mikami
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

As part of the Language Observatory Project [4], we have been crawling all the web space since 2004. We have collected terabytes of data mostly from Asian and African ccTLDs. In this paper, we present results of the current status of the African web and compare it with its status in 2004 and 2002. This paper focuses on the accessibility of the web pages, the web tree growth, web technology, privacy protection, and web interconnection.
A framework for XML data streams history checking and monitoring
Authors: Alessandro Campi, Paola Spoletini
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

The need of formal verification is a problem that involves all the fields in which sensible data are managed. In this context the verification of data streams became a fundamental task. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework, based on the model checker SPIN, for the verification of data streams.The proposed method uses a linear temporal logic, called TRIO, to describe data constraints and properties. Constraints are automatically translated into Promela, the input language of the model checker SPIN in order to verify them.
Site level noise removal for search engines
Authors: André Luiz da Costa Carvalho, Paul-Alexandru Chirita, Edleno Silva de Moura, Pável Calado, Wolfgang Nejdl
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

The currently booming search engine industry has determined many online organizations to attempt to artificially increase their ranking in order to attract more visitors to their web sites. In the same time, the growth of the web has also inherently generated several navigational hyperlink structures which have a negative impact on the importance measures employed by current search engines. In this paper we propose and evaluate algorithms for identifying all these noisy links over the web graph, may them be spam or simple relationships between real world entities represented by sites, replication of content, etc. Unlike prior work, we target a different type of noisy link structures, residing at the site level, instead of the page level. We thus investigate and annihilate site level mutual reinforcement relationships, abnormal support coming from one site towards another, as well as complex link alliances between web sites. Our experiments with the link database of the TodoBR search engine show a very strong increase in the quality of the output rankings after having applied our techniques.
From adaptation engineering to aspect-oriented context-dependency
Authors: Sven Casteleyn, Zoltán Fiala, Geert-Jan Houben, Kees van der Sluijs
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

The evolution of the Web requires to consider an increasing number of context-dependency issues. Therefore, in our research we focus on how to extend a Web application with additional adaptation concerns without having to redesign the entire application. Based on a generic transcoding tool we illustrate here how we can add adaptation functionality to an existing Web application. Furthermore, we consider how an aspect-oriented approach can support the high-level specification of such additional concerns in the design of the Web application.
Requirements for multimedia document enrichment
Authors: Ajay Chakravarthy, Vitaveska Lanfranchi, Fabio Ciravegna
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

Nowadays a large and growing percentage of information is stored in various multimedia formats. In order for multimedia information to be efficiently utilised by users, it is very important to add suitable metadata. In this paper we will present AKTiveMedia, a tool for enriching multimedia documents with semantic information.
Personalization and accessibility: integration of library and web approaches
Authors: Ann Chapman, Brian Kelly, Liddy Nevile, Andy Heath
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

This paper describes personalization metadata standards that can be used to enable individuals to access and use resources based on a user's particular requirements. The paper describes two approaches which are being developed in the library and Web worlds and highlights some of the potential challenges which will need to be addressed in order to maximise interoperability. The paper concludes by arguing the need for greater dialogue across these two communities.
The ODESeW 2.0 semantic web application framework
Authors: Óscar Corcho, Angel López-Cima, Asunción Gómez-Pérez
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

We describe the architecture of the ODESeW 2.0 Semantic Web application development platform, which has been used to generate the internal and external Web sites of several R&D projects.
System for spatio-temporal analysis of online news and blogs
Authors: Angelo Dalli
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

Previous work on spatio-temporal analysis of news items and other documents has largely focused on broad categorization of small text collections by region or country. A system for large-scale spatio-temporal analysis of online news media and blogs is presented, together with an analysis of global news media coverage over a nine year period. We demonstrate the benefits of using a hierarchical geospatial database to disambiguate between geographical named entities, and provide results for an extremely fine-grained analysis of news items. Aggregate maps of media attention for particular places around the world are compared with geographical and socio-economic data. Our analysis suggests that GDP per capita is the best indicator for media attention.
A case for software assurance
Authors: Mary Ann Davidson
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

Information technology has become "infrastructure technology," as most sectors of critical infrastructure rest on an IT backbone. Yet IT systems are not yet designed to be as safe, secure and reliable as physical infrastructure. Improving the security worthiness of commercial software requires a significant change in the development and product delivery process across the board. The security worthiness of all commercial software - from all vendors - demands that assurance became a critical focus for both providers and customers of IT. During Oracle's long history of building and delivering secure software, we continue to invest heavily in building security into each component of the product lifecycle. This is also an "organic" process which is regularly being enhanced to improve overall security practices. Our efforts have evolved from a formal development process to now additionally include secure coding standards, intensive developer training, innovative "bug finding" tools and working with leading vendors to "raise the bar" for all of industry as it pertains to security.
Phoiling phishing
Authors: Rachna Dhamija, Peter Cassidy, Phillip M. Hallam-Baker, Markus Jacobsson
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

In the last few years, Internet users have seen the rapid expansion of "phishing", the use of spoofed e-mails and fraudulent websites designed to trick users into divulging sensitive data. More recently, we have seen the growth of "pharming", the use of malware or DNS-based attacks to misdirect users to rogue websites. In this panel, we will examine the state of the art in anti-phishing solutions and explore promising directions for future research.
Analysis of WWW traffic in Cambodia and Ghana
Authors: Bowei Du, Michael J. Demmer, Eric A. Brewer
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

In this paper we present an analysis of HTTP traffic captured from Internet cafés and kiosks from two different developing countries -- Cambodia and Ghana. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a analysis of the characteristics of the web trace, including the distribution and classification of the web objects requested by the users. We outline notable features of the data set which effect the performance of the web for users in developing regions. Using the trace data, we also perform several simulation analyses of cache performance, including both traditional caching and more novel off-line caching proposals. The second contribution is a set of suggestions on mechanisms to improve the user experience of the web in these regions. These mechanisms include both applications of well-known research techniques as well as offering some less well-studied suggestions based on intermittent connectivity.
Towards practical genre classification of web documents
Authors: George Ferizis, Peter Bailey
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

Classification of documents by genre is typically done either using linguistic analysis or term frequency based techniques. The former provides better classification accuracy than the latter but at the cost of two orders of magnitude more computation time. While term frequency analysis requires much less computational resources than linguistic analysis,it returns poor classification accuracy when the genres are not sufficiently distinct. A method that removes or approximates the expensive portions of linguistic analysis is presented.The accuracy and computation time of this method then compared with both linguistic analysis and term frequency analysis. The results in this paper show that this method can significantly reduce the computation of both time of linguistic analysis and term frequency analysis, while retaining an accuracy that is higher than that of term frequency analysis.
Compressing and searching XML data via two zips
Authors: Paolo Ferragina, Fabrizio Luccio, Giovanni Manzini, S. Muthukrishnan
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

XML is fast becoming the standard format to store, exchange and publish over the web, and is getting embedded in applications. Two challenges in handling XML are its size (the XML representation of a document is significantly larger than its native state) and the complexity of its search (XML search involves path and content searches on labeled tree structures). We address the basic problems of compression, navigation and searching of XML documents. In particular, we adopt recently proposed theoretical algorithms [11] for succinct tree representations to design and implement a compressed index for XML, called XBZIPiNDEX, in which the XML document is maintained in a highly compressed format, and both navigation and searching can be done uncompressing only a tiny fraction of the data. This solution relies on compressing and indexing two arrays derived from the XML data. With detailed experiments we compare this with other compressed XML indexing and searching engines to show that XBZIPiNDEX has compression ratio up to 35% better than the ones achievable by those other tools, and its time performance on some path and content search operations is order of magnitudes faster: few milliseconds over hundreds of MBs of XML files versus tens of seconds, on standard XML data sources.
Living the TV revolution: unite MHP to the web or face IDTV irrelevance!
Authors: Stefano Ferretti, Marco Roccetti, Johannes Andrich
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

The union of Interactive Digital TV (IDTV) and Web promotes the development of new interactive multimedia services, enjoyable while watching TV even on the new handheld digital TV receivers. Yet, several design constraints complicate the deployment of this new pattern of services. Indeed, for a suitable presentation on a TV set, Web contents must be structured in such a way that they can be effectively displayed on TV screens via low-end Set Top Boxes (STBs). Moreover, usable interfaces for IDTV platforms are needed which ensure a smooth access to contents. Our claim is that the distribution of Web contents over the IDTV broadcast channels may bring IDTV to a new life. A failure of this attempt may put IDTV on a progressive track towards irrelevance. We propose a system for the distribution of Web contents towards IDTV under the Digital Video Broadcasting - Multimedia Home Platform (DVB-MHP) standard. Our system is able to automatically transcode Web contents and ensure a proper visualization on IDTV. The system is endowed with a client application which permits to easily browse contents on the TV via a remote control. Real assessments have confirmed the effectiveness for such an automatic online service able to reconfigure Web contents for an appropriate distribution and presentation on IDTV.
Background knowledge for ontology construction
Authors: Blaz Fortuna, Marko Grobelnik, Dunja Mladenic
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

In this paper we describe a solution for incorporating background knowledge into the OntoGen system for semi-automatic ontology construction. This makes it easier for different users to construct different and more personalized ontologies for the same domain. To achieve this we introduce a word weighting schema to be used in the document representation. The weighting schema is learned based on the background knowledge provided by user. It is than used by OntoGen's machine learning and text mining algorithms.
Generation of multimedia TV news contents for WWW
Authors: Hsin-Chia Fu, Yeong-Yuh Xu, Cheng-Lung Tseng
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

In this paper, we present a system we have developed for automatic TV News video indexing that successfully combines results from the fields of speaker verification, acoustic analysis, very large vocabulary video OCR, content based sampling of video, information retrieval, dialogue systems, and ASF media delivery over IP. The prototype of TV news content processing Web was completed in July 2003. Since then, the system has been up running continuously. Up to the date when this message is written (March 27, 2006), the system records and analyzes the prime time evening news program in Taiwan every day of these years, except a few power failure shutdown. The TV news web is at http://140.113.216.64/NewsQuery/main.as
Safeguard against unicode attacks: generation and applications of UC-simlist
Authors: Anthony Y. Fu, Wan Zhang, Xiaotie Deng, Liu Wenyin
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

A severe potential security problem in utilization of Unicode on the Web is identified, which is resulted from the fact that there are many similar characters in the Universal Character Set (UCS). The foundation of our solution relies on evaluating the similarity of characters in UCS. We develop a solution based on the renowned Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) method to establish such a Unicode Similarity List (UC-SimList).
An audio/video analysis mechanism for web indexing
Authors: Marco Furini, Marco Aragone
Venue: WWW
Year: 2006

The high availability of video streams is making necessary mechanisms for indexing such contents in the Web world. In this paper we focus on news programs and we propose a mechanism that integrates low and high level video features to provide a high level semantic description. A color/luminance analysis is coupled with audio analysis to provide a better identification of all the video segments that compose the video stream. Each video segment is subject to speech detection and is described through MPEG7 so that the resulting metadata description can be used to index the video stream. An experimental evaluation shows the benefits of integrating audio and video analysis.