Optimizing Sensing: From Water to the Web

Where should we place sensors to quickly detect contamination in drinking water distribution networks? Which blogs should we read to learn about the biggest stories on the Web? Such problems are typically NP-hard in theory and extremely challenging in practice. The authors present algorithms that exploit submodularity to efficiently find provably near-optimal solutions to large, complex real-world sensing problems.     

SWAP: leveraging the Web to manage workflow

Many organizations are beginning to discover what workflow vendors already know-namely, that the real value of the Web lies not just in its documents and resources, but also in the activities surrounding them. Collaborative work involves not only handoff and routing of data between humans, but the coordination of activities among them and with automated agents as well. Workflow engines typically ensure that the information ends up on the right desktop along with the tools to accomplish a slated task. It is difficult to synchronize work and activity tracking within a technically diverse organization. Tools and formats typically differ among workgroups, as do skill levels and understanding among individual participants in a process. Browser-based user interfaces offer a mechanism to easily access distributed information and hand off documents and data over the Web, but at the expense of being able to effectively manage and track work activities. Web protocols provide no inherent support for automated change notification, handoff of control, or initiation of human- and computer-executed activities. In essence, there is no standard way for service requests to trigger a workflow process and monitor it across platforms and between organizations     

Navigation by pointing to GPS locations

This article deals with a method for interacting with a handheld navigation application, based on using the mobile device for pointing. When the user points the device in any direction, feedback will be provided based on if the user is aiming at the next point in the track or beside it. The presented study has been performed in order to get a better understanding of how the basic parameters in this type of interaction—like the angle for pointing and the size of the target—influence the navigation performance. We have applied a dual investigation by running a computer simulation varying additional parameters such as GPS accuracy and user behavior, and also running an in-context study with 15 participants in a realistic outdoor setting with real location-based GPS data. The study has resulted in general recommendations for angle intervals and the radius of the circles surrounding the track points.     

Social networks: from the Web to the enterprise

Social networks are just one layer of functionality for next-generation enterprise portals. They are implemented in the context of other knowledge discovery and management functions. At Verity, we place them at the top of a three-layer knowledge infrastructure. At the bottom is a discovery layer that addresses the general area of search, including parametric and role-based search, security, and ranking mechanisms. In between these basics and the implicit structures of social networks is the content organization layer, which addresses issues of classification, taxonomies, and profiling. The key to next-generation enterprise portals is to integrate all three layers into a knowledge management experience that demonstrably improves user productivity     

New approach to facility locations decisions

In a rapidly changing and complex environment, facility location decisions require careful evaluation; both quantitative and qualitative factors must be considered. Existing methods emphasize the quantitative aspects of such decisions. In this paper, we introduce a new method that provides a framework for a comprehensive analysis of both qualitative and quantitative factors in order to reach a logical and rational decision for choosing a site.     

Attaching context-aware services to moving locations

User information and communication resources - such as precise location information and direction, altitude, light, and humidity measurements (via sensors) - are becoming more available in end devices. This increasing range of information can enable context-aware informational services as well as linking digital objects to physical objects a user is observing. Thus, mobile users can obtain relevant information about real-world objects while simultaneously staying in touch with other users. The author describes an open, scalable service architecture in which context-aware service negotiation lets entities establish communication and negotiate services without a third party's assistance and without advance knowledge of either party's features. Context information can help hide data complexity from users until they need to make choices regarding such things as payments or object interactions.     

Service-Oriented Computing: Bringing Business Systems to the Web

The notion of service has spurred major evolutions for both information systems and the Web. A software application is no longer considered a monolithic component; it can be divided into services that are smaller components defined by their function and accessible through well-defined interfaces and protocols. As a result, IT actors are using service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to remodel the information systems of many companies while the Web is increasingly becoming a programmable place. In both domains, developers build composite client applications to consume these services. Even boundaries between enterprise services and Internet services are vanishing. Some companies, such as Strikelron provide enterprise services that were previously always hosted internally - like customer relationship management solutions. As a consequence, companies now have the technologies required to bring their business online. With Web services, private business processes can be exposed to partners through public composite Web applications. When new projects emerge, companies need guidance to properly handle such work. In this context, we aim to provide companies solutions - through a methodology, an architecture, and technical choices - that will help them solve generic problems such as security and application conception     

Databases to the Web: From Static to Dynamic on the Express

SUMMARY

The need to deliver current data on periodical holdings and electronic resources led the staff at Kennesaw State University's Sturgis Library to develop database-driven dynamic Web pages. The project's success was based on the incorporation of skills, technologies and hardware that were already in place in the library with Allaire's ColdFusion Express, a free, feature-limited version of ColdFusion Web application server.     

Moving the OS to the Web

With the increasing use of high-speed Internet technologies, the concept of cloud computing has become more popular. In cloud computing, users work with Web-based, rather than local, storage and software. These applications are accessible via a browser and look and act like desktop programs.     

The Semantic Web: Collective Intelligence on the Web

The World Wide Web has turned hypertext into a success story by enabling world-wide sharing of unstructured information and informal knowledge. The Semantic Web targets the sharing of structured information and formal knowledge pursuing objectives of achieving collective intelligence on the Web. Germane to the structure of the Semantic Web is a layering and standardization of concerns. These concerns are reflected by an architecture of the Semantic Web that we present through a common use case. Semantic Web data for the use case is now found on the Web and is part of a quickly growing set of Semantic Web resources available for formal processing.     

从Java Web应用到Web挖掘

随着web技术的发展,演示层、业务规则层从数据层分离出来。模型视图控制器(MVC,Model View Controller)是第一个分离演示层和业务规则层的设计模式,提高了组件的灵活性和复用性。在"浏览器-服务器"(Browser-Server)模式下,客户端只需要浏览器即可完成工作,有效地降低了运行与维护成本。本文集中探讨如何用J2EE技术实现企事业单位内(Intranet)外(Internet)Web应用及Web Ming(挖掘)技术。     

Improving accessibility of Web interfaces: refactoring to the rescue

Universal access should be a target for all public Web sites. However, it is very hard to achieve, and even Web applications that comply with accessibility standards may still lack usability for disabled users. This paper proposes refactoring as an essencial technique to incrementally improve the accessibility and usability of a Web interface. Some accessibility refactorings are described and classified by the problems that each refactoring addresses. The way mainstream Web sites struggle with accessibility is illustrated, and two evaluations of email clients are presented as empirical evidence of the significance of accessibility refactorings at a low implementation cost.     

TVGuide2.0: applying the Web2.0 fundamentals to IDTV

In this paper we introduce our experiences in applying the Web 2.0 philosophy to build a TV guide system for Interactive Digital TV (IDTV) platforms. Subscribers give their opinion about TV content and, informally, a folksonomy is progressively built. Based on this shared knowledge, the TV guide obtains personal recommendations and allows users to browse among the multimedia content. Additionally, and over this collaborative layer, a more formal vision enables applying semantic reasoning to supplement the knowledge informally inferred.     

From the Semantic Web to social machines: A research challenge for AI on the World Wide Web

The advent of social computing on the Web has led to a new generation of Web applications that are powerful and world-changing. However, we argue that we are just at the beginning of this age of “social machines” and that their continued evolution and growth requires the cooperation of Web and AI researchers. In this paper, we show how the growing Semantic Web provides necessary support for these technologies, outline the challenges we see in bringing the technology to the next level, and propose some starting places for the research.     

Explaining answers from the Semantic Web: the Inference Web approach

The Semantic Web lacks support for explaining answers from web applications. When applications return answers, many users do not know what information sources were used, when they were updated, how reliable the source was, or what information was looked up versus derived. Many users also do not know how implicit answers were derived. The Inference Web (IW) aims to take opaque query answers and make the answers more transparent by providing infrastructure for presenting and managing explanations. The explanations include information concerning where answers came from (knowledge provenance) and how they were derived (or retrieved). In this article we describe an infrastructure for IW explanations. The infrastructure includes: IWBase — an extensible web-based registry containing details about information sources, reasoners, languages, and rewrite rules; PML — the Proof Markup Language specification and API used for encoding portable proofs; IW browser — a tool supporting navigation and presentations of proofs and their explanations; and a new explanation dialogue component. Source information in the IWBase is used to convey knowledge provenance. Representation and reasoning language axioms and rewrite rules in the IWBase are used to support proofs, proof combination, and Semantic Web agent interoperability. The Inference Web is in use by four Semantic Web agents, three of them using embedded reasoning engines fully registered in the IW. Inference Web also provides explanation infrastructure for a number of DARPA and ARDA projects.     

Bubble-sensing: Binding sensing tasks to the physical world

We propose bubble-sensing, a new sensor network abstraction that allows mobile phone users to create a binding between sensing tasks and the physical world at locations of interest, that remains active for a duration set by the user. We envision mobile phones being able to affix sensing task bubbles at places of interest and then receive sensed data as it becomes available in a delay-tolerant fashion, in essence, creating a living documentary of places of interest in the physical world. The system relies on other mobile phones that opportunistically pass through bubble-sensing locations to acquire tasks and do the sensing on behalf of the initiator, and deliver the data to the bubble-sensing server for retrieval by the user who initiated the task.We describe an implementation of the bubble-sensing system using sensor-enabled mobile phones, specifically, Nokia’s N80 and N95 (with GPS, accelerometers, microphone, camera). Task bubbles are maintained at locations through the interaction of “bubble carriers”, which carry the sensing task into the area of interest, and “bubble anchors”, which maintain the task bubble in the area when the bubble carrier is no longer present. In our implementation, bubble carriers and bubble anchors implement a number of simple mobile phone based protocols that refresh the task bubble state as new mobile phones move through the area. Phones communicate using the local Ad-Hoc 802.11g radio to transfer task state and maintain the task in the region of interest. This task bubble state is ephemeral and times out when no bubble carriers or bubble anchors are in the area. Our design is resilient to periods when no mobiles pass through the bubble area and is capable of “reloading” the task into the bubble region. In this paper, we describe the bubble-sensing system and a simple proof-of-concept experiment.     

From e-sex to e-commerce: Web search changes

The Web has become a worldwide source of information and a mainstream business tool. Are human information needs and searching behaviors evolving along with Web content? As part of a body of research studying this question, we have analyzed three data sets culled from more than one million queries submitted by more than 200,000 users of the Excite Web search engine, collected in September 1997, December 1999, and May 2001. This longitudinal benchmark study shows that public Web searching is evolving in certain directions. Specifically, search topics have shifted from entertainment and sex to commerce and people, but there is little change in query lengths or frequency per user. Search topics have shifted, but there is little change in user search behaviors