Self-maintaining web pages

Data-intensive web-based information systems usually employ database systems to store the contents forming the basis for web page construction. Generating web pages on the fly, especially in peak times, can lead to severe performance problems. Thus, pre-generation of web pages has been suggested to be ready for prime time, allowing to reliably deliver several hundred pre-generated pages per second. Maintaining the consistency of these web pages with respect to changes within the database in an efficient way, however, represents a major challenge. This paper presents a novel approach for “self-maintaining” web pages that is, different to previous approaches, characterized by a simple (and thus, easy to maintain) database-to-web page mapping and very low page re-generation costs. This is achieved by utilizing fragmentation techniques from distributed databases, by allocating parameterized fragment classes to web page classes (rather than individual fragments to single web pages), and using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as an intermediate layer between the database and the final web pages.     

Using the web infrastructure to preserve web pages

To date, most of the focus regarding digital preservation has been on replicating copies of the resources to be preserved from the “living web” and placing them in an archive for controlled curation. Once inside an archive, the resources are subject to careful processes of refreshing (making additional copies to new media) and migrating (conversion to new formats and applications). For small numbers of resources of known value, this is a practical and worthwhile approach to digital preservation. However, due to the infrastructure costs (storage, networks, machines) and more importantly the human management costs, this approach is unsuitable for web scale preservation. The result is that difficult decisions need to be made as to what is saved and what is not saved. We provide an overview of our ongoing research projects that focus on using the “web infrastructure” to provide preservation capabilities for web pages and examine the overlap these approaches have with the field of information retrieval. The common characteristic of the projects is they creatively employ the web infrastructure to provide shallow but broad preservation capability for all web pages. These approaches are not intended to replace conventional archiving approaches, but rather they focus on providing at least some form of archival capability for the mass of web pages that may prove to have value in the future. We characterize the preservation approaches by the level of effort required by the web administrator: web sites are reconstructed from the caches of search engines (“lazy preservation”); lexical signatures are used to find the same or similar pages elsewhere on the web (“just-in-time preservation”); resources are pushed to other sites using NNTP newsgroups and SMTP email attachments (“shared infrastructure preservation”); and an Apache module is used to provide OAI-PMH access to MPEG-21 DIDL representations of web pages (“web server enhanced preservation”).     

基于服务上下文的Web服务发现机制

服务发现成为Web服务组合研究的重点,为解决服务组合过程中服务发现方法存在动态适应能力不足,提出了一种基于服务上下文的Web服务发现机制.该机制将一种服务本体描述语言OWL-S和一种基于服务上下文的服务发现算法相结合,利用语义描述服务的信息,同时定义了服务上下文信息并进行服务上下文匹配来发现所需服务.实验结果表明,基于服务上下文的Web服务发现机制能够提高服务发现的准确性,具有较好地动态适应性.     

关于Web服务组合的有效Web服务发现机制

随着Web Services的广泛流行,怎样发现适当Web Services来支持Web Services的组合已经成为一种挑战.由于传统的关键字搜索具有太低的记忆性和精确性,因此这种方法是很低效的.基于Web Services的描述信息,介绍了一种有效的Web Services发现机制.此服务发现方法是简单可用的,通过引入语义变得十分高效,因此该机制成功的在服务组合模型上得到了实现.     

Aesthetics and preferences of web pages

The first impressions of web pages presented to users was investigated by using 13 different web pages, three types of scales and 18 participants. Multidimensional analysis of similarity and preference judgements found four important dimensions: beauty, mostly illustrations versus mostly text, overview and structure. Category scales indicated the existence of two factors related to formal aspects and to appeal of the objects, respectively. The best predictor for the overall judgement of the category scales was beauty. Property vector fitting of the multidimensional solutions with the category scales further indicated the importance of beauty for the preference space. Aspects of usability, product design and aesthetics are discussed.     

Temporal pre-fetching of dynamic web pages

Although caching has been shown as an efficient technique to reduce the delay in generating web pages to meet the page requests from web users, it becomes less effective if the pages are dynamic and contain dynamic contents. In this paper, instead of using caching, we study the effectiveness of using pre-fetching to resolve the problems in handling dynamic web pages. Pre-fetching is a proactive caching scheme since a page is cached before the receipt of any page request for the page. In addition to the problem of which pages to be pre-fetched, another equally important question is when to perform the pre-fetching. To resolve the prediction and timing problems, we explore the temporal properties of the dynamic web pages and the timing issues in accessing the pages to determine which pages to be pre-fetched and the best time to pre-fetch the pages to maximize the cache hit probability of the pre-fetched page. If the required pages can be found in the cache validly, the response times of the requests can be greatly reduced. The proposed scheme is called temporal pre-fetching (TPF) in which we prioritize pre-fetching requests based on the predicted usability of the to-be pre-fetched pages. To minimize the impact of incorrect prediction in pre-fetching on processing of on-demand page requests, a qualifying examination is performed to remove unnecessary and low usability pre-fetching requests while they are waiting to be processed and just before their processing. We have implemented the proposed TPF scheme in a web server system and experiments have been performed to study its performance characteristics compared with conventional cache-only scheme using a benchmark auction application under different system and application settings. As shown in the experiment results, the overall system performance, i.e., response time, is improved as more page requests can be served immediately using pre-fetched pages.     

Aesthetics and preferences of web pages

The first impressions of web pages presented to users was investigated by using 13 different web pages, three types of scales and 18 participants. Multidimensional analysis of similarity and preference judgements found four important dimensions: beauty, mostly illustrations versus mostly text, overview and structure. Category scales indicated the existence of two factors related to formal aspects and to appeal of the objects, respectively. The best predictor for the overall judgement of the category scales was beauty. Property vector fitting of the multidimensional solutions with the category scales further indicated the importance of beauty for the preference space. Aspects of usability, product design and aesthetics are discussed.     

Predicting user attention in complex web pages

Users' visual attention measured by eyetracking fixations was investigated in web pages with different designs. Browsing and search conditions were tested. Layout structure influenced attention with fixation densities being concentrated in upper parts of pages according to the layout structure. In sites with open graphical layouts, animations and images dominated attention. In the search condition, attention patterns focused on salient objects and information-scent components leading to the targets. Based on the results, a model of structured directed visual attention was proposed and implemented in the Web Page Analyser tool (WPA) to predict heat maps of visual attention. Validation of the tool demonstrated good accuracy in browse and search modes.     

基于Web日志挖掘的网页实时推荐算法研究

网页在线实时推荐是网络个性化服务的重要内容,基于Web日志的网页实时推荐有助于提高检索效率、缓解网络拥塞,提高网站吸引力.该算法通过将用户会话处理成数字序列以体现用户访问路径的先后顺序,利用动态矩阵和滑动窗简化了路径相似度计算;算法只扫描一遍日志,可以进一步提高实时响应速度.该算法在考虑用户访问路径的先后顺序和简化推荐机制的基础上,提出了会话编码和动态矩阵的概念,利用其在推荐中可以兼顾满意度和实时性,同时实时性不受日志增加的影响.试验结果表明,该算法在兼顾满意度的基础上可以大幅提高推荐的实时性,具有实际应用价值.     

A taxonomy of geospatial services for global service discovery and interoperability

Geospatial service taxonomies represent the knowledge about the characteristics of geospatial services from the enterprise, computational, information, engineering, infrastructure, or technology viewpoints. This paper presents a lightweight taxonomy of geospatial services with the aim of promoting the global sharing of and interoperability among geospatial service instances. This taxonomy focuses on the knowledge connected with service interoperability. As a hierarchical taxonomy, it consists of six layers: service category, service type, version, profile, binding and uniform resource name (URN), from the root down to the leaves. Each layer is composed of classification nodes, with each node identifying one classification concept. Each concept, with a concrete semantic meaning, can be used to classify service instances. The application of this classification scheme to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Component and Service registry is also introduced. The results of this study may lead to the further development of service taxonomy to thoroughly capture the knowledge about geospatial services. The lessons learned may be useful to others representing and manipulating geoscientific knowledge.     

Visual extraction of information from web pages

In this paper we present a graphical software system that provides an automatic support to the extraction of information from web pages. The underlying extraction technique exploits the visual appearance of the information in the document, and is driven by the spatial relations occurring among the elements in the page. However, the usual information extraction modalities based on the web page structure can be used in our framework, too. The technique has been integrated within the Spatial Relation Query (SRQ) tool. The tool is provided with a graphical front-end which allows one to define and manage a library of spatial relations, and to use a SQL-like language for composing queries driven by these relations and by further semantic and graphical attributes.     

网页去重方法研究

搜索引擎返回的重复网页不但浪费了存储资源,而且加重了用户浏览的负担。针对网页重复的特征,提出了一种基于语义的去重方法。该方法通过句子在文本中的位置和组块的重要度,提取出网页正文的主题句向量,然后对主题句向量进行语义相似度计算,把重复的网页去除。实验证明,该方法对全文重复和部分重复的网页都能进行较准确的检测。     

基于语义的Web服务发现算法优化

服务发现的精确度和对服务请求者的响应速度随着发布的Web服务的数量增多显得日益重要.确保服务发现精度的同时,提出一种改进服务匹配的算法即服务发现提前匹配算法,通过有效地利用已计算出来的匹配程度的信息以减少匹配操作,缩短对请求者的响应时间.为了能及时地更新和删除过时的服务,通过改进相应的数据存储结构,提出了一种维护服务的算法,并进行了相关的理论和实验上的性能分析.实验结果表明算法在很大程度上缩短了对服务请求的响应时间.     

基于移动agent的语义Web服务发现模型

现有的语义Web服务发现机制还很难实现Web服务发布、发现的自动化、智能化,这严重影响了语义Web服务的质量(QoS)和满意度.因此提出了一种分布式UDDI网络环境下基于移动agent的语义Web服务发现模型,性能分析表明该模型具有较高的查全率和查准率,提高了Web服务发布,发现的自动化、智能化,缩短了查询时间,很大程度上满足了用户个性化服务需求.     

基于本体的多模式Web服务发现研究

目前基于本体的Web服务匹配方法主要是利用本体的逻辑推理能力,通过计算得到Web服务描述之间的离散值匹配度并实施服务匹配.但基于离散值的粗粒度划分会使每一个离散匹配度下可能仍会有大量的Web服务存在,无法满足用户精确的服务查找请求.在相关研究基础之上,提出了一种基于本体的多模式Web服务匹配策略,并给出了基于实体和功能性的相似度计算方法.通过将基于离散值的逻辑推理服务匹配和基于连续值的服务相似度计算相结合,从而得到服务请求与可用服务的综合相似度,满足了用户不同粒度的服务查找请求,增强了服务匹配过程的可适应性和有效性.     

快速语义Web服务发现方法

针对现有的基于本体描述的语义Web服务发现方法发现效率较为低下的问题,提出一种新的服务发现方法.该方法在基于本体距离计算语义Web服务综合相似度的基础上,利用数据挖掘中的聚类算法AGNES对语义Web服务集合进行聚类预处理,形成若干服务簇,然后应用相应服务发现算法根据相似度阈值定位于某一服务簇内进行查找匹配,从而可减少搜索空间.理论与仿真实验结果表明,该方法既可保证服务发现的准确率,又可明显提高服务发现的效率.     

基于UDDI的语义Web服务发现研究

目前基于UDDI的Web服务发现机制仅提供了简单的基于关键字的搜索方法,缺乏对语义推理的支持。因此给出了一种基于UDDI的语义Web服务发现的架构,通过把Web服务的语义描述发布到UDDI注册中心,并扩展查询API的规范,在服务查找中加入语义推理,从而增强了UDDI的语义Web服务发现的能力。