Emerging topic tracking system in WWW

Due to its open characteristic, the Web is being posted with vast amount of new information changes continuously. Consequently, at any time, it is conceivable that there will be hot issues (emerging topics) being discussed in any information area on the Web. However, it is not practical for the user to browse the Web manually all the time for the changes. Thus, we need this Emerging Topic Tracking System (ETTS) as an information agent, to detect the changes in the information area of our interest and generate a summary of changes back to us regularly. This summary of changes will be telling the latest most discussed issues and thus revealing the emerging topics in the particular information area. With this system, we will be ‘all time aware’ of the latest trends of the WWW information space.     

一种计算求精网页主题抽取结果的方法

传统的主题抽取方法单纯依靠分析网页内容的来自动获取网页主题，其分析结果并不十分精确．在WWW上，网页之间通过超链接来互相联系，而链接关系紧密的网页趋向于属于同一主题、基于这一思想，本文提出了一种利用Web链接结构信息来对主题抽取结果进行求精的方法，其通过所链接网页对本网页的影响来修正本网页的主题权值．本文还通过一个实际应用例子，分析了这一方法的特点。     

面向综合集成研讨环境的主动信息获取方法*

针对在综合集成研讨环境中,由于存在时间压力,传统的网络信息获取方法难以直接使用,提出了一种面向综合集成研讨环境的主动信息获取方法。该方法将领域词条与通用词条相结合,从发言文本流中实时提取话题,并在话题发生变化时自动生成检索词送入搜索引擎进行检索,再通过多个用户之间的协作推荐实现对重要检索结果的筛选。实验结果表明,这种方法可为综合集成研讨系统的用户提供及时、准确、上下文相关的信息服务。     

Information mediation in cyberspace: Scalable methods for declarative information networks

An end-to-end discussion, from logical architecture to implementation, of issues and design decisions in declarative information networks is presented. A declarative information network is defined to be a dynamic and decentralized structure where value-added services are declared and applied as mediators in a scalable and controlled manner. A primary result is the need to adopt dynamically linked ontologies as the semantic basis for knowledge sharing in scalable networks. It is shown that data mining techniques provide a promising basis upon which to explore and develop this result. Our prototype system, entitled Mystique, is described in terms of KQML, distributed object management, and distributed agent execution. An example shows how we map our architecture into the World Wide Web (WWW) and transform the appearance of the WWW into an intelligently integrated and multi-subject distributed information network.     

Early detection method for emerging topics based on dynamic bayesian networks in micro-blogging networks

Micro-blogging networks have become the most influential online social networks in recent years, more and more people are used to obtain and diffuse information in them. Detecting topics from a great number of tweets in micro-blogging is important for information propagation and business marketing, especially detecting emerging topics in the early period could strongly support these real-time intelligent systems, such as real-time recommendation, ad-targeting, marketing strategy. However, most of previous researches are useful to detect emerging topic on a large scale, but they are not so effective for the early detection due to less informative properties in a relatively small size. To solve this problem, we propose a new early detection method for emerging topics based on Dynamic Bayesian Networks in micro-blogging networks. We first analyze the topic diffusion process and find two main characteristics of emerging topic which are attractiveness and key-node. Then based on this finding, we select features from the topology properties of topic diffusion, and build a DBN-based model by the conditional dependencies between features to identify the emerging keywords. An emerging keyword not only occurs in a given time period with frequency properties, but also diffuses with specific topology properties. Finally, we cluster the emerging keywords into emerging topics by the co-occurrence relations between keywords. Based on the real data of Sina micro-blogging, the experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective and capable of detecting the emerging topics one to two hours earlier than the other methods.     

Finding Order in a Chaotic World

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) has a decentralized information environment and a non-linear (hypertext) information structure. This non-linear structure allows users to retrieve information at many different levels but also increases the difficulty of information retrieval. Unlike a well-developed CD-ROM database, the WWW does not have a controlled searching environment and information can be indexed in many different ways. It takes a well planned search strategy to perform an effective search in the labyrinth of the WWW. The SIRO (Systematic Information Retrieval/Organization) model offers a research planning process designed specifically for information seekers in the agricultural disciplines. The intention is to enhance search results and organize retrieved information. This process starts with the identification of the information structure on the WWW, then proceeds by organizing and analyzing information in a visual diagram or a “thinking map.” This process leads searchers to logical sources on the WWW and a systematic analysis of the result.     

Extending the TAM for a World-Wide-Web context

Ease of use and usefulness are believed to be fundamental in determining the acceptance and use of various, corporate ITs. These beliefs, however, may not explain the user’s behavior toward newly emerging ITs, such as the World-Wide-Web (WWW).In this study, we introduce playfulness as a new factor that reflects the user’s intrinsic belief in WWW acceptance. Using it as an intrinsic motivation factor, we extend and empirically validate the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) for the WWW context.     

Distributed Virtual Reality Authoring Interfaces for the WWW: The VR-Shop Case

Electronic commerce is emerging as an important domain of integration and enhancement of more specific technologies and research efforts. It is clear that the role of WWW in this context is a cornerstone as the medium of information dissemination. A trend in e-commerce is to provide to the potential customers the ability to view and try the products in a persuasive 3D representation. We have designed and implemented a system for WWW enabled interactive design & visualization of a room, definition of pieces of furniture and placement of domestic appliances. The system conveys a generic approach for distributed creation and update of virtual worlds as means of interaction and information dissemination in an e-commerce context.     

Virtual marketplaces: Building Management Information Systems for internet brokerage

On the World Wide Web (WWW), an increasing number of new trading forms for brokerage of business transactions are emerging. Almost inevitably, central contactpoints on the WWW are being formed, so-called virtual marketplaces, where supply and demand meet. The organisation they require is carried out by a central operator, who offers his brokerage services on a business footing. The aim of this paper is the generation of practical components of a Management Information System (MIS) for such marketplaces that are only accessible online. To do this, the theoretical assumptions of virtual marketplaces are combined with a case study of a German internet-broker for used cars.     

Exploring novice users' training needs in searching information on the WWW

Abstract Searching for information on the WWW involves locating a website and locating information on that site. A recent study implied that novice users' training needs exclusively relate to locating websites. The present case study tried to reveal the knowledge and skills that constitute these training needs. Fourteen pre‐university students, classified as novice (n = 7) or experienced WWW‐user (n = 7) performed three web search tasks. Their actions and verbalisations were recorded. Between‐group comparisons showed minimal performance differences. However, qualitative analyses of novice users' search performance suggest that their ability to locate websites could be enhanced by instructing monitoring skills and advanced system knowledge.     

Caching for Web Searching

Abstract. We study Web Caching when the input sequence is a depth first search traversal of some tree. There are at least two good motivations for investigating tree traversal as a search technique on the WWW: First, empirical studies of people browsing and searching the WWW have shown that user access patterns commonly are nearly depth first traversals of some tree. Secondly (as we will show in this paper), the problem of visiting all the pages on some WWW site using anchor clicks (clicks on links) and back button clicks—by far the two most common user actions—reduces to the problem of how best to cache a tree traversal sequence (up to constant factors). We show that for tree traversal sequences the optimal offline strategy can be computed efficiently. In the bit model, where the access time of a page is proportional to its size, we show that the online algorithm LRU is (1 + 1/ɛ) -competitive against an adversary with unbounded cache as long as LRU has a cache of size at least (1+ ɛ) times the size of the largest item in the input sequence. In the general model, where pages have arbitrary access times and sizes, we show that in order to be constant competitive, any online algorithm needs a cache large enough to store Ω(log n) pages; here n is the number of distinct pages in the input sequence. We provide a matching upper bound by showing that the online algorithm Landlord is constant competitive against an adversary with an unbounded cache if Landlord has a cache large enough to store the Ω(log n) largest pages. This is further theoretical evidence that Landlord is the ``right' algorithm for Web Caching.     

Ethical norms and issues in crowdsourcing practices: A Habermasian analysis

Crowdsourcing practices have generated much discussion on their ethics and fairness, yet these topics have received little scholarly investigation. Some have criticized crowdsourcing for worker exploitation and for undermining workplace regulations. Others have lauded crowdsourcing for enabling workers' autonomy and allowing disadvantaged people to access previously unreachable job markets. In this paper, we examine the ethics in crowdsourcing practices by focusing on three questions: (a) What ethical issues exist in crowdsourcing practices? (b) are ethical norms emerging or are issues emerging that require ethical norms? and, more generally, (c) how can the ethics of crowdsourcing practices be established? We answer these questions by engaging with Jürgen Habermas' discourse ethics theory to interpret findings from a longitudinal field study (from 2013 to 2016) involving key crowdsourcing participants (workers, platform organizers, and requesters) of three crowdsourcing communities. Grounded in this empirical study, we identify ethical concerns and discuss the ones for which ethical norms have emerged as well as others which remain unresolved and problematic in crowdsourcing practices. Furthermore, we provide normative considerations of how ethical concerns can be identified, discussed, and resolved based on the principles of discourse ethics.     

Gratifications and Seeding Behavior of Online Adolescents

Several studies indicate that only a small minority of Web 2.0 users actively participates, while the minority do not contribute at all. This article investigates whether a similar division applies for adolescents' Internet behavior. Using Szuprowicz’ (1995) typology of interactivity, we distinguish different types of user‐generated content (UGC): media, narrative, and metadata UGC. Our results show a 20%–80% division between high‐ and low‐frequency seeders. Furthermore, we utilize the uses‐and‐gratifications paradigm to investigate how these high‐ and low‐frequency seeders differ in their overall gratifications obtained by WWW use. Although the gratifications' rank orders are identical for all groups, their magnitudes differ significantly. Finally, this article focuses on how these WWW gratifications can predict seeding, while controlling for socio‐demographics and usage frequency.     

基于自动分类的网页机器人

随着互联网的普及和发展，网络上的信息资源越来越丰富，它需要高效智能的工具来完成信息资源的采集。WWW上的网页抓取器，又称Robot讨论了抓取器与文本自动分类器相结合，对用户要求领域网页的收集。抓取器找到相关链接进行抓取，而避免对非相关链接的抓取。这样可以节省硬件、网络资源和提高抓取器的效率。     

Building large-scale digital libraries

In this era of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the long-time topic of digital libraries has suddenly become white hot. As the Internet expands, particularly the WWW, more people are recognizing the need to search indexed collections. The paper discusses some of the Digital Library Initiative (DLI) projects which are a good measure of the research into large scale digital libraries. They span a wide range of the major topics necessary to develop the National Information Infrastructure     

Finding Diachronic Like‐Minded Users

User communities in social networks are usually identified by considering explicit structural social connections between users. While such communities can reveal important information about their members such as family or friendship ties and geographical proximity, just to name a few, they do not necessarily succeed at pulling like‐minded users that share the same interests together. Therefore, researchers have explored the topical similarity of social content to build like‐minded communities of users. In this article, following the topic‐based approaches, we are interested in identifying communities of users that share similar topical interests with similar temporal behavior. More specifically, we tackle the problem of identifying temporal (diachronic) topic‐based communities, i.e., communities of users who have a similar temporal inclination toward emerging topics. To do so, we utilize multivariate time series analysis to model the contributions of each user toward emerging topics. Further, our modeling is completely agnostic to the underlying topic detection method. We extract topics of interest by employing seminal topic detection methods; one graph‐based and two latent Dirichlet allocation‐based methods. Through our experiments on Twitter data, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed temporal topic‐based community detection method in the context of news recommendation, user prediction, and document timestamp prediction applications, compared with the nontemporal as well as the state‐of‐the‐art temporal approaches.     

Discovering and tracking query oriented active online social groups in dynamic information network

The efficient identification of social groups with common interests is a key consideration for viral marketing in online social networking platforms. Most existing studies in social groups or community detection either focus on the common attributes of the nodes (users) or rely on only the topological links of the social network graph. The temporal evolution of user activities and interests have not been thoroughly studied to identify their effects on the formation of groups. In this paper, we investigate the problem of discovering and tracking time-sensitive activity driven user groups in dynamic social networks for a given input query consisting a set of topics. The users in these groups have the tendency to be temporally similar in terms of their activities on the topics of interest. To this end, we develop two baseline solutions to discover effective social groups. The first solution uses the network structure, whereas the second one uses the topics of common interest. We further propose an index-based method to incrementally track the evolution of groups with a lower computational cost. Our main idea is based on the observation that the degree of user activeness often degrades or upgrades widely over a period of time. The temporal tendency of user activities is modelled as the freshness of recent activities by tracking the social streams with a fading time window. We conduct extensive experiments on three real data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods. We also report some interesting observations on the temporal evolution of the discovered social groups using case studies.

     

HyperTree: a structural approach to web authoring

The expansion of the World Wide Web (WWW) has created an increasing need for tools capable of supporting WWW authors in composing documents using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Currently, most web authors use tools which are basically ordinary text editors and have additional features to facilitate the easy and correct use of HTML tags. This approach places the burden on the web author to design and then create the entire web site in a top-down fashion, without any explicit support for the structural design of the site. In this paper we discuss an alternative structural approach to Web authoring, which is based on the use of the HyperTree hypermedia system as the central authoring tool. The advantages of using HyperTree are two-dimensional. Firstly, web authors can manage a web site as a single complete hypermedia database. For example, HyperTree provides facilities like the automatic creation of indices and the discovery of link inconsistencies. Additionally, it organizes the web pages in an easy to understand hierarchy without using any HTML directly. Secondly, web end-users can benefit from the use of HyperTree, since seeking information in structured web sites is generally less disorientating and develops fewer cognitive overheads. ©1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Using VRML-based visualisations to facilitate information retrieval in the world wide web

With the explosive growth of information in the WWW, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the user to find information of interest. Visualisations may be helpful in assisting the users in their information retrieval task. Effective visualisation of the structure of a WWW site is extremely useful for browsing through the site. Visualisation can also be used to augment a WWW search engine when too many or too few results are retrieved. In this paper, we discuss several visualisations we have developed to facilitate information retrieval on the WWW. With VRML becoming the standard for graphics on the Web and efficient VRML browsers becoming available, VRML was used for developing these visualisations. Unique visualisations like focus + context views of WWW nodes and semantic visualisation are presented and examples are given on scenarios where the visualisations are useful.