Showing papers on "Semantic Web published in 1996"

Silk from a sow's ear: extracting usable structures from the Web

Abstract: In its current implementation, the World-Wide Web lacks much of the explicit structure and strong typing found in many closed hypertext systems. While this property probably relates to the explosive acceptance of the Web, it further complicates the already difficult problem of identifying usable structures and aggregates in large hypertext collections. These reduced structures, or localities, form the basis for simplifying visualizations of and navigation through complex hypertext systems. Much of the previous research into identifying aggregates utilize graph theoretic algorithms based upon structural topology, i.e., the linkages between items. Other research has focused on content analysis to form document collections. This paper presents our exploration into techniques that utilize both the topology and textual similarity between items as well as usage data collected by servers and page meta-information lke title and size. Linear equations and spreading activation models are employed to arrange Web pages based upon functional categories, node types, and relevancy.

A declarative language for querying and restructuring the Web

Abstract: World Wide Web is a hypertext based, distributed information system that provides access to vast amounts of information in the Internet. A fundamental problem with the Web is the difficulty of retrieving specific information of interest to the user, from the enormous number of resources that are available. We develop a simple logic called WebLog that is capable of retrieving information from HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) documents in the Web. WebLog is inspired by SchemaLog, a logic for multidatabase interoperability. We demonstrate the suitability of WebLog for: querying and restructuring Web information; exploiting partial knowledge users might have on the information being queried; and dealing with the dynamic nature of information in the Web. We illustrate the simplicity and power of WebLog using a variety of applications involving real life information in the Web.

WWW: past, present, and future

Abstract: The World Wide Web is simply defined as the universe of global network-accessible information. It is an abstract space within which people can interact, and it is chiefly populated by interlinked pages of text, images, and animations, with occasional sounds, videos, and three-dimensional worlds. The Web marks the end of an era of frustrating and debilitating incompatibility between computer systems. It has created an explosion of accessibility, with many potential social and economical impacts. The Web was designed to be a space within which people could work on a project. This was a powerful concept, in that: people who build a hypertext document of their shared understanding can refer to it at all times; people who join a project team can have access to a history of the team's activities, decisions, and so on; the work of people who leave a team can be captured for future reference; and a team's operations, if placed on the Web, can be machine-analyzed in a way that could not be done otherwise. The Web was originally supposed to be a personal information system and a tool for groups of all sizes, from a team of two to the entire world. People have rapidly developed new features for the Web, because of its tremendous commercial potential. This has made the maintenance of globalWeb interoperability a continuous task. This has also created a number of areas into which research must continue.

The World-Wide-Web as social hypertext

Abstract: S omething curious is happening on the World-Wide Web. It is undergoing a slow transformation from an abstract, chaotic, information web into what I call a social hypertext. Initially, I didn’t pay much attention to the Web. After all, it was just a new take on distributed information server systems, such as WAIS [8] and Gopher [1]. True, it was easier to use than WAIS, and the ability of Web browsers to display formatted text and graphics with embedded links made it more attractive and engaging than either WAIS or Gopher. But there was nothing really new; it was an incremental advance, a new combination of well-known functionality. So I mentally categorized the Web as just the latest fashion to sweep the Internet. In this I was quite wrong, although the phrasing of my dismissal in terms of fashion contained a deep truth. This isn’t to say I ignored the Web. As a user-experience specialist in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, one of my jobs is to stay abreast of new things. So I occasionally browsed it to see what was happening. Early in 1995 I had a conversion experience. The cause of my change of heart was the widespread appearance of personal pages. Personal pages are similar to informal resumes, except that in addition to professional material they often contain personal information. Hobbies, research interests, pets, professional publications, children, politics, friends, colleagues, all are grist for the personal page. I believe this seemingly frivolous blending of the professional and the personal is the key to why the Web is becoming a fundamentally different creature from the systems of information servers that preceded it. Personal pages and the Web are not being used to “publish information”; they are being used to construct identity—useful information is just a side effect. A personal page is a carefully constructed portrayal of a person. This insight leads me to characterize the Web as a social hypertext. The nodes—at least some of them—are becoming representations of people. And this, in turn, enables another critical feature to emerge: links from a personal page often point to socially salient pages. A common feature of the personal page is a list of pointers to “interesting people and places.” What and who count as interesting? That depends on the person, and hence also tells us more about the person. Thus, the links, The World-Wide Web as Social Hypertext

Web Map: Concept Mapping on the Web.

Abstract: Concept maps have long provided visual languages widely used in many different disciplines and application domains. This article reports experience in taking an existing open architecture concept mapping tool and making it available on the web in a number of ways: as a client helper downloading and uploading concept maps; as an active controller of the browser, indexing multimedia material through URLs embedded in concept maps; as a concept map creator controlled by the browser, generating concept maps through the browsing process; and as an auxiliary HTTP server making concept maps available as clickable maps for users who do not have the client helper or want to use active concept maps embedded in documents.

Ontology-Based Knowledge Discovery on the World-Wide Web

Abstract: This paper describes SHOE, a set of Simple HTML Ontology Extensions. SHOE allows World-Wide Web authors to annotate their pages with ontology-based knowledge about page contents. We present examples showing how the use of SHOE can support a new generation of knowledge-based search and knowledge discovery tools that operate on the WorM-Wide Web.

Guidelines for designing usable World Wide Web pages

Abstract: The proliferation of World Wide Web pages with poor usability is a serious problem because these pages waste user time, discourage exploration and could be responsible for a large amount of unnecessary traffic on the Internet. To alleviate this problem, we are proposing a set of simple guidelines for designing usable Web pages. The guidelines were compiled from a heuristic evaluation of existing Web sites. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the usability of home pages designed with the proposed guidelines. The experiment demonstrated that designers of Web pages can improve the usability of home pages by applying these guidelines.

Do-I-Care: a collaborative Web agent

Abstract: Social filtering and collaborative resource discovery mechanisms often fail because of the extra burden, even tiny, placed on the user. This work proposes an innovative World Wide Web agent that uses a model of collaboration that leverages the natural incentives for individual users to easily provide for collaborative work.

Author-oriented link management

Abstract: Currently, a major issue with the World Wide Web (WWW) is link management—keeping web structures consistent whenever pages are moved, deleted, or changed. This paper describes a link management technique that helps authors ensure the consistency of their content. This technique, called the change log table/web-walk (CLT/WW) approach, is based on web operations that log the gross changes made by authors to their web pages. We discuss the interesting properties of this approach, including: managing cross-site linking of many web sites, ease of integration into existing content management systems, and decoupling web operations from link management. The issues surrounding this technique and potential extensions to this approach are also discussed.

WebinTool: a generic Web to database interface building tool

Abstract: The increasing use of the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) for information retrieval from information systems has created a demand for Web to database interface building tools. The requirements for such a building tool is analysed and a framework (WebinTool) for rapid building and easy maintenance of Web interfaces is presented. The key component of the WebinTool is an interface tool language which mainly consists of the HTML statements and dedicated SQL-based data manipulation statements. Using this language, a variety of user-customized Web interfaces can be created.

Weblint: quality assurance for the World Wide Web

Abstract: More and more people are creating World Wide Web (WWW) pages. This explosive growth of the WWW is made easier through a widening variety of web browsers, each implementing its own interpretation of HTML. WWW search engines which extract information from pages based on their structure have multiplied just as rapidly. All these things mean it is increasingly important that web pages are checked for legal syntax and for additional problems, such as portability across browsers. This paper develops an initial taxonomy of HTML problems and describes weblint, a tool which can be used to identify a number of these problems.

Visualizing the World Wide Web

Abstract: We discuss some principles that we believe are important in creating useful visualizations of the World Wide Web. They are: layout, abstraction, focus, and interaction. We illustrate these points with examples from the work of our group at the University of Toronto.

Enhanced graph models in the Web: multi-client, multi-head, multi-tail browsing

Abstract: One key to the wide and rapid acceptance of the World Wide Web is the simplicity of its model. We see this in its short-lived connections and generally stateless servers, as well as in the relationship between nodes (HTML pages) and embedded links. Though these factors contribute to the Web's success, they also come at a cost: precise control of how documents are presented to the user is beyond this basic model. Richer graph models permit authors to “program” the browsing behavior they want readers to see by turning the hypertext into a hyperprogram with specific semantics. Multiple browsing streams can be started under the author's control and then kept in step through the synchronization mechanisms provided by the graph model. Our current work adds a Semantic Web Graph Layer (SWGL) which allows dynamic interpretation of link and node structures according to graph models. As a motivating example of the utility of the SWGL, we have chosen to implement the graph model for Colored Petri Nets (CPNs). The previous MMM project[6] implemented a limited subset of the Petri net model to give Web authors the ability to control concurrency and synchronization in a single reader's browsing session. CPNs extend this protocol to give control of multiple readers in a like fashion. This paper details the SWGL and its architecture, some sample protocol implementations, and the latest extensions to MHTML[6] that were necessary to support these enhancements.

The design, development and evaluation of hypermedia courseware for the World Wide Web

Abstract: The World Wide Web provides hypertext and multimedia based information across the Internet. Many applications have been developed on http servers.

An architecture for integrating OODBs with WWW

Abstract: The main topic of this paper is how to structure information so that the view of the web, both within and across web pages, is dynamically customizable. We present an architecture that integrates Object-Oriented Databases with the World Wide Web to organize such dynamic structures. Different users, or the same user at different times, could have different views of the web. We discuss several architectural variants and implementation issues. Our chosen architecture provides high flexibility for a wide variety of applications, ranging from managed healthcare to software development environments, and has been realized in the dkweb system.

Simple but useful tools for interactive WWW development

Abstract: An important area for World Wide Web (WWW) development is customized educational web pages incorporating interactive features. Unfortunately, it is usually necessary for an engineering instructor to expend a substantial amount of time to learn the peculiarities of programming and debugging web-based interactive applications. To help eliminate this time hurdle a description is given in this paper of a set of software routines which allow an instructor to prepare a set of quiz questions or drill problems in the form of ordinary text files, then to convert the files automatically into hypertext markup language (HTML) with an interactive "forms" interface for inclusion in a web site. The relatively simple examples considered in this paper are intended to serve as templates for those individuals who are interested in probing more deeply into the intricacies of web software. Examples and computer code are also available.

Html 3: Electronic Publishing on the World Wide Web

Abstract: An understanding of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language used to publish information on the World Wide Web, is vital to anyone considering creating a Web page for the internet Fully updated to include the latest additions to the HTML standard, this book is the second edition of HTML 3: Electronic Publishing on the World Wide Web Lead HTML architect Dave Raggett provides readers with insider information regarding the new Version X and the development of HTML

Applying database visualization to the World Wide Web

Abstract: In this paper, we present visualizations of parts of the network of documents comprising the World Wide Web. We describe how we are using the Hy+ visualization system to visualize the portion of the World Wide Web explored during a browsing session. As the user browses, the web browser communicates the URL and title of each document fetched as well as all the anchors contained in the document. Hy+ displays graphically the history of the navigation and multiple views of the structure of that portion of the web.

Web document engineering

Abstract: This tutorial provides an overview of several document engineering techniques which are applicable to the authoring of World Wide Web documents. It illustrates how pre-WWW hypertext research is applicable to the development of WWW information resources.

Interactive Graph Drawing on the World Wide Web

Abstract: We discuss a system for performing interactive graph drawing on the World Wide Web (WWW), implemented in the Java programming language. The system allows for highly interactive experimentation in graph drawing, supporting direct user interaction and parameter adjustment during the embedding process. The use of Java and the WWW in its implementation makes the system globally available, both for interactive use and for integration into other systems, regardless of computer platform details. We present the design, implementation and use of the system, as well as some experimental results.

Ex-W-Pert system: A Web-based distributed expert system for groupware design

Abstract: The World Wide Web (Web) allows people at remotely located sites to communicate and share their ideas using a common communication protocol. A common use of the Web system is running a client application, using a browsing tool, by pointing to a local or proxy server to browse data written in the hypertext format that contains anchors that address other URLs. In this paper a new application of the Web system for sharing knowledge-based systems and groupware development activities is introduced. An architecture for a Web-based Distributed Expert System (Ex-W-Pert System) is proposed and an implementation of the proposed architecture in groupware design is demonstrated. The resources and knowledge bases are distributed and can be accessed through the internet.