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Showing papers on "Web modeling published in 2017"


Proceedings ArticleDOI
14 Jun 2017
TL;DR: The motivation, design and formal semantics of WebAssembly are described, some preliminary experience with implementations are provided, and it is described how WebAssembly is an abstraction over modern hardware, making it language-, hardware-, and platform-independent, with use cases beyond just the Web.
Abstract: The maturation of the Web platform has given rise to sophisticated and demanding Web applications such as interactive 3D visualization, audio and video software, and games. With that, efficiency and security of code on the Web has become more important than ever. Yet JavaScript as the only built-in language of the Web is not well-equipped to meet these requirements, especially as a compilation target. Engineers from the four major browser vendors have risen to the challenge and collaboratively designed a portable low-level bytecode called WebAssembly. It offers compact representation, efficient validation and compilation, and safe low to no-overhead execution. Rather than committing to a specific programming model, WebAssembly is an abstraction over modern hardware, making it language-, hardware-, and platform-independent, with use cases beyond just the Web. WebAssembly has been designed with a formal semantics from the start. We describe the motivation, design and formal semantics of WebAssembly and provide some preliminary experience with implementations.

388 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The results of this study confirms that new meta-heuristic algorithms have not yet been applied for solving QoS-aware web services composition and describes future research directions in this area.
Abstract: Web service composition concerns the building of new value added services by integrating the sets of existing web services. Due to the seamless proliferation of web services, it becomes difficult to find a suitable web service that satisfies the requirements of users during web service composition. This paper systematically reviews existing research on QoS-aware web service composition using computational intelligence techniques (published between 2005 and 2015). This paper develops a classification of research approaches on computational intelligence based QoS-aware web service composition and describes future research directions in this area. In particular, the results of this study confirms that new meta-heuristic algorithms have not yet been applied for solving QoS-aware web services composition.

168 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The idea is that several detection methods are combined and executed in parallel during an optimization process to find a consensus regarding the identification of web service antipatterns using a cooperative parallel evolutionary algorithm (P-EA).
Abstract: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is widely used in industry and is regarded as one of the preferred architectural design technologies. As with any other software system, service-based systems (SBSs) may suffer from poor design, i.e., antipatterns, for many reasons such as poorly planned changes, time pressure or bad design choices. Consequently, this may lead to an SBS product that is difficult to evolve and that exhibits poor quality of service (QoS). Detecting web service antipatterns is a manual, time-consuming and error-prone process for software developers. In this paper, we propose an automated approach for detection of web service antipatterns using a cooperative parallel evolutionary algorithm (P-EA). The idea is that several detection methods are combined and executed in parallel during an optimization process to find a consensus regarding the identification of web service antipatterns. We report the results of an empirical study using eight types of common web service antipatterns. We compare the implementation of our cooperative P-EA approach with random search, two single population-based approaches and one state-of-the-art detection technique not based on heuristic search. Statistical analysis of the obtained results demonstrates that our approach is efficient in antipattern detection, with a precision score of 89 percent and a recall score of 93 percent.

106 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
06 Nov 2017
TL;DR: This work proposes the first end-to-end framework to build an NL2API for a given web API, and applies it to real-world APIs, and shows that it can collect high-quality training data at a low cost, and build NL2APIs with good performance from scratch.
Abstract: As the Web evolves towards a service-oriented architecture, application program interfaces (APIs) are becoming an increasingly important way to provide access to data, services, and devices. We study the problem of natural language interface to APIs (NL2APIs), with a focus on web APIs for web services. Such NL2APIs have many potential benefits, for example, facilitating the integration of web services into virtual assistants. We propose the first end-to-end framework to build an NL2API for a given web API. A key challenge is to collect training data, i.e., NL command-API call pairs, from which an NL2API can learn the semantic mapping from ambiguous, informal NL commands to formal API calls. We propose a novel approach to collect training data for NL2API via crowdsourcing, where crowd workers are employed to generate diversified NL commands. We optimize the crowdsourcing process to further reduce the cost. More specifically, we propose a novel hierarchical probabilistic model for the crowdsourcing process, which guides us to allocate budget to those API calls that have a high value for training NL2APIs. We apply our framework to real-world APIs, and show that it can collect high-quality training data at a low cost, and build NL2APIs with good performance from scratch. We also show that our modeling of the crowdsourcing process can improve its effectiveness, such that the training data collected via our approach leads to better performance of NL2APIs than a strong baseline.

66 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Recommendations are made that allow Web developers to choose a framework for creating a real-world Web project using various criteria to determine performance and effectiveness of frameworks during the same task.

61 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper reviews the developments of web mapping from the first static online map images to the current highly interactive, multi-sourced web mapping services that have been increasingly moved to cloud computing platforms.
Abstract: Web mapping and the use of geospatial information online have evolved rapidly over the past few decades. Almost everyone in the world uses mapping information, whether or not one realizes it. Almost every mobile phone now has location services and every event and object on the earth has a location. The use of this geospatial location data has expanded rapidly, thanks to the development of the Internet. Huge volumes of geospatial data are available and daily being captured online, and are used in web applications and maps for viewing, analysis, modeling and simulation. This paper reviews the developments of web mapping from the first static online map images to the current highly interactive, multi-sourced web mapping services that have been increasingly moved to cloud computing platforms. The whole environment of web mapping captures the integration and interaction between three components found online, namely, geospatial information, people and functionality. In this paper, the trends and interactions among these components are identified and reviewed in relation to the technology developments. The review then concludes by exploring some of the opportunities and directions.

60 citations


Book
29 Sep 2017
TL;DR: This book introduces data validation and describes its practical use in day-to-day data exchange, using Web addresses as identifiers for data elements enables the construction of distributed databases on a global scale.
Abstract: RDF and Linked Data have broad applicability across many fields, from aircraft manufacturing to zoology. Requirements for detecting bad data differ across communities, fields, and tasks, but nearly all involve some form of data validation. This book introduces data validation and describes its practical use in day-to-day data exchange. The Semantic Web offers a bold, new take on how to organize, distribute, index, and share data. Using Web addresses (URIs) as identifiers for data elements enables the construction of distributed databases on a global scale. Like the Web, the Semantic Web is heralded as an information revolution, and also like the Web, it is encumbered by data quality issues. The quality of Semantic Web data is compromised by the lack of resources for data curation, for maintenance, and for developing globally applicable data models. At the enterprise scale, these problems have conventional solutions. Master data management provides an enterprise-wide vocabulary, while constraint l...

59 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article collects and analyzes over 200 related academic works to build a flexible conceptual model for WoTSE, and develops an analytical framework on this model to review the development of the field and its current status, reflected by 30 representative works in the area.
Abstract: Technological advances allow more physical objects to connect to the Internet and provide their services on the Web as resources. Search engines are the key to fully utilize this emerging Web of Things, as they bridge users and applications with resources needed for their operation. Developing these systems is a challenging and diverse endeavor due to the diversity of Web of Things resources that they work with. Each combination of resources in query resolution process requires a different type of search engine with its own technical challenges and usage scenarios. This diversity complicates both the development of new systems and assessment of the state of the art. In this article, we present a systematic survey on Web of Things Search Engines (WoTSE), focusing on the diversity in forms of these systems. We collect and analyze over 200 related academic works to build a flexible conceptual model for WoTSE. We develop an analytical framework on this model to review the development of the field and its current status, reflected by 30 representative works in the area. We conclude our survey with a discussion on open issues to bridge the gap between the existing progress and an ideal WoTSE.

48 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A new QoS-aware Web service recommendation system, which considers the contextual feature similarities of different services based on their feature similarities, and utilizes an improved matrix factorization method to recommend services to users.
Abstract: Quality of service (QoS) has been playing an increasingly important role in today’s Web service environment. Many techniques have been proposed to recommend personalized Web services to customers. However, existing methods only utilize the QoS information at the client-side and neglect the contextual characteristics of the service. Based on the fact that the quality of Web service is affected by its context feature, this paper proposes a new QoS-aware Web service recommendation system, which considers the contextual feature similarities of different services. The proposed system first extracts the contextual properties from WSDL files to cluster Web services based on their feature similarities, and then utilizes an improved matrix factorization method to recommend services to users. The proposed framework is validated on a real-world dataset consisting of over 1.5 million Web service invocation records from 5825 Web services and 339 users. The experimental results prove the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.

45 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper describes a novel approach for the automatic generation of page objects for web applications that combines clustering and static analysis to identify meaningful page abstractions that are automatically turned into Java pageObjects for Selenium WebDriver.
Abstract: Modern web applications are characterized by ultra-rapid development cycles, and web testers tend to pay scant attention to the quality of their automated end-to-end test suites. Indeed, these quickly become hard to maintain, as the application under test evolves. As a result, end-to-end automated test suites are abandoned, despite their great potential for catching regressions. The use of the Page Object pattern has proven to be very effective in end-to-end web testing. Page objects are facade classes abstracting the internals of web pages into high-level business functions that can be invoked by the test cases. By decoupling test code from web page details, web test cases are more readable and maintainable. However, the manual development of such page objects requires substantial coding effort, which is paid off only later, during software evolution. In this paper, we describe a novel approach for the automatic generation of page objects for web applications. Our approach is implemented in the tool Apogen, which automatically derives a testing model by reverse engineering the target web application. It combines clustering and static analysis to identify meaningful page abstractions that are automatically turned into Java page objects for Selenium WebDriver. Our evaluation on an open-source web application shows that our approach is highly promising: Automatically generated page object methods cover most of the application functionalities and result in readable and meaningful code, which can be very useful to support the creation of more maintainable web test suites.

44 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A data set of implicit feedback on real-world Web services, which consist of more than 280,000 user-service interaction records, 65,000 service users and 15,000 Web services or mashups, is reported and a time-aware service recommendation approach is proposed.
Abstract: An increasing number of Web services have been published on the Internet over the past decade due to the rapid development and adoption of the SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) standard However, in the current state of the Web, recommending suitable Web services to users becomes a challenge due to the huge divergence in published content Existing Web services recommendation approaches based on collaborative filtering are mainly aiming to QoS (Quality of Service) prediction Recommending services based on users' ratings on services are seldomly reported due to the difficulty of collecting such explicit feedback In this paper, we report a data set of implicit feedback on real-world Web services, which consist of more than 280,000 user-service interaction records, 65,000 service users and 15,000 Web services or mashups Temporal information is becoming an increasingly important factor in service recommendation since time effects may influence users' preferences on services to a large extent Based on the collected data set, we propose a time-aware service recommendation approach Temporal information is sufficiently considered in our approach, where three time effects are analyzed and modeled including user bias shifting, Web service bias shifting, and user preference shifting Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms seven existing collaborative filtering approaches on the prediction accuracy

Book ChapterDOI
28 May 2017
TL;DR: It is shown that annotating APIs with smartAPI metadata is straightforward through an extension of the existing Swagger editor, and this work increases the automated interoperability of Web APIs.
Abstract: Data science increasingly employs cloud-based Web application programming interfaces (APIs). However, automatically discovering and connecting suitable APIs for a given application is difficult due to the lack of explicit knowledge about the structure and datatypes of Web API inputs and outputs. To address this challenge, we conducted a survey to identify the metadata elements that are crucial to the description of Web APIs and subsequently developed the smartAPI metadata specification and associated tools to capture their domain-related and structural characteristics using the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. This paper presents the results of the survey, provides an overview of the smartAPI specification and a reference implementation, and discusses use cases of smartAPI. We show that annotating APIs with smartAPI metadata is straightforward through an extension of the existing Swagger editor. By facilitating the creation of such metadata, we increase the automated interoperability of Web APIs. This work is done as part of the NIH Commons Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) API Interoperability Working Group.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper considers the Basic Model Interface (BMI) as model interface and demonstrates that BMI helps connect web service models by reducing the heterogeneity of variable names, and EMELI-Web makes it convenient to couple BMI-enabledweb service models.
Abstract: Service-oriented approach for model coupling is gradually gaining momentum. By leveraging the World Wide Web, the service-oriented approach lowers the interoperability barrier of integrating models in terms of programming languague and operating system. While such paradigm has been applied to integrate models wrapped with some standard interfaces, this paper considers the Basic Model Interface (BMI) as model interface. The advantages of BMI are that it (1) enrich the semantics of variable names, and (2) is framework-agnostic. We exposed the BMI-enabled models through web services. Then, a smart modeling framework, the Experimental Modeling Environment for Linking and Interoperability (EMELI), was enhanced into a web application (i.e., EMELI-Web) to integrate the BMI-enabled web service models. By implementing the whole orchestration in coupling TopoFlow components, we demonstrate that BMI helps connect web service models by reducing the heterogeneity of variable names, and EMELI-Web makes it convenient to couple BMI-enabled web service models.

Posted ContentDOI
09 Feb 2017-bioRxiv
TL;DR: This work presents an extension of the widely used PhyloXML standard with several new options to accommodate functional genomics or annotation datasets for advanced visualization in the web browser, with support for advanced annotations.
Abstract: Motivation: Comparative and evolutionary studies utilise phylogenetic trees to analyse and visualise biological data. Recently, several web-based tools for the display, manipulation, and annotation of phylogenetic trees, such as iTOL and Evolview, have released updates to be compatible with the latest web technologies. While those web tools operate an open server access model with a multitude of registered users, a feature-rich open source solution using current web technologies is not available. Results: Here, we present an extension of the widely used PhyloXML standard with several new options to accommodate functional genomics or annotation datasets for advanced visualization. Furthermore, PhyD3 has been developed as a lightweight tool using the JavaScript library D3.js to achieve a state-of-the-art phylogenetic tree visualisation in the web browser, with support for advanced annotations. The current implementation is open source, easily adaptable and easy to implement in third parties9 web sites. Availability: More information about PhyD3 itself, installation procedures, and implementation links are available at http://phyd3.bits.vib.be and at http://github.com/vibbits/phyd3/. Contact: bits@vib.be

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A linear-temporal logic model checking approach for the analysis of structured e-commerce Web logs is proposed that can be easily converted into event logs where the behavior of users is captured.
Abstract: Online shopping is becoming more and more common in our daily lives Understanding users’ interests and behavior is essential to adapt e-commerce websites to customers’ requirements The information about users’ behavior is stored in the Web server logs The analysis of such information has focused on applying data mining techniques, where a rather static characterization is used to model users’ behavior, and the sequence of the actions performed by them is not usually considered Therefore, incorporating a view of the process followed by users during a session can be of great interest to identify more complex behavioral patterns To address this issue, this paper proposes a linear-temporal logic model checking approach for the analysis of structured e-commerce Web logs By defining a common way of mapping log records according to the e-commerce structure, Web logs can be easily converted into event logs where the behavior of users is captured Then, different predefined queries can be performed to identify different behavioral patterns that consider the different actions performed by a user during a session Finally, the usefulness of the proposed approach has been studied by applying it to a real case study of a Spanish e-commerce website The results have identified interesting findings that have made possible to propose some improvements in the website design with the aim of increasing its efficiency

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Apr 2017
TL;DR: The methods, algorithms and architecture of software system to identify non-relevant and wrong information for online website of organization using the web semantic and content analysis are considered.
Abstract: In the article the methods, algorithms and architecture of software system to identify non-relevant and wrong information for online website of organization using the web semantic and content analysis are considered

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A minimal vocabulary to describe and link distributed ledgers is proposed to unlock the web's true potential and generate trustable, secure, and accountable updates among autonomous participants without a central server.
Abstract: The web was originally conceived as decentralized and universal, but during its popularization, its big value was built on centralized servers and nonuniversal access. A key element to redecentralize the web is to be able to generate trustable, secure, and accountable updates among autonomous participants without a central server. The authors believe that the marriage between distributed ledgers and linked data can provide this functionality and unlock the web's true potential. As a first step toward it, the authors propose a minimal vocabulary to describe and link distributed ledgers.

Book
22 Feb 2017
TL;DR: Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web presents a consolidated and holistic coverage of engineering, management, and analytics of the Internet of Things, ranging from modeling, searching, and data analytics, to software building, applications, and social impact.
Abstract: Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web presents a consolidated and holistic coverage of engineering, management, and analytics of the Internet of Things. The web has gone through many transformations, from traditional linking and sharing of computers and documents (i.e., Web of Data), to the current connection of people (i.e., Web of People), and to the emerging connection of billions of physical objects (i.e., Web of Things). With increasing numbers of electronic devices and systems providing different services to people, Web of Things applications present numerous challenges to research institutions, companies, governments, international organizations, and others. This book compiles the newest developments and advances in the area of the Web of Things, ranging from modeling, searching, and data analytics, to software building, applications, and social impact. Its coverage will enable effective exploration, understanding, assessment, comparison, and the selection of WoT models, languages, techniques, platforms, and tools. Readers will gain an up-to-date understanding of the Web of Things systems that accelerates their research. Offers a comprehensive and systematic presentation of the methodologies, technologies, and applications that enable efficient and effective management of the Internet of Things Provides an in-depth analysis on the state-of-the-art Web of Things modeling and searching technologies, including how to collect, clean, and analyze data generated by the Web of Things Covers system design and software building principles, with discussions and explorations of social impact for the Web of Things through real-world applications Acts as an ideal reference or recommended text for graduate courses in cloud computing, service computing, and more

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is aimed to bring smart object services to the Web and make them accessible by plenty of existing Web APIs in consideration of its constraints such as limited resources, low-power microcontrollers, and low-bitrate communication links.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A novel Web service discovery approach based on topic models is presented that can maintain the performance of service discovery at an elevated level by greatly decreasing the number of candidate Web services, thus leading to faster response time.
Abstract: Web services have attracted much attention from distributed application designers and developers because of their roles in abstraction and interoperability among heterogeneous software systems, and a growing number of distributed software applications have been published as Web services on the Internet. Faced with the increasing numbers of Web services and service users, researchers in the services computing field have attempted to address a challenging issue, i.e., how to quickly find the suitable ones according to user queries. Many previous studies have been reported towards this direction. In this paper, a novel Web service discovery approach based on topic models is presented. The proposed approach mines common topic groups from the service-topic distribution matrix generated by topic modeling, and the extracted common topic groups can then be leveraged to match user queries to relevant Web services, so as to make a better trade-off between the accuracy of service discovery and the number of candidate Web services. Experiment results conducted on two publicly-available data sets demonstrate that, compared with several widely used approaches, the proposed approach can maintain the performance of service discovery at an elevated level by greatly decreasing the number of candidate Web services, thus leading to faster response time.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper identifies the most capable libraries for being the basis of a Web GIS client (Cesium, Leaflet, NASA Web World Wind, OpenL layers 2, and OpenLayers 3) and compares them and suggests a new metric named Approximate Learning Curve for JavaScript is proposed, which is based on other software metrics.
Abstract: The increasing capabilities of web browsers and the growing spread of JavaScript have an impact on the development of web-based GIS systems. While in traditional Web GIS applications the client-side component is only responsible for creating representation models, modern geographically enabled JavaScript libraries have extended capabilities, making them capable of doing extensive tasks, like complex geographical analyses. This paper identifies the most capable libraries for being the basis of a Web GIS client (Cesium, Leaflet, NASA Web World Wind, OpenLayers 2, and OpenLayers 3) and compares them. The libraries are compared by their GIS feature coverage and some quality metrics. OpenLayers 3 is identified for being the most capable library by supporting nearly 60% of the examined GIS features, its small size, and moderate learning curve. For comparing the learning curves of JavaScript libraries, a new metric named Approximate Learning Curve for JavaScript is proposed, which is based on other software metrics.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Some of the state-of-the-art web technologies, third-party libraries, and frameworks for quick interactive web development, and a simple interactive browser-based, mobile friendly web application which was developed using one of the latest web development framework are reviewed.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
02 Nov 2017
TL;DR: The ease with which the library can be integrated in an already existing web application is presented, some of the visualization perspectives that the library provides are discussed and some future challenges for similar libraries are pointed to.
Abstract: Tens of thousands of web applications are written in Flask, a Python-based web framework. Despite a rich ecosystem of extensions, there is none that supports the developer in gaining insight into the evolving performance of their service. In this paper, we introduce Flask Dashboard, a library that addresses this problem. We present the ease with which the library can be integrated in an already existing web application, discuss some of the visualization perspectives that the library provides and point to some future challenges for similar libraries.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper proposes a novel Web services discovery approach, which can mine the underlying semantic structures of interaction interface parameters to help users find and employ Web services, and can match interfaces with high precision when the parameters of those interfaces contain meaningful synonyms, abbreviations, and combinations of disordered fragments.
Abstract: In recent years, Web service discovery has been a hot research topic. In this paper, we propose a novel Web services discovery approach, which can mine the underlying semantic structures of interaction interface parameters to help users find and employ Web services, and can match interfaces with high precision when the parameters of those interfaces contain meaningful synonyms, abbreviations, and combinations of disordered fragments. Our approach is based on mining the underlying semantics. First, we propose a conceptual Web services description model in which we include the type path for the interaction interface parameters in addition to the traditional text description. Then, based on this description model, we mine the underlying semantics of the interaction interface to create index libraries by clustering interaction interface names and fragments under the supervision of co-occurrence probability. This index library can help provide a high-efficiency interface that can match not only synonyms but also abbreviations and fragment combinations. Finally, we propose a Web service Operations Discovery algorithm (OpD). The OpD discovery results include two types of Web services: services with “Single” operations and services with “Composite” operations. The experimental evaluation shows that our approach performs better than other Web service discovery methods in terms of both discovery time and precision/recall rate.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A comparative study of some of the prominent tools, techniques, frameworks and models for web application testing is presented and highlights the current research directions ofSome of the web applicationTesting techniques.
Abstract: Testing is an important part of every software development process on which companies devote considerable time and effort The burgeoning web applications and their proliferating economic significance in the society made the area of web application testing an area of acute importance The web applications generally tend to take faster and quicker release cycles making their testing very challenging The main issues in testing are cost efficiency and bug detection efficiency Coverage-based testing is the process of ensuring exercise of specific program elements Coverage measurement helps determine the “thoroughness” of testing achieved An avalanche of tools, techniques, frameworks came into existence to ascertain the quality of web applications A comparative study of some of the prominent tools, techniques and models for web application testing is presented This work highlights the current research directions of some of the web application testing techniques

Journal ArticleDOI
31 Jul 2017
TL;DR: This work presents a novel inclusion dependency detection algorithm, specialized for the very many—but typically small—tables found on the Web, and evaluation on two corpora of Web tables shows a superior runtime over known approaches and its usefulness to reveal hidden structures on the Internet.
Abstract: Detecting inclusion dependencies, the prerequisite of foreign keys, in relational data is a challenging task. Detecting them among the hundreds of thousands or even millions of tables on the web is daunting. Still, such inclusion dependencies can help connect disparate pieces of information on the Web and reveal unknown relationships among tables.With the algorithm Many, we present a novel inclusion dependency detection algorithm, specialized for the very many—but typically small—tables found on the Web. We make use of Bloom filters and indexed bit-vectors to show the feasibility of our approach. Our evaluation on two corpora of Web tables shows a superior runtime over known approaches and its usefulness to reveal hidden structures on the Web.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This survey collects, classify and review existing proposals in the area of formal methods for web security, spanning many different topics: JavaScript security, browser security, web application security, and web protocol analysis.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Warcbase, an open-source Web archiving platform that aims to fill the need for scalable analytics infrastructure to support exploration of captured content, is presented and the current state of the project is presented.
Abstract: Web archiving initiatives around the world capture ephemeral Web content to preserve our collective digital memory. However, unlocking the potential of Web archives for humanities scholars and social scientists requires a scalable analytics infrastructure to support exploration of captured content. We present Warcbase, an open-source Web archiving platform that aims to fill this need. Our platform takes advantage of modern open-source “big data” infrastructure, namely Hadoop, HBase, and Spark, that has been widely deployed in industry. Warcbase provides two main capabilities: support for temporal browsing and a domain-specific language that allows scholars to interrogate Web archives in several different ways. This work represents a collaboration between computer scientists and historians, where we have engaged in iterative codesign to build tools for scholars with no formal computer science training. To provide guidance, we propose a process model for scholarly interactions with Web archives that begins with a question and proceeds iteratively through four main steps: filter, analyze, aggregate, and visualize. We call this the FAAV cycle for short and illustrate with three prototypical case studies. This article presents the current state of the project and discusses future directions.

Journal ArticleDOI
24 Aug 2017
TL;DR: The article puts on the spotlight the potential of in-browser plugin-less programming technologies for carrying out numerical calculations, text processing and mining, retrieval and analysis of data through queries to online databases and web services, effective visualization of data including 3D visualization and even virtual and augmented reality.
Abstract: Whereas server-side programs are essential to maintain databases and run data analysis pipelines and simulations, client-side web-based computing tools are also important as they allow users to access, visualize and analyze the content delivered to their devices on-the-fly and interactively. This article reviews the best-established tools for in-browser plugin-less programming, including JavaScript as used in HTML5 as well as related web technologies. Through examples based on JavaScript libraries, web applets, and even full web apps, either alone or coupled to each other, the article puts on the spotlight the potential of these technologies for carrying out numerical calculations, text processing and mining, retrieval and analysis of data through queries to online databases and web services, effective visualization of data including 3D visualization and even virtual and augmented reality; all of them in the browser at relatively low programming effort, with applications in cheminformatics, structural biology, biophysics, and genomics, among other molecular sciences.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
05 Jun 2017
TL;DR: This paper explores the maturity of modern 3D web technologies in participatory urban planning through two real-world case studies and reports qualitative feedback from users and technical analysis of the applications in terms of download sizes, runtime performance and memory use.
Abstract: 3D Web is a potential platform for publishing and distributing 3D visualizations that have proven useful in enabling the participation of the general public in urban planning. However, technical requirements imposed by detailed and rich real-world plans and related functionalities are demanding for 3D web technologies. In this paper we explore the maturity of modern 3D web technologies in participatory urban planning through two real-world case studies. Applications built on Unity-based platform are published on the web to allow the general public to create, browse and comment on urban plans. The virtual models of seven urban development sites of different visual styles are optimized in terms of download sizes and memory use to be feasible on browsers used by the general public. We report qualitative feedback from users and present a technical analysis of the applications in terms of download sizes, runtime performance and memory use. We summarize the findings of the case studies into an assessment of the general feasibility of modern 3D web technologies in web-based urban planning.