A browser for directed graphs

A general-purpose browser for directed graphs is described. The browser provides operations to examine and edit graphs and to generate a layout for a graph automatically that minimizes edge crossings. Two layout algorithms were implemented. A hierarchical graph layout algorithm was found to be best for directed graphs. The graph browser also has facilities that allow it to be integrated with other applications (e.g. a program browser). These facilities and our experiences building a program call-graph browser are described.     

Regia: a metadata editor for audiovisual documents

Although the Metadata Editor is an important part of any digital library, it becomes fundamental in the presence of audiovisual content. This is because the metadata produced by automated support tools (such as speech recognizers and shot detection procedures) is error-prone and often needs correction. In addition, scenes are manually annotated. This paper describes Regia, a prototype application for manually editing metadata for audiovisual documents developed in the ECHO project. Regia allows the user to manually edit textual metadata and to hierarchically organize the segmentation of the audiovisual content. An important feature of this metadata editor is that it is not hard-wired with a particular metadata attributes set. To achieve this feature the XML schema of the metadata model is used by the editor as a configuration file.

Taking advantage of metadata semantics: the case of learning-object-based lesson graphs

Learning objects (LOs) are pieces of educational material characterized with a valuable amount of information about their content and usage. This additional information is defined as a set of metadata generally following the IEEE LOM specification. This specification also serves to characterize the relations existing between LOs. LOs whose relations are explicit are regarded as the nodes of a lesson graph. Link types and LO metadata constitute the lesson graph semantics. This article proposes to take advantage of lesson graph semantics using a context diffusion approach. It consists in diffusing the metadata-based processes along the edges of the lesson graph. This technique aims at coping with the metadata processing issues arising when some graph metadata are missing, incorrect, or incomplete. This article also presents a three-layer extensible framework for easing the use of context diffusion in a graph. As part of the framework, two original types of metadata processes are introduced. The first one takes advantage of the metadata attribute similarities between related LOs. The second one focuses on the lesson graph consistency. The framework and the application examples were implemented as an open-source Java library used in the lesson graph authoring tool LessonMapper2. During the lesson authoring process, we show that the framework can bring support not only for generating and validating metadata, but also for retrieving LOs.     

Exploring large graphs in 3D hyperbolic space

Drawing graphs as nodes connected by links is visually compelling but computationally difficult. Hyperbolic space and spanning trees can reduce visual clutter, speed up layout, and provide fluid interaction. This article briefly describes a software system that explicitly attempts to handle much larger graphs than previous systems and support dynamic exploration rather than final presentation. It then discusses the applicability of this system to goals beyond simple exploration. A software system that supports graph exploration should include both a layout and an interactive drawing component. I have developed new algorithms for both layout and drawing (H3 and H3Viewer). The H3Viewer drawing algorithm remains under development, so this article presents preliminary results. I have implemented a software library that uses these algorithms. It can handle graphs of more than 100,000 edges by using a spanning tree as the backbone for the layout and drawing algorithms     

On context-aware co-clustering with metadata support

In traditional co-clustering, the only basis for the clustering task is a given relationship matrix, describing the strengths of the relationships between pairs of elements in the different domains. Relying on this single input matrix, co-clustering discovers relationships holding among groups of elements from the two input domains. In many real life applications, on the other hand, other background knowledge or metadata about one or more of the two input domain dimensions may be available and, if leveraged properly, such metadata might play a significant role in the effectiveness of the co-clustering process. How additional metadata affects co-clustering, however, depends on how the process is modified to be context-aware. In this paper, we propose, compare, and evaluate three alternative strategies (metadata-driven, metadata-constrained, and metadata-injected co-clustering) for embedding available contextual knowledge into the co-clustering process. Experimental results show that it is possible to leverage the available metadata in discovering contextually-relevant co-clusters, without significant overheads in terms of information theoretical co-cluster quality or execution cost.     

Twitter n-gram corpus with demographic metadata

Social media is a natural laboratory for linguistic and sociological purposes. In micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, people share hundreds of millions of short messages about their lives and experiences on a daily basis. These messages, coupled with metadata about their authors, provide an opportunity to understand a wide variety of phenomena ranging from political polarization to geographic and demographic lexical variation. Lack of publicly available micro-blogging datasets has been a hindrance to replicable research. In this paper, I introduce Rovereto Twitter n-gram corpus, a publicly available n-gram dataset of Twitter messages, which contains gender-of-the-author and time-of-posting tags associated with the n-grams. I compare this dataset to a more traditional web-based corpus and present a case study which shows the potential of combining an n-gram corpus with demographic metadata.     

基于嵌入式系统的浏览器的研究与实现

该文简单概要了嵌入式系统和嵌入式浏览器,介绍了嵌入式浏览器的相关技术,并详细地描述了实现的细节和主要模型。     

Designers: the browser war casualties

As Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator battle for dominance of the browser market, each company is adopting different versions of some important technologies: Microsoft and Netscape are innovating along paths that reflect their business goals. In the process though, Web site developers and even Web surfers are paying a price. Microsoft and Netscape disagree over several key Web standards under consideration by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), including several key aspects of Dynamic HTML (DHTML). Internet Explorer and Navigator will thus use formats that differ in some key ways. Therefore, to develop a Web site that can work with both browsers, a designer must create either two sets of sites, which costs additional time and money, or one site that satisfies the elements that both browsers have in common, which limits the capability of the site to take full advantage of each browser's strengths. This, in turn, has limited DHTML usage to a small subset of the capabilities that would be possible if there was no standards conflict. In addition, the disparity in browser features makes hand coding HTML in text editors difficult, especially when working with HTML 4.0's new features, such as DHTML and cascading style sheets (CSS). This will make life difficult for tool vendors whose business hinges on visually authoring pages that work well with both Internet Explorer and Navigator     

Metagit: Decentralised metadata management with Git

Version control systems are used widely for tracking edits to data files, especially when working in teams with simultaneous editors. They track who made edits and when, and provide tools for comparing changes made and for resolving conflicts when the same file is edited by two people. Attaching metadata to files which stays with the data and tracking changes can be difficult if the file format does not support it. In this paper we present a new and innovative architecture for recording key-value metadata for objects in a revision control system, specifically Git. The utility and maturity of version control system tools make them a good candidate for a metadata store. We take advantage of Git's data store to permit the values to be blobs, opening up other possibilities such as defining thumbnails for files and folders. Propagation rules are presented, detailing when metadata follows a file after modifications to the repository. A prototype version of a tool is presented and the usefulness of the architecture is demonstrated with a number of examples. Adapting the approach to other systems such as Mercurial and Subversion is also discussed.     

物流元数据及其管理

对物流元数据的概念进行了定界,针对元数据的现状,提出了物流元数据的存储组织模型,并根据此模型,设计了一种基于“元关系”的元数据与物流信息实体之间的同步更新机制,较好地解决了物流元数据的集成管理等问题.     

Comparing the perspicacity,appropriateness and preference of web browser icons with Chinese users

This paper compares the perspicacity, appropriateness and preference of web browser icons from leading software providers with those of a culture-specific design. This online study was conducted in Taiwan and involved 103 participants, who were given three sets of web browser icons to review, namely Microsoft Internet Explorer, Macintosh Safari and culturally specific icons created using the Culture-Centred Design methodology. The findings of the study show that all three sets have generally high recognition rates in the region of 80%, but that some icon functions (e.g. Go/Visit and Favourite) in all three sets have poor recognition rates in the region of 60% and are considered inappropriate and below the ISO threshold of success.     

一种嵌入式浏览器的核心技术及特色

随着嵌入式系统广泛应用于消费电子和通信领域，嵌入式浏览器成为嵌入式网络应用的热点，介绍了设计并实现的嵌入式浏览器的主要特点，描述了浏览器核心模块主要功能的实现技术。     

嵌入式浏览器缓存策略的设计与实现

给出了一种嵌入式浏览器缓存的实现策略,将网络数据进行分类,通过使用内存缓存技术,合理地缓冲网络数据,同时根据网页的结构和访问信息,使用一种简单可行的缓存淘汰策略,充分地利用缓存资源,使系统具有了较好的性能。     

Experimenting with tagging and context for collaborative MPEG-7 metadata

Whether unstructured or structured, tagging of multimedia resources is a laborious and time-consuming process when carried out in the context of a single individual. However, effort can be greatly reduced and the detail, quality and volume of metadata increased within the context of a web community. Despite this, little empirical research has been carried out to understand how users individually or collaboratively work with multimedia tagging tools, whether structured or unstructured. Consequently, we explore how to effectively achieve collaborative multimedia tagging through the results of an experiment that collected data from 51 users using both unstructured folksonomy (Flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us) and structured MPEG-7 tools (COSMOSIS). We contribute a detailed analysis of the use of the multimedia tagging tools used in the experiment and show the relationships between user behaviours, resultant outcomes of these behaviours, and subsequent implications for future collaborative multimedia MPEG-7 tagging tools.     

Extending metadata with scenarios in adaptive distributed system

The traditional metadata cannot provide enough support for the adaptive distributed systems. In this paper, we propose a metadata extension that uses the scenarios as semantic aspect, describing the expected interaction sequence based on XML Schema. With such constraints, resource waste and further damages can be avoided by preventing the illegal interactions at runtime. This extension is more valid and user-friendly than the majority of the existing proposals, avoiding the potential inconsistency. A prototype has been developed to illustrate the applicability of the extended metadata. The experiments demonstrate that the prototype introduces an average overhead ratio of 6.4% in the inter-process interactions and only 0.27% in the remote interactions. The approach presented in this paper is suitable for the adaptive distributed systems and affords more guarantee of reliability.     

Java网络浏览器组件的设计与实现

Java标准组件JEditorPane支持HTML3.2标准,但不支持被广泛采用的HTML4.0标准,无法表达网页中嵌入的多媒体信息。为此提出了一个基于本地浏览器的JavaAWT浏览器组件设计方案,采用Socket在本地浏览器和Java虚拟机之间进行通信,利用Java的AWT本地接口将浏览器组件嵌入JavaAWT/Swing应用程序,实现了在Java应用程序中提供网络浏览器的功能。     

嵌入式浏览器可移植性的研究与实现

现有嵌入式浏览器都是针对某一领域的具体应用开发,可移植性很差,既使部分产品具有一定的可移植性,在移植时也需要重新编写界面代码.嵌入浏览器的移植大部分工作都在界面的移植上.从解决此问题入手,以开源代码Mozilla为基础,通过研究视窗抽象层的结构,在嵌入图形库MiniGUI上设计并实现视窗抽象层的一系列接口,可以大大提高嵌入式浏览器的可移植性.     

基于Android的多功能文件浏览器的设计与开发

针对目前大多数Android手机文件浏览器只能浏览多种格式的文件,不支持直接打开和编辑Word、Excel和PDF等办公文档的特点,开发了一款基于Android的多功能文件浏览器。该软件除了提供常规文件浏览功能之外,还能直接打开Word、Excel和PDF等办公文档,并能对该类文档进行简单的编辑,同时还具有换肤、扫描文件、摇一摇截屏、图片分享、视频和音频播放以及发邮件等功能。在实际应用中,该软件取得了较好的效果。     

支持动态标准的政务元数据管理的研究与应用

针对电子政务信息资源目录体系中的对不同元数据标准的目录系统存在重复建设的问题,通过总结政务信息资源元数据标准的一般规律,提出动态政务信息资源元数据标准下的元数据统一管理策略,并给出了具体实现方法.该方法已成功应用于北京市政务信息资源共享交换平台,实践证明动态标准下的元数据管理具有很好的应用价值.