Leveraging Java applets: toward collaboration transparency in Java

Widespread use of the Internet is giving rise to the need for collaborative applications that link users at remote sites. Many toolkits support the development of collaboration-aware applications, those developed specifically for cooperative work by multiple users. Another approach is collaboration transparency, the collaborative use of applications originally developed for a single user. When the runtime environment supports collaboration transparency, an application programmer need not write new code to make an application collaborative. Thus, collaboration transparency leverages the existing base of single user applications by extending them to collaborative use. We review options for providing collaboration transparency. We also discuss how collaboration transparency can be incorporated into Sun Microsystems' Java, the most widely used vehicle for developing interactive World Wide Web applications     

Model‐driven design of collaborative Web applications

This paper introduces a model‐driven approach to the design of collaborative Web‐based applications, i.e. applications in which several users play different roles, in a collaborative way, to pursue a specific goal. The paper illustrates a conference management application (CMA), whose main requirements include: (i) the management of users profiles and access rights based on the role played by users during the conference life cycle; (ii) the delivery of information and services to individual users; (iii) the management of the sequence of activities that lead to the achievement of a common goal. The presented approach is based on WebML, a conceptual modelling language for the Web. The paper also highlights some general properties—as understood by the practical experience of CMA development—that a Web modelling language should feature in order to fully support the development of collaborative applications. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Web computing framework

In this paper an approach to provide Web-based framework for distributed execution of collaborative applications is presented. The work is part of a wider on-going project whose aim is to make computing resources, both hardware and software, available to Web users. The core of the system is the Web computing skeleton constructed from prefabricated Web-enabled components with the ability to open and maintain Internet connections and provide collaboration over the World Wide Web. A number of examples illustrate how Web presentation can be enriched with collaborative software using the Web computing framework.     

基于协同过滤的可信Web服务推荐方法

为了实现对可信Web服务的推荐,在分析了Web服务推荐技术与电子商务推荐技术的不同的基础上,提出了一种基于协同过滤的可信Web服务推荐方法。首先,根据已有成果对待组装应用的可信需求进行评估,根据此需求对相似用户进行首次筛选;然后在首次筛选的用户中,根据用户使用服务后的评分数据和用户信息来对相似用户进行二次筛选,经过两次筛选得到最终推荐用户。在根据用户对服务的评分数据计算用户之间的相似性时,考虑了不同服务对于用户间相似性的贡献值;在根据用户信息计算用户之间的相似性时,考虑到用户信息之间非线性的特点,引入了欧几里得距离公式来计算其相似值;在产生推荐的过程中还考虑了不诚实用户和用户数不足的问题。模拟实验结果表明该方法能够有效地对可信Web服务进行推荐。     

Boosting social collaborations based on contextual synchronization: An empirical study

Supporting context-based collaboration among online users is an important issue to computer-mediated collaboration to fulfill specified tasks. However, several problems make it difficult to be aware of the context. The context of the user task can be (i) dynamic (i.e., changing over time), and (ii) mixed with multiple sub-contexts together. We propose a novel ontology-based platform to overcome these problems. It finds the most relevant users from a given social network, taking into account two types of context (i.e., personal and group contexts) and matching them. By measuring similarities between the personal contexts, we can dynamically organize a number of communities, so that users can be contextually synchronized. Individual users can be involved in complex collaborations related to multiple semantics. This paper demonstrates and discusses how the proposed context synchronization process is able to boost social collaborations. We show the experimental results collected from a collaborative information searching system. The main empirical issues in this work are (i) setting thresholds, (ii) searching performance, and (iii) scalability testing.     

分布式协作模型及应用研究

With the development of the Web technology,the application environment has acquired many new characters such as dynamic, openness,distribution and information uncertainty.The processing mode of application systems is more complicated than ever.For example,it requires application systems to have more community processing ability,interactive ability,distributed processing ability and collaborative ability.Accordingly the research and development of the computer application system transited from client/server information processing system into distributed collaborative processing system based on Web.Especially in the environment where the information and resources are highly distributed,the accomplishment of complicated tasks is dependent more on the resources coordination,information sharing and coordinator collaboration.The collaboration is one aspect of the group behavior and its goal is to provide a optimal method to utilize the resource through the information interaction and to solve the task which couldn't be accomplished by each coordinator alone and get the more total benefits than the sum of each benefit.The collaboration problem is the important one for distributed tasks processing.This paper surveys,the research and application status of distributed collaborative models and several representative architectures of distributed collaborative processing are proposed.However,the existing problems and the future researching direction are presented.     

Designing educational software as a re-usable resource

Abstract The production of educational software is moving from a focus on courseware produced by the individual lecturer to the development of educational resources that can be shared and accessed from a wide variety of teaching sites. This change has a number of implications. Firstly, different resources must be capable of being seamlessly integrated into a specific teaching package. Secondly, collaboration between institutions will be increasingly important to ensure that resources so produced are sufficiently generic to be of interest to those outside the development team. Thirdly, management procedures to direct and control this collaborative effort are required. This paper details how the distributed hypermedia environment provided by the World Wide Web may be effectively exploited to realise these three goals.     

基于重复模式的自动Web信息抽取

互联网上存在很多在线购物网站,抽取这类网站页面里的商品信息可以为电子商务、Web查询提供增值服务。该文针对这类网站提出一种自动的Web信息抽取方法,通过检测网页中的重复模式以及分析主题内容的特征获取网页的主题内容,该方法在抽取过程中不需要人工干预。对10个在线购物网站进行了测试,实验结果表明提出的方法是有效的。     

Approximate resolution of asynchronous conflicts among sequential collaborations in dynamic virtual environments

Asynchronous collaboration for a networked virtual environment (NVE) has emerged as a promising area in collaborative computer‐aided design applications. The concept of asynchronous collaboration is a sequential collaboration of temporal processes in an NVE where the participants are not required to be present at the time of the collaboration. Conflicts in asynchronous collaboration occur because the preceding task of a participant can influence the output of the ensuing task of another participant. The conflicted tasks must be modified manually. However, it requires considerable time and effort to resolve conflicts in a sequential collaboration. In this paper, we present an asynchronous collaborative framework that converts the conflict states of the shared objects into approximately resolved states. We develop a novel approximate resolution algorithm using a task‐based modeling mechanism to resolve the asynchronous conflicts with their corresponding tasks. Moreover, we propose a visual relation editor for convenient management. The participants can set flexible relations among shared objects using the proposed visual editor. The proposed approximate resolution approach can significantly reduce the average resolution time and the number of required manual task resolutions in a virtual environment compared to a manual resolution approach. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一种Web评论自动抽取方法

Web用户评论是许多重要应用的信息来源,比如公众舆情的检测与分析,Web用户评论必须从网页中准确地抽取出来.用户生成内容(user-generated content)不受页面模板的限制,这就给Web数据抽取提出了新的挑战:首先,不同用户评论内容的不一致性严重影响了评论记录在DOM树和视觉上的相似性;其次,评论内容在DOM树中是一棵复杂的子树,而且彼此之间在DOM树中的结构相差巨大.为了解决这两个问题,提出了一种完整的解决方案,使用多种技术来实现对用户评论内容的抽取.抽取过程分为两个步骤,基于深度加权的树相似性算法评论记录首先从网页中抽取出来,然后通过比较DOM树中节点的一致性,将纯粹的用户评论内容从评论记录中抽取出来.在多个新闻网站和论坛网站上的实验结果表明,该方法可以达到较高的准确度和效率.     

Piggy Bank: Experience the Semantic Web inside your web browser

The Semantic Web Initiative envisions a Web wherein information is offered free of presentation, allowing more effective exchange and mixing across web sites and across web pages. But without substantial Semantic Web content, few tools will be written to consume it; without many such tools, there is little appeal to publish Semantic Web content.To break this chicken-and-egg problem, thus enabling more flexible information access, we have created a web browser extension called Piggy Bank that lets users make use of Semantic Web content within Web content as users browse the Web. Wherever Semantic Web content is not available, Piggy Bank can invoke screenscrapers to re-structure information within web pages into Semantic Web format. Through the use of Semantic Web technologies, Piggy Bank provides direct, immediate benefits to users in their use of the existing Web. Thus, the existence of even just a few Semantic Web-enabled sites or a few scrapers already benefits users. Piggy Bank thereby offers an easy, incremental upgrade path to users without requiring a wholesale adoption of the Semantic Web's vision.To further improve this Semantic Web experience, we have created Semantic Bank, a web server application that lets Piggy Bank users share the Semantic Web information they have collected, enabling collaborative efforts to build sophisticated Semantic Web information repositories through simple, everyday's use of Piggy Bank.     

现代远程协作学习系统的设计与实现

目前的远程教学中主要依赖的信息共享、个体学习、有限交互的模式,已经不能满足学习者对学习质量越来越高的期望。在此,提出一个协作学习模型。这种协作方式可以使学生在信息交流的过程中,更好地了解他人的观点、方法和建议,促进自己的学习。同时,这种模型也为基于Web的信息交流提供新的协作方式。     

An Operable Email Based Intelligent Personal Assistant

The recent phenomena of email-function-overloading and email-centricness in daily life and business have created new problems to users. There is a practical need for developing a software assistant to facilitate the management of personal and organizational emails, and to enable users to complete their email-centric jobs or tasks smoothly. This paper presents the status, goals, and key technical elements of an Email-Centric Intelligent Personal Assistant, called ECIPA. ECIPA provides various assisting functions, including automated and cost-sensitive spam filtering based on corresponding analysis, ontology-mediated email classification, query and archiving. ECIPA can learn from dynamic user behaviors to effectively sort and automatically respond email. Techniques developed in Web Intelligence (WI) are adopted to implement ECIPA. In order to facilitate cooperation of ECIPAs of different users, the concept of operable email, an extension of traditional email with an operable form, is introduced. ECIPA can in fact be viewed as a family of collaborative agents working together on the operable email.     

基于SNS的Web协作学习系统设计

随着Web2.0的快速发展,具有社会特征的SNS软件不断涌现,基于SNS平台的Web协作学习逐渐成为一种新型学习模式。提出了一种基于SNS的Web协作学习模式,并结合国内主流的SNS平台进行二次开发,设计了一个面向SNS的Web协作学习系统,主要实现了个人社区、协作学习社区、文件共享和问答系统等模块。实践证明该系统能够实现高效的Web协作和资源共享,能够帮助学习者更好地交流学习心得和分享学习成果,从而增强学习者的学习兴趣和解决问题的能力。     

Analyzing the understandability of Requirements Engineering languages for CSCW systems: A family of experiments

ContextA collaborative system is a special kind of software whose users can perform collaboration, communication and collaboration tasks. These systems usually have a high number of non-functional requirements, resulting from the users’ need of being aware of other users with whom to collaborate, that is, the workspace awareness.ObjectiveThis paper aims at evaluating two Requirements Engineering languages i^* and CSRML (an extension of i^*) in order to determine which is the most suitable one to specify requirements of collaborative systems, taking into account their special characteristics regarding collaboration and awareness.MethodWe performed a family of experiments comprising an original experiment and two replicas. They were performed by 30, 45 and 9 Computer Science students, respectively, from Spain and Argentina. These subjects filled in two understandability questionnaires once they analyzed the requirements models of two systems: an e-learning collaborative system and a conference review system with some collaborative aspects support. Both models were specified by using the evaluated languages.ResultsThe statistical analysis of the family of experiments showed that the understandability was higher for the models specified with CSRML than for those specified with i^*, especially for collaborative aspects. This result was also confirmed by the meta-analysis conducted.ConclusionsCSRML surpasses i^* when modeling collaborative systems requirements models due to the specific expressiveness introduced to represent collaboration between users and awareness and the new resorts to manage actors and roles.     

DYSCS: A platform to build geographically and semantically enhanced social content sites

Social content sites allow ordinary internet users to upload, edit, share, and annotate Web content with freely chosen keywords called tags. However, tags are only useful to the extent that they are processable by users and machines, which is often not the case since users frequently provide ambiguous and idiosyncratic tags. Thereby, many social content sites are starting to allow users to enrich their tags with semantic metadata, such as the GeoSocial Content Sites, for example, where users can annotate their tags with geographic metadata. But geographic metadata alone only unveils a very specific facet of a tag, which leads to the need for more general purpose semantic metadata. This paper introduces DYSCS – Do it Yourself Social Content Sites – a platform that combines Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies for assisting users in creating their own social content sites enriched with geographic and general purpose semantics. Moreover, DYSCS is highly reusable and interoperable, which are consequences of its ontology driven architecture.     

Extracting significant Website Key Objects: A Semantic Web mining approach

Web mining has been traditionally used in different application domains in order to enhance the content that Web users are accessing. Likewise, Website administrators are interested in finding new approaches to improve their Website content according to their users' preferences. Furthermore, the Semantic Web has been considered as an alternative to represent Web content in a way which can be used by intelligent techniques to provide the organization, meaning, and definition of Web content. In this work, we define the Website Key Object Extraction problem, whose solution is based on a Semantic Web mining approach to extract from a given Website core ontology, new relations between objects according to their Web user interests. This methodology was applied to a real Website, whose results showed that the automatic extraction of Key Objects is highly competitive against traditional surveys applied to Web users.     

SemWebDL: A privacy-preserving Semantic Web infrastructure for digital libraries

Recent advances in digital libraries have been closely intertwined with advances in Internet technologies. With the advent of the Web, digital libraries have been able to reach constituencies previously unanticipated. Because of the wide deployability of Web-accessible digital libraries, the potential for privacy violations has also grown tremendously. The much touted Semantic Web, with its agent, service, and ontology technologies, is slated to take the Web to another qualitative level in advances. Unfortunately, these advances may also open doors for privacy violations in ways never seen before. We propose a Semantic Web infrastructure, called SemWebDL, that enables the dynamic composition of disparate and autonomous digital libraries while preserving user privacy. In the proposed infrastructure, users will be able to pose more qualitative queries that may require the ad hoc collaboration of multiple digital libraries. In addition to the Semantic Web-based infrastructure, the quality of the response would rest on extraneous information in the form of a profile. We introduce the concept of communities to enable subject-based cooperation and search speedup. Further, digital libraries heterogeneity and autonomy are transcended by a layered Web-service-based infrastructure. Semantic Web-based digital library providers would advertise to Web services, which in turn are organized in communities accessed by users. For the purpose of privacy preservation, we devise a three-tier privacy model consisting of user privacy, Web service privacy, and digital library privacy that offers autonomy of perspectives for privacy definition and violation. We propose an approach that seamlessly interoperates with potentially conflicting privacy definitions and policies at the different levels of the Semantic Web-based infrastructure. A key aspect in the approach is the use of reputations for outsourcing Web services. A Web service reputation is associated with its behavior with regard to privacy preservation. We developed a technique that uses attribute ontologies and information flow difference to collect, evaluate, and disseminate the reputation of Web services.     

Distributed and collaborative visualization

Visualization typically involves large computational tasks, often performed on supercomputers. The results of these tasks are usually analyzed by a design team consisting of several members. Our goal is to depart from traditional single-user systems and build a low-cost scientific visualization environment that enables computer-supported cooperative work in the distributed setting. A synchronously conferenced collaborative visualization environment would let multiple users on a network of workstations and supercomputers share large data sets, simultaneously view visualizations of the data, and interact with multiple views while varying parameters. Such an environment would support collaboration in both the problem-solving phase and the review phase of design tasks. In this article we describe two distributed visualization algorithms and the facilities that enable collaborative visualization. These are all implemented on top of the distribution and collaboration mechanisms of an environment called Shastra, executing on a set of low-cost networked workstations     

Sheepdog,parallel collaborative programming-by-demonstration

We introduce parallel collaborative programming-by-demonstration (PBD) as a principled approach to capturing knowledge on how to perform computer-based procedures by independently recording multiple experts executing these tasks and combining the recordings via a learning algorithm. Traditional PBD has focused on end-user programming for a single user, and does not support parallel collaborative procedure model construction from examples provided by multiple experts. In this paper we discuss how to extend the main aspects of PBD (instrumentation, abstraction, learning, and execution), and we describe the implementation of these extensions in a system called Sheepdog.