A survey of methods for the extraction of information from Web resources

Earlier surveys of research in the field of extracting structured data from Web-pages are analyzed, and a scheme for the classification of the available approaches based on the extent of their application is proposed.     

Interchanging lexical resources on the Semantic Web

Lexica and terminology databases play a vital role in many NLP applications, but currently most such resources are published in application-specific formats, or with custom access interfaces, leading to the problem that much of this data is in “data silos” and hence difficult to access. The Semantic Web and in particular the Linked Data initiative provide effective solutions to this problem, as well as possibilities for data reuse by inter-lexicon linking, and incorporation of data categories by dereferencable URIs. The Semantic Web focuses on the use of ontologies to describe semantics on the Web, but currently there is no standard for providing complex lexical information for such ontologies and for describing the relationship between the lexicon and the ontology. We present our model, lemon, which aims to address these gaps while building on existing work, in particular the Lexical Markup Framework, the ISOcat Data Category Registry, SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) and the LexInfo and LIR ontology-lexicon models.     

Making Web services tradable: A policy-based approach for specifying preferences on Web service properties

In service-oriented architectures, applications are developed by incorporating services which are often provided by different organizations. Since a service might be offered under different configurations by various different organizations, sophisticated service selection and negotiation algorithms are required. Policies capture the conditions under which services are offered or requested and thereby constrain the negotiation space. However, current policy languages are ill-suited to realize beneficial trade-offs within a negotiation, since they support only Boolean decisions and cannot capture all relevant service information.Therefore, we present a novel policy language in this work that provides two main contributions: (i) we enable the specification of constraints on functional as well as non-functional properties of Web services. The functional properties include data objects and the behaviour, whereas the non-functional properties include QoS attributes. (ii) Given such constraints, we show how the concept of utility function policies can be used to define cardinal preferences over functional as well as non-functional properties. This is required to rank Web service offers, define their prices, and consequently to realize automated negotiations between service providers and requesters.     

Open annotations on multimedia Web resources

Many Web portals allow users to associate additional information with existing multimedia resources such as images, audio, and video. However, these portals are usually closed systems and user-generated annotations are almost always kept locked up and remain inaccessible to the Web of Data. We believe that an important step to take is the integration of multimedia annotations and the Linked Data principles. We present the current state of the Open Annotation Model, explain our design rationale, and describe how the model can represent user annotations on multimedia Web resources. Applying this model in Web portals and devices, which support user annotations, should allow clients to easily publish and consume, thus exchange annotations on multimedia Web resources via common Web standards.     

A reverse engineering approach for automatic annotation of Web pages

The Semantic Web is gaining increasing interest to fulfill the need of sharing, retrieving, and reusing information. Since Web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines, searching and reusing information on the Web is a difficult task without human participation. To this aim adding semantics (i.e meaning) to a Web page would help the machines to understand Web contents and better support the Web search process. One of the latest developments in this field is Google’s Rich Snippets, a service for Web site owners to add semantics to their Web pages. In this paper we provide a structured approach to automatically annotate a Web page with Rich Snippets RDFa tags. Exploiting a data reverse engineering method, combined with several heuristics, and a named entity recognition technique, our method is capable of recognizing and annotating a subset of Rich Snippets’ vocabulary, i.e., all the attributes of its Review concept, and the names of the Person and Organization concepts. We implemented tools and services and evaluated the accuracy of the approach on real E-commerce Web sites.     

A policy-based approach for strong mobility of composed Web services

This paper presents a flexible, portable, and transparent solution for strong mobility of composed Web services relying on policy-oriented techniques. The proposed approach provides a checkpoint solution based on automatic code instrumentation using correct source code transformation rules. This checkpoint technique permits to save the execution state of a mobile orchestration process as well as the execution states of its orchestrated partners. Thus, after migration, only non-executed codes will be resumed. In addition, our approach enables dynamic adaptation of the employed checkpointing and mobility techniques using aspects. For that, we use policies allowing dynamic selection of the used checkpointing and mobility techniques according to the execution context. Moreover, the proposed solution includes a module allowing the determination of the checkpointing interval satisfying QoS requirements. Experimentations show the efficiency of the proposed solution.     

Organising access to Evidence-Based Medicine resources on the Web

The continuing education is a challenge for health care professionals, considering the growing amount and variable quality of information in this field. In this context, we developed a method allowing clinicians to have a centralised access to the best current medical evidence supporting medical decision-making. Relevant data has been gathered according to the rules stated for Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) and organised in a free-of-charge Web site, created by using common software applications. The general aim of our study was to encourage individual practice of EBM by providing tutorials as well as a selection of free access tools for searching medical information on the Web. In addition to the education part, we provided clinicians, through a Web interface, with up-to-date, accurate and quality data obtained from heterogeneous sources and presented in a full text format when available. The developed methodology has been applied to human prostate cancer. URL address: http://www.ebm.lib.ulg.ac.be/prostate/index.htm.     

A patterned approach for linking knowledge-based systems to external resources

Knowledge-based systems (KBSs) have been developed and used in industry and government as assistance systems, voting partner systems, and embedded applications. As web-based systems change the face of software implementations, these closed, internal KBSs need to be integrated into multicomponent applications that provide updated and extensible services. Therefore, KBSs must be adapted to an environment in which data and control are exchanged with external processes and resources; complementing other participating systems or using them to refine its own results. This integration can be a daunting task. If improperly done, it can result in an inefficient and unmanageable composite application. One approach to simplifying this task is the use of architectural patterns for integration. These patterns are assembled from functional entities that resolve component interoperability conflicts. In this paper, we describe an architectural pattern called the Knowledge Director pattern, which directs the integration of a closed KBS into a broader application environment.     

A practical approach to e-government Web evaluation

Does your Web site function smoothly enough to deliver government services? Combining evaluation techniques gives you a multidimensional answer. The article discusses usability testing, and the use of user feedback, usage data, and Web and Internet performance data.     

A business model for deploying Web services:A data-centric approach based on factual dependencies

The standards XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI allow (i) services to be accessed and executed via the Web; and (ii) a loose coupling of these services. Thanks to these standards, Web services technology is becoming not only a de facto integration standard, but also a de facto Internet standard instance of the SOA architecture. However, the deployment of such a technology is still hindered by some technical as well as methodological issues. This paper proposes a business model with multiple interfaced abstraction levels as a framework to methodologically deploy Web services technology with respect to SOA architecture. The attributes describing the business objects and coordination artifacts as described in the highest abstraction level of the business model, i.e. the universe of discourse, are aggregated according to a time/space constraint called factual dependency. Each aggregation of factually dependent attributes is validated with regard to an actual business event. The aggregation is then interfaced to lead to a well-specified Web service. The resulting comprehensive set of consistent Web services are then registered in a public or a private UDDI to be discovered and invoked by any business process. The proposed Web services generation process aims at unlocking and turning informational assets into actions. It differs from the current IT perspective approaches that generate Web services directly from redundant and inconsistent elements in the enterprise information systems.     

LinkLive: discovering Web learning resources for developers from Q&A discussions

World Wide Web - Software developers need access to correlated information (e.g., API documentation, Wikipedia pages, Stack Overflow questions and answers) which are often dispersed among different...     

A mean-variance approach to advertising media selection

We propose a simple model of advertising media selection taking into account the uncertainty of the audiences reached effectively. The model is based upon the mean-variance point of view but the formulation differs from the now classical model used in portfolio theory.Here the goal is to minimize the variability of the total desirable audience. A practical solution method is proposed and applied to some examples.     

OWL-L: An OWL-based language for Web resources links

Although providing metadata association, XLink lacks computer-interpretability to support knowledge representation for intelligent applications. This study proposes an OWL-based language, called OWL-L, to make Web resources links computer-interpretable. Two aspects of OWL-L, link profile and link model are described. The link profile provides the information required for an agent to discover a link, while the link model provides information that enables an agent to exploit a link. Finally, this study describes the feasibility of using role/arcRole properties of links to represent OWL-based ontologies, which can thus seamlessly interoperate and integrate with OWL-L to enhance knowledge representation.     

VR-Tree: A novel tree-based approach for modeling Web Query Interfaces

Web Query Interfaces (WQIs) play a very important role in retrieving Deep Web content. WQIs allow users to query domain-specific databases for obtaining information of interest from diverse domains such as car rentals, hotels, airfare, etc. As the number of WQIs on the web is increasing drastically, some research efforts are focused on building a single (unified) WQI that allows users to query and integrate information available in different web databases related to a specific domain. A very important task in this WQIs’ integration process is the extraction, modeling and understanding of WQIs’ semantic content. However, this task is challenging because of the great heterogeneity in the design of WQIs. This paper presents a novel tree-based approach for the modeling and understanding of WQIs. A tree schema called the Visual Reduced Tree (VR-Tree) is built from the tree produced by a web browser’s render engine, applying a set of well- defined functions and guided by a set of heuristic rules to identify the WQI’s main components and their relationships. The proposed strategy was evaluated by running a collection of experiments over the Tel-8 and ICQ datasets from the UIUC repository. The results show that the automatic modeling of WQIs is possible with a high degree of precision if compared against previous approaches, simplifying the modeling task by only considering visual and spatial properties of WQI components using the VR-Tree schema proposed in this work.     

A scalable hybrid approach for extracting head components from Web tables

We have established a preprocessing method for determining the meaningfulness of a table to allow for information extraction from tables on the Internet. A table offers a preeminent clue in text mining because it contains meaningful data displayed in rows and columns. However, tables are used on the Internet for both knowledge structuring and document design. Therefore, we were interested in determining whether or not a table has meaningfulness that is related to the structural information provided at the abstraction level of the table head. Accordingly, we: 1) investigated the types of tables present in HTML documents, 2) established the features that distinguished meaningful tables from others, 3) constructed a training data set using the established features after having filtered any obvious decorative tables, and 4) constructed a classification model using a decision tree. Based on these features, we set up heuristics for table head extraction from meaningful tables, and obtained an F-measure of 95.0 percent in distinguishing meaningful tables from decorative tables and an accuracy of 82.1 percent in extracting the table head from the meaningful tables.     

A finite element approach for multiphase fluid flow in porous media

The main scope of this work is to carry out a mathematical framework and its corresponding finite element (FE) discretization for the partially saturated soil consolidation modelling in presence of an immiscible pollutant. A multiphase system with the interstitial voids in the grain matrix filled with water (liquid phase), water vapour and dry air (gas phase) and with pollutant substances, is assumed. The mathematical model addressed in this work was developed in the framework of mixture theory considering the pollutant saturation-suction coupling effects. The ensuing mathematical model involves equations of momentum balance, energy balance and mass balance of the whole multiphase system. Encouraging outcomes were achieved in several different examples.     

An artist life cycle model for digital media content: Strategies for the Light Web and the Dark Web

This paper surveys and categorizes emerging digital media business models. We apply the customer activity cycle of Vandermerwe (2000) to the consumption of digital media, taking three phases into account: pre-consumption, consumption and post-consumption. Our analysis of the business models focuses on their social costs and benefits. We derive the parameters as follows: convenience of use, exposure, ease of compliance and administration. We distinguish two polar environments for digital media: the Dark Web with content created by the masses, and the Light Web with content created by big media. We develop an artist life cycle model in which different business models appear to be optimal at different stages of an artist’s career. Voluntary payment-based models seem to be ideal for newcomers in the Dark Web, while digital rights management-based and complementary product and service-based models are the likely choice of established artists in the Light Web. Established artists might change their approach again, using voluntary payment-based or complementary product and service-based models when they retire.