Websigns: hyperlinking physical locations to the Web

HP researchers are developing handheld devices that combine wireless technology and ubiquitous computing to provide a transparent linkage between physical entities in the environment and resources available on the Web. First-generation mobile computing technologies typically use protocols such as WAP and i-mode to let PDAs, smart phones, and other wireless devices with Web browsers access the Internet, thereby freeing users from the shackles of their desktops. We believe, in addition, users would benefit from having access to devices that combine the advantages of wireless technology and ubiquitous computing to provide a transparent linkage between the physical world around them and the resources available on the Web. We are developing devices that augment users' reality with Web services related to the physical objects they see     

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.     

Exploring Social Annotations with the Application to Web Page Recommendation

Collaborative social annotation systems allow users to record and share their original keywords or tag attachments to Web resources such as Web pages, photos, or videos. These annotations are a method for organizing and labeling information. They have the potential to help users navigate the Web and locate the needed resources. However, since annotations are posted by users under no central control, there exist problems such as spam and synonymous annotations. To efficiently use annotation information to facilitate knowledge discovery from the Web, it is advantageous if we organize social annotations from semantic perspective and embed them into algorithms for knowledge discovery. This inspires the Web page recommendation with annotations, in which users and Web pages are clustered so that semantically similar items can be related. In this paper we propose four graphic models which cluster users, Web pages and annotations and recommend Web pages for given users by assigning items to the right cluster first. The algorithms are then compared to the classical collaborative filtering recommendation method on a real-world data set. Our result indicates that the graphic models provide better recommendation performance and are robust to fit for the real applications.     

.NET环境下基于RBAC的Web应用程序访问控制

文中从目前Web应用系统的变化趋势及其面临的安全问题出发,提出一种基于RBAC模型的访问控制方案。该方案以.NET环境为平台,以角色为中介,把用户和Web资源联系起来。在为Web资源分配角色的同时给用户分配角色,这样具有一定角色的用户就可以访问到该角色所许可的资源,从而实现了基于角色的访问控制。该方案简化了访问控制的操作,具有较大的灵活性,使系统的安全性得到提高。最后,给出了结论并指出需进一步研究的问题和改进方法。     

Who and what links to the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive’s (IA) Wayback Machine is the largest and oldest public Web archive and has become a significant repository of our recent history and cultural heritage. Despite its importance, there has been little research about how it is discovered and used. Based on Web access logs, we analyze what users are looking for, why they come to IA, where they come from, and how pages link to IA. We find that users request English pages the most, followed by the European languages. Most human users come to Web archives because they do not find the requested pages on the live Web. About 65 % of the requested archived pages no longer exist on the live Web. We find that more than 82 % of human sessions connect to the Wayback Machine via referrals from other Web sites, while only 15 % of robots have referrers. Most of the links (86 %) from Websites are to individual archived pages at specific points in time, and of those 83 % no longer exist on the live Web. Finally, we find that users who come from search engines browse more pages than users who come from external Web sites.     

Searching for multimedia: analysis of audio,video and image Web queries

The development of digital libraries has enhanced the integration of textual and multimedia information in many document collections. The World Wide Web provides the connectivity for many digital library users. Studies exploring the searching characteristics of Web users are an important and a growing area of research. Most Web user studies have focused on general Web searching, regardless of subject matter or format. Little research has examined how Web users search for multimedia information. Our study examines users' multimedia searching on a major Web search service. The data set examined consisted of 1,025,908 queries from 211,058 users of Excite ®, a major Web search service. From this data set, we identified and analyzed queries for audio, image, and video queries. Our findings were compared to results from general Web searching studies. Implications for the design of Web searching services and interfaces are discussed.     

Federated identity management

Most confidential, valuable resources on the World Wide Web are protected by some form of authentication technology. To access these resources, either via the public Internet or private intranets, users must verify their digital identity. This can range from a simple user-name-password combination to biometric data such as fingerprints to physical objects like hardware tokens and smart cards. Federated identity management would enable individuals to interact with various service providers or Web sites with trust relationships by signing in just once.     

Discovery of Web user communities and their role in personalization

One of the major innovations in personalization in the last 20?years was the injection of social knowledge into the model of the user. The user is not considered an isolated individual any more, but a member of one or more communities. User communities have been facilitated by the striking advancements of electronic communications and in particular the penetration of the Web into people??s everyday routine. Communities arise in a number of different ways. Social networking tools typically allow users to proactively connect to each other. Alternatively, data mining tools discover communities of connected Web sites or communities of Web users. In this article, we focus on the latter type of community, which is commonly mined from logs of users?? activity on the Web. We recall how this process has been used to model the users?? interests and personalize Web applications. Collaborative filtering and recommendation are the most widely used forms of community-driven personalization. However, we examine a range of other interesting alternatives that are worth investigating further. This effort leads us naturally to the recent developments on the Web and particularly the advent of the social Web. We explain how this development draws together the different viewpoints on Web communities and introduces new opportunities for community-based personalization. In particular, we propose the concept of active user community and show how this relates to recent efforts on mining social networks and social media.     

Increasing application accessibility through Java

Java has begun to open up new possibilities for accessing applications on the Web. With Java, developers can write applications as applets and insert them into Web pages. The user can then retrieve and execute them with local computing resources. We show how developers can use this feature to create a network computing platform that lets Web users share applications not specifically devised for network use, including those that are computationally intensive. With our approach, the network is not involved as long as the user executes operations on the graphical interface, which is executed locally on the client. Only when users require some computational response from the server do they need to access it. Access is straightforward; authorized users can access the application from any node connected with the Internet as long as they have a Java-enabled Web browser. We have used used one such network computing platform to port an existing tool and develop a new application     

A URI-based approach for addressing fragments of media resources on the Web

To make media resources a prime citizen on the Web, we have to go beyond simply replicating digital media files. The Web is based on hyperlinks between Web resources, and that includes hyperlinking out of resources (e.g., from a word or an image within a Web page) as well as hyperlinking into resources (e.g., fragment URIs into Web pages). To turn video and audio into hypervideo and hyperaudio, we need to enable hyperlinking into and out of them. The W3C Media Fragments Working Group is taking on the challenge to further embrace W3C??s mission to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing a Media Fragment protocol and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web. The major contribution of this paper is the introduction of Media Fragments as a media-format independent, standard means of addressing media resources using URIs. Moreover, we explain how the HTTP protocol can be used and extended to serve Media Fragments and what the impact is for current Web-enabled media formats.     

Disambiguating identity web references using Web 2.0 data and semantics

As web users disseminate more of their personal information on the web, the possibility of these users becoming victims of lateral surveillance and identity theft increases. Therefore web resources containing this personal information, which we refer to as identity web references must be found and disambiguated to produce a unary set of web resources which refer to a given person. Such is the scale of the web that forcing web users to monitor their identity web references is not feasible, therefore automated approaches are required. However, automated approaches require background knowledge about the person whose identity web references are to be disambiguated. Within this paper we present a detailed approach to monitor the web presence of a given individual by obtaining background knowledge from Web 2.0 platforms to support automated disambiguation processes. We present a methodology for generating this background knowledge by exporting data from multiple Web 2.0 platforms as RDF data models and combining these models together for use as seed data. We present two disambiguation techniques; the first using a semi-supervised machine learning technique known as Self-training and the second using a graph-based technique known as Random Walks, we explain how the semantics of data supports the intrinsic functionalities of these techniques. We compare the performance of our presented disambiguation techniques against several baseline measures including human processing of the same data. We achieve an average precision level of 0.935 for Self-training and an average f-measure level of 0.705 for Random Walks in both cases outperforming several baselines measures.     

基于 MATLAB WebFigure 的在线作图课件

利用数学工具软件MATLAB的MATLAB Compiler Runtime架设MATLAB Web服务,应用MATLAB WebFigure开发在线作图实验课件。介绍设计思想和方法,给出利用MATLAB WebFigure实现在线作空间曲线图的关键技术,在网页上实现MATLAB环境下的直观逼真效果,为师生提供在线作图的教学资源。     

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.     

Changes in Web client access patterns: Characteristics and caching implications

Understanding the nature of the workloads and system demands created by users of the World Wide Web is crucial to properly designing and provisioning Web services. Previous measurements of Web client workloads have been shown to exhibit a number of characteristic features; however, it is not clear how those features may be changing with time. In this study we compare two measurements of Web client workloads separated in time by three years, both captured from the same computing facility at Boston University. The older dataset, obtained in 1995, is well known in the research literature and has been the basis for a wide variety of studies. The newer dataset was captured in 1998 and is comparable in size to the older dataset. The new dataset has the drawback that the collection of users measured may no longer be representative of general Web users; however, using it has the advantage that many comparisons can be drawn more clearly than would be possible using a new, different source of measurement. Our results fall into two categories. First we compare the statistical and distributional properties of Web requests across the two datasets. This serves to reinforce and deepen our understanding of the characteristic statistical properties of Web client requests. We find that the kinds of distributions that best describe document sizes have not changed between 1995 and 1998, although specific values of the distributional parameters are different. Second, we explore the question of how the observed differences in the properties of Web client requests, particularly the popularity and temporal locality properties, affect the potential for Web file caching in the network. We find that for the computing facility represented by our traces between 1995 and 1998, (1) the benefits of using size‐based caching policies have diminished; and (2) the potential for caching requested files in the network has declined. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Tailored presentation of dynamic web content for audio browsers

Understanding the content of a Web page and navigating within and between pages are crucial tasks for any Web user. To those who are accessing pages through non-visual means, such as screen readers, the challenges offered by these tasks are not easily overcome, even when pages are unchanging documents. The advent of ‘Web 2.0’ and Web applications, however, means that documents often are not static, but update, either automatically or due to user interaction. This development poses a difficult question for screen reader designers: how should users be notified of page changes? In this article we introduce rules for presenting such updates, derived from studies of how sighted users interact with them. An implementation of the rules has been evaluated, showing that users who were blind or visually impaired found updates easier to deal with than the relatively quiet way in which current screen readers often present them.     

An empirical analysis of smartphone personalisation: measurement and user variability

The present report is an empirical analysis of smartphone personalisation. We collected data from two groups of users to measure how they adapt the content, interface and physical appearance of their devices. This user-driven personalisation is measured with a simple heuristic approach to quantify the behaviour. Using these scores, we explore how users differ from each other in how they personalise their smartphones with a focus on gender differences, usability and device usage in the wild. Among our findings are that not all users personalise their smartphones, females and males personalise their iPhones differently, and those who personalised their phones more tended to rate it as more usable. The users who personalised more also used their device for greater periods of time on a broader range of applications. For instance, individuals who adapted their iPhones to a greater degree also accessed the Web more often and spent more time browsing once it was accessed. We conclude with a discussion of possible factors underlying the large user diversity of smartphone personalisation found in this research.     

Improving Web usability with the link lens

A number of factors may influence Web users' choice of which links to follow. These include assumptions about document quality and anticipated retrieval times. The present generation of World Wide Web browsers, however, provide only minimal support to assist users in making informed decisions. Web browser `link user interfaces' typically only display a document's Universal Resource Locator (URL), whilst a simple binary colour change in the URL's anchor is used to indicate its activation history. The question then is, how do users deal with the problem of having to make such decisions when the information at hand is insufficient? We have been conducting an investigation of how users make link selections.The results show users often are forced to fall back on heuristics and improvising strategies drawn from past experience. Based upon these results, we present a prototype of the `link lens', an enhanced link user interface designed to make such decisions easier and more productive for all users and help less experienced ones gain a better understanding of Web behaviour.     

Distributed user interfaces in public spaces using RFID-based panels

The combination and integration of services between mobile computing and context-aware applications responds to the use of mobile devices defining a wide range of distributed user interfaces to support social activities. In this paper, we propose a novel solution that combines social software with context awareness to improve users' interaction in public spaces. This approach is based on the concept of collaborative interactive panels where users share their opinions and ideas about environmental issues by performing natural gestures. And so, taking advantage of physical resources already available in public spaces combined with the use of well-known technologies, such as mobile devices and RFID, we extend the concept of social software from the Web to physical public scenarios, such as bus stations, squares, etc. As an example, we present a case of study that encourage citizens' participation in decisions related to the community environmental issues reducing the gap between the social software and users.     

An approach for supporting distributed user interface orchestration over the Web

Currently, a lot of the tasks engaged by users over the Web involve dealing with multiple Web sites. Moreover, whilst Web navigation was considered as a lonely activity in the past, a large proportion of users are nowadays engaged in collaborative activities over the Web. In this paper we argue that these two aspects of collaboration and tasks spanning over multiple Web sites call for a level of coordination that require Distributed User Interfaces (DUI). In this context, DUIs would play a major role by helping multiple users to coordinate their activities whilst working collaboratively to complete tasks at different Web sites. For that, we propose in this paper an approach to create distributed user interfaces featuring procedures that are aimed to orchestrate user tasks over multiple Web sites. Our approach supports flexible process modeling by allowing users to combine manual tasks and automated tasks from a repertoire of patterns of tasks performed over the Web. In our approach, whilst manual tasks can be regarded as simple instructions that tell users how to perform a task over a Web site, automated tasks correspond to tools built under the concept of Web augmentation (as it augments the repertoire of tasks users can perform over the Web) called Web augmenters. Both manual and automated tasks are usually supported by specific DOM elements available in different Web sites. Thus, by combining tasks and DOM elements distributed in diverse Web sites our approach supports the creation of procedures that allows seamless users interaction with diverse Web site. Moreover, such an approach is aimed at supporting the collaboration between users sharing procedures. The approach is duly illustrated by a case study describing a collaborative trip planning over the Web.     

Graph Farming

The Giant Global Graph is an excellent perspective on how we can consider diverse pieces of Web infrastructure as a conceptual whole. The Web, when augmented with RDF's graph model, provides an interconnected system. The resources on the semantic Web are interconnected through logical predicates, but this layer exists on top of the coupling offered by the link, as built into the Web since day one. Resources can be identified with URIs designed for HTTP, and the primary Web mechanism is that of using HTTP to get representations of those resources.