Abstract: Computer users may integrate any annotation, including ink, highlighter, text-based notes and audio, directly into a Web-based document (WBD) displayed by a Web browser. This integration enables others to view the personalized annotated WBD, which retains its original active links and properties, over the Internet without the need for specialized software. Annotations are integrated into WBDs by freezing the WBD, overlaying an image file containing the annotations onto the WBD, and enabling browser events to pass through the image layer. Annotations may also be integrated into WBDs by using component object technology. By collecting and organizing annotated WBDs, users can be provided with an intuitive Web-based interface for accessing, viewing and searching the annotated WBDs. Users may annotate blank WBDs, effectively converting their Web browsers into online notebooks/scrapbooks. Users may also be provided with many interface techniques, such as dog-ears and its associated navigation tools, splitting pages, turning pages, selecting and copying various portions of a WBD (including shaking out a copy), and marking menus suited for right-handed or left-handed users.

Abstract: Business-to-consumer electronic commerce (e-commerce), one form of which is Web-based shopping, is defined as electronic-based economic transactions conducted between individual consumers and organizations. While this form of e-commerce is forecast to grow rapidly for the foreseeable future, it still represents only a small fraction of total consumer spending. To better take advantage of and be prepared for this economic phenomenon, organizations need to identify and understand factors that may impact consumers' decisions to engage in Web-based e-commerce. Recently, the importance of trust has been discussed in both the academic and practitioner press. The impact of trust on the use of e-commerce has been established empirically. The research reported here builds on those findings by establishing that not only is trust in Web merchants significantly related to purchase intentions via the Web, but this significance holds even when other, more traditional perceptions are considered. A survey of consumers was conducted and results indicate that trust in Web merchants is positively related to intentions to make purchases from Web merchants, even when the impact of other perceived innovation characteristics are considered. The research also contributes to the literature on technology adoption by verifying the impact of perceived innovation characteristics on adoption intentions.

Abstract: Provided is a method and system for monitoring and analysis of networked systems, that is non-intrusive and real time. Both secure and non-secure traffic may be analyzed. The provided method involves non-intrusively copying data from a communication medium, reconstructing this data to a higher level of communication, such as the application level, grouping the data into sets, each set representing a session, and organizing the data for chosen sessions in hierarchical fashion which corresponds to the hierarchy of the communicated information. If monitored communications are encrypted, they are non-intrusively decrypted in real time. Hierarchically reconstructed session data is used by one or more plug-in applications, such as alarms, archival applications, visualization applications, script generation applications, abandonment monitoring applications, error detection applications, performance monitoring applications, and others.

Abstract: Wireless Electronic Check Deposit Scanning and Cashing Machine (also known and referred to as WEDS) Web-based Online account cash Management computer application System (also known and referred to as OMS virtual/live teller)—collectively invented integrated as “WEDSOMS” System Method and Apparatus for Depositing and Cashing Ordinary paper and/or substitute checks and money orders online Wirelessly from home/office computer, laptop, Internet enabled mobile phone, pda (personal digital assistant) and/or any Internet enabled device WEDS enables verification and transmittal of image, OMS is the navigation tool used to set commands and process requests, integrated with WEDS, working collectively as WEDSOMS System

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach of using web log data generated by course management systems (CMS) to help instructors become aware of what is happening in distance learning classes. Specifically, techniques from Information Visualization are used to graphically render complex, multidimensional student tracking data collected by CMS. A system, called CourseVis, illustrates the proposed approach. Graphical representations from the use of CourseVis to visualise data from a java on-line distance course ran with WebCT are presented. Findings from the evaluation of CourseVis are presented, and it is argued that CourseVis can help teachers become aware of some social, behavioural, and cognitive aspects related to distance learners. Using graphical representations of student tracking data, instructors can identify tendencies in their classes, or quickly discover individuals that need special attention.

Abstract: Web services are fast emerging as the dominant means for connecting remotely executing programs via well established Internet protocols and commonly used machine readable representations. Software agents are now increasingly used in commercial applications to solve complex engineering problems, and these applications often expose or make use of Web services. As such, this paper presents a gateway architecture for connecting software agents and Web services in a transparent manner with fully automatic operation. This gateway allows Web services to invoke agent services and vice versa by translating message encodings and service descriptions between the two technologies. We also address how software agents offer the opportunity to introduce new modalities in the ways Web services are used and manipulated, including redirection, aggregation, integration and administration.

Abstract: A system and a method for providing offline web application, page, and form access in a networked or Internet environment. In accordance with one embodiment an Offline Access Server offline Web infrastructure based on a scalable, polite communication technology. The Offline Access Server uses an offline enabling technology, and an HTML extension such as OTML (Offline Tagging Markup Language), to enable any set of web application, application data, page, or form to operate and to be usable offline.

Abstract: A workflow, enterprise, and mail-enabled application server and platform supports distributed computing and remote execution of web applications. Lotus Domino online services (DOLS) is used by a web site administrator to configure Internet Notes (iNotes) clients to auto download from server, thus providing iNotes clients with web access using HTTP with various browsers, and with local processing and replication. A local run time model comprises a hierarchy of models including object data store model, security model, indexing model, replication model, agent workflow model and mail model. DOLS provides a layered security model that allows flexibility for controlling access to all or part of an application. The highest level of security is managed through a database access control list (ACL). Further refinements within the security model provide access to specific documents, and their views, forms or folders, and include read access lists, write access lists, form access lists and readers and authors fields.

Abstract: With the rapid development of e-business, web applications based on the Web are developed from localization to globalization, from B2C(business-to-customer) to B2B(business-to-business), from centralized fashion to decentralized fashion. Web service is a new application model for decentralized computing, and it is also an effective mechanism for the data and service integration on the web. Thus, web service has become a solution to e-business. It is important and necessary to carry out the research on the new architecture of web services, on the combinations with other good techniques, and on the integration of services. In this paper, a survey presents on various aspects of the research of web services from the basic concepts to the principal research problems and the underlying techniques, including data integration in web services, web service composition, semantic web service, web service discovery, web service security, the solution to web services in the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) computing environment, and the grid service, etc. This paper also presents a summary of the current art of the state of these techniques, a discussion on the future research topics, and the challenges of the web services.

Abstract: Content delivery networks have evolved beyond traditional distributed caching. With services such as Akamai's EdgeComputing it is now possible to deploy and run enterprise business Web applications on a globally distributed computing platform, to provide subsecond response time to end users anywhere in the world. Additionally, this distributed application platform provides high levels of fault-tolerance and scalability on-demand to meet virtually any need. Application resources can be provisioned dynamically in seconds to respond automatically to changes in load on a given application.In some cases, an application can be deployed completely on the global platform without any central enterprise infrastructure. Other applications can require centralizing core business logic and transactional databases at the enterprise data center while the presentation layer and some business logic and database functionality move onto the edge platform.Implementing a distributed application service on the Internet's edge requires overcoming numerous challenges, including sandboxing for security, distributed load-balancing and resource management, accounting and billing, deployment, testing, debugging, and monitoring. Our current implementation of Akamai EdgeComputing supports application programming platforms such as Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft's .NET Framework, in large part because they make it easier to address some of these challenges. In the near future we will also support environments for other application languages such as C, PHP, and Perl.

Abstract: The present invention relates to a system and method for providing a communication network. The system comprises a ‘network-connected server having input and access capabilities, a site builder, a transmitter, a communicator, and memory. The site-builder receives instructions input from a first user and creates a dedicated network site based on the received instructions. The transmitter communicates the existence of the dedicated network site to a nominated second user. The communicator provides accesses to the contents of the dedicated network site by the first and second users. The memory stores information input by the first and the second user in the dedicated network site.

Abstract: Previous work demonstrated that web counts can be used to approximate bigram frequencies, and thus should be useful for a wide variety of NLP tasks. So far, only two generation tasks (candidate selection for machine translation and confusion-set disambiguation) have been tested using web-scale data sets. The present paper investigates if these results generalize to tasks covering both syntax and semantics, both generation and analysis, and a larger range of n-grams. For the majority of tasks, we find that simple, unsupervised models perform better when n-gram frequencies are obtained from the web rather than from a large corpus. However, in most cases, web-based models fail to outperform more sophisticated state-of-theart models trained on small corpora. We argue that web-based models should therefore be used as a baseline for, rather than an alternative to, standard models.

Abstract: This paper presents a proven and reusable methodology (MiLE) for performing a costeffective usability evaluation of an e-learning web application. MiLE is a scenario-driven inspection technique which is based on the concepts of user profile, user goal, scenario, and usability attribute. Mitigating the drawbacks and merging the respective benefits of state-of-the-art methods for usability evaluation, MiLE is intended to be a helpful tool for project managers, instructional designers, and evaluators to carry out a learner-centered validation which can anticipate and analytically justify the usability breakdowns, thus providing organized indications for a focused redesign. Examples of the results that can be obtained using MiLE are showed through a real case study evaluation of a large e-learning corporate platform.

Abstract: This paper describes a Web-based and distributed system named QSIA that serves as an environment for learning, assessing and knowledge sharing. QSIA - Questions Sharing and Interactive Assignments-offers a unified infrastructure for developing, collecting, managing and sharing of knowledge items. QSIA enhances collaboration in authoring via online recommendations and generates communities of teachers and learners. At the same time, QSIA fosters individual learning and might promote high-order thinking skills among its users. QSIA's community, conceptual architecture, structure overview and implementations are discussed.

Abstract: A framework for creating modular web pages. The framework enables the development of modular, customized, and personalized web applications including web portals and web pages. The framework includes an extensible part base class and an extensible zone base class. Part controls that derive from the part base class include web part controls, editor part controls, and catalog part controls. Zone controls, editor zone controls, and catalog zone controls derive from the zone base class. Each zone control contains one or more part controls and each zone is responsible for rendering part controls within each respective zone. Web part controls can communicate with other web part controls. Web part controls can be edited, removed, or added to a zone control. The functionality of part controls can vary widely among the part controls in a particular zone and across different zones.

Abstract: We propose new features and algorithms for automating Web-page classification tasks such as content recommendation and ad blocking. We show that the automated classification of Web pages can be much improved if, instead of looking at their textual content, we consider each links's URL and the visual placement of those links on a referring page. These features are unusual: rather than being scalar measurements like word counts they are tree structured---describing the position of the item in a tree. We develop a model and algorithm for machine learning using such tree-structured features. We apply our methods in automated tools for recognizing and blocking Web advertisements and for recommending "interesting" news stories to a reader. Experiments show that our algorithms are both faster and more accurate than those based on the text content of Web documents.

Abstract: We characterize usage and problems for Web applications, evaluate their reliability, and examine the potential for reliability improvement. Based on the characteristics of Web applications and the overall Web environment, we classify Web problems and focus on the subset of source content problems. Using information about Web accesses, we derive various measurements that can characterize Web site workload at different levels of granularity and from different perspectives. These workload measurements, together with failure information extracted from recorded errors, are used to evaluate the operational reliability for source contents at a given Web site and the potential for reliability improvement. We applied this approach to the Web sites www.seas.smu.edu and www.kde.org. The results demonstrated the viability and effectiveness of our approach.

Abstract: Adaptive navigation support is a specific group of technologies that support user navigation in "virtual spaces" adapting to the goals, preferences and knowledge of the individual user. These technologies, originally developed in the field of adaptive hypermedia, are becoming increasingly important in several adaptive Web applications from Web-based adaptive hypermedia to adaptive virtual reality. This paper provides a brief introduction to adaptive navigation support, reviews major adaptive navigation support technologies, and presents a sequence of projects performed by our group to study adaptive navigation support in different contexts.

Abstract: The rapid, progressive diffusion of Web applications in several productive contexts of our modern society is laying the foundations of a renewed scenario of software development, where one of the emerging problems is that of defining and validating cost-effective approaches for maintaining and evolving these software systems.Due to several factors, the solution to this problem is not straightforward. The heterogeneous and dynamic nature of components making up a Web application, the lack of effective programming mechanisms for implementing basic software engineering principles in it, and undisciplined development processes induced by the high pressure of a very short time-to-market, make Web application maintenance a challenging problem. A relevant issue consists of reusing the methodological and technological experience in the sector of traditional software maintenance, and exploring the opportunity of using reverse engineering to support effective Web application maintenance.This paper presents an approach for defining reverse engineering processes involving Web applications. The approach has been used to implement a process, including reverse engineering methods and a supporting software tool, that helps to understand existing undocumented Web applications to be maintained or evolved, through the reconstruction of UML diagrams. The proposed reverse engineering process has been submitted to a validation experiment, the results of which showed the usability of the process for reverse engineering Web applications with different characteristics, and highlighted possible areas for improvement of its effectiveness. The experiment and the lessons learned from it are presented in the paper.

Abstract: A scalable method, system, and apparatus for non-intrusively auditing and improving security assessments includes capturing, storing, presenting, displaying, inspecting, monitoring, and analyzing data flow in client-server security assessments and/or network/infrastructure security assessments. The invention provides interested parties with a mechanism to non-intrusively audit in real-time the vulnerability test effort, as well as review, replay, and analyze all aspects of the security assessment during and after the test. For web application assessments, the data capture includes one of the following or some combination: an intermediary with all data passing through the intermediary; a sniffer that can passively extract all data being communicated between the application and tester; and a plurality of computing modules (e.g., software, appliances, etc.) installed in the tester environment or within the application system environment (e.g., software installed on the tester's computer, or on the computer where the intermediary is running, or software installed on the application systems proxy or web server, or an appliance in either environment) for storing, processing, analyzing, reporting, and displaying the data.

Abstract: A limited body of research examines the extent to which social studies teachers are actually utilizing primary sources that are accessible in traditional classroom-based formats versus web-based fo...

Abstract: The principles, processes, and tools of instructional design and technology (IDT) can facilitate the translation of paper-based, text-intensive Manual-Based Therapies (MBTs) into media-rich, interactive, Web-based training (WBT) applications. This article outlines available technology-based mechanisms for delivering instructional content, provides examples of how each can be used for effective dissemination of MBTs, and outlines the advantages that may accrue from this approach. Clinical researchers and IDT professionals can collaborate to increase adoption of treatment manuals by employing user-friendly, instructionally sound Web applications that incorporate video role-plays, audio narration, graphics, animation, and dynamic, interactive content.

Abstract: The continuous use of the Web for daily operations by businesses, consumers, and government has created a great demand for reliable Web applications. One promising approach to testing the functionality of Web applications leverages user-session data collected by Web servers. This approach automatically generates test cases based on real user profiles. The key contribution of This work is the application of concept analysis for clustering user sessions for test suite reduction. Existing incremental concept analysis algorithms can be exploited to avoid collecting large user-session data sets and thus provide scalability. We have completely automated the process from user session collection and reduction through replay. Our incremental test suite update algorithm coupled with our experimental study indicate that concept analysis provides a promising means for incrementally updating reduced test suites in response to newly captured user sessions with some loss in fault detection capability and practically no coverage loss.

Abstract: A case study in adaptive information filtering systems for the Web is presented. The described system comprises two main modules, named HUMOS and WIFS. HUMOS is a user modeling system based on stereotypes. It builds and maintains long term models of individual Internet users, representing their information needs. The user model is structured as a frame containing informative words, enhanced with semantic networks. The proposed machine learning approach for the user modeling process is based on the use of an artificial neural network for stereotype assignments. WIFS is a content-based information filtering module, capable of selecting html/text documents on computer science collected from the Web according to the interests of the user. It has been created for the very purpose of the structure of the user model utilized by HUMOS. Currently, this system acts as an adaptive interface to the Web search engine ALTA VISTATM. An empirical evaluation of the system has been made in experimental settings. The experiments focused on the evaluation, by means of a non-parametric statistics approach, of the added value in terms of system performance given by the user modeling component; it also focused on the evaluation of the usability and user acceptance of the system. The results of the experiments are satisfactory and support the choice of a user model-based approach to information filtering on the Web.

Abstract: The Semantic Web is not semantic. It is good for syllogistic reasoning, but there is much more to semantics than syllogisms. I argue that the current Semantic Web is too dependent on symbolic representations of information structures, which limits its representational capacity. As a remedy, I propose conceptual spaces as a tool for expressing more of the semantics. Conceptual spaces are built up from quality dimensions that have geometric or topological structures. With the aid of the dimensions, similarities between objects can easily be represented and it is argued that similarity is a central aspect of semantic content. By sorting the dimensions into domains, I define properties and concepts and show how prototype effects of concepts can be treated with the aid of conceptual spaces. I present an outline of how one can reconstruct most of the taxonomies and other meta-data that are explicitly coded in the current Semantic Web and argue that inference engines on the symbolic level will become largely superfluous. As an example of the semantic power of conceptual spaces, I show how concept combinations can be analysed in a much richer and more accurate way than in the classical logical approach. 1 The dream of the Semantic Web Given the enormous amount of information on the Internet, it is becoming ever more important to find methods for information integration. The Semantic Web is the most well known recent attempt in this direction. In an introductory article, Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila [3] write that “the Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” The ambition of the Semantic Web is excellent, but, so far, most work has been devoted to developing languages such as RDF for representing information and OWL for expressing ontologies. In my opinion, to enable “computers and people to work in cooperation” one should, above all, take into consideration how humans process concepts. As I shall argue in this article, this will be necessary if we want to put real semantic content into the Semantic Web. The dream of the Semantic Web is to develop one ontology expressed in one language potentially covering everything that exists on the web. Berners-Lee [2] writes: “The Semantic Web is what we will get if we perform the same globalization process to Knowledge Representation that the Web initially did to Hypertext. We remove the centralized concepts of absolute truth, total knowledge, and total provability, and see what we can do with limited knowledge.” As Noy and McGuinness [37] note, there are several excellent reasons for developing ontologies: to share a common understanding of the structure of information among people; to enable reuse of domain knowledge; to make domain assumptions explicit; to separate domain knowledge from the operational knowledge; and to analyse domain knowledge. The question is whether the ontologies as we know them from the current Semantic Web are the best tools to achieve these goals. In reality, the picture is not so beautiful: there are several ontologies in several languages covering partly overlapping subdomains of the web. And the formalisms encounter several kinds of integration problems, including structural heterogeneity, semantic heterogeneity, inconsistency and redundancy problems [47]. Shirky [42] summarizes the state of the art as follows: “The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared world view is harder to create than we often want to admit.” One may even question whether we really need the meta-data provided by the Semantic Web. Uschold [46] points out that sometimes information integration works anyway, for example in web shopping agents. He writes that “[s]hopping agents can work even if there is no automatic processing of semantics; they can work without any formal representations of semantics; they can even work with no explicit representations of semantics at all. The key to enabling shopping agents to automatically use web content is that the meaning of the web content that the agents are expected to encounter can be determined by the human programmers who hardwire it into the web application software.” The reason this can be done is that the terminology involved in web shopping application is comparatively limited and free from ambiguities. 2 The Semantic Web is not semantic My main point of criticism is that the Semantic Web is not very semantic. At best, it is ontological. From a philosopher’s point of view, it is not even ontological, since the formalisms exploited only provide a partial description of what a metaphysician would call an ontology. Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila [3] have the following comment: “Artificialintelligence and Web researchers have co-opted the term for their own jargon, and for them an ontology is a document or file that formally defines the relations among terms. The most typical kind of ontology for the Web has a taxonomy and a set of inference rules.” Even if we grant that the Semantic Web is ontological, it contains a number of competing ontologies that make information integration very problematic. Furthermore, the methodology of the Semantic Web puts too much emphasis on symbolic structures. This will be the topic of next section. Why do I say that the Semantic Web is not semantic? Let us consider what can be expressed in, for example OWL (as far as I understand, other tools for the Semantic Web have similar properties). McGuinness and Hamelen [28] write that on top of RDF descriptions “OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (for example disjointness), cardinality (for example “exactly one”), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (for example symmetry and transitivity), and enumerated classes.” These are admittedly important semantic notions. But they are exactly what is to be expected of a language that has the expressivity of first order logic and that defines all concepts (properties and relations) in terms of sets of objects. However, there is much more to the semantics of concepts. It is an unfortunate dogma of computer science in general, and the Semantic Web in particular, that all semantic contents are reducible to first order logic or to set theory. Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila [3] claim that “[f]ortunately, a large majority of the information we want to express is along the lines of 'a hex-head bolt is a type of machine bolt'.” Unfortunately, this is not true. If one considers how humans handle concepts, the class relation structures of the Semantic Web capture only a minute part of our information about concepts. For instance, we often categorize objects according to the similarity between the objects [11, 14]. And similarity is not a notion that can be expressed in a natural way in a web ontology language. Along the same lines, Shirky [42] declares that “the Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms.” He concludes that: “This is the promise of the Semantic Web – it will improve all the areas of your life where you currently use syllogisms. Which is to say, almost nowhere.” He adds, somewhat sarcastically: “The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence projects generally.) The great popularizer of this error was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to people's understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than Rene Descartes.” In my book Conceptual Spaces [11], I contrast three basic methodologies within the cognitive sciences for representing information: the symbolic, the associationist and the conceptual. In the symbolic approach, cognition is seen as essentially being computation involving symbol manipulation. The second approach is associationism, where associations between different kinds of information elements carry the main burden of representation. Connectionism is a special case of associationism that models associations using artificial neuron networks. The Semantic Web builds almost entirely on the symbolic methodology. The core of this paper will be to outline the conceptual approach to representations (sections 4-9). I shall argue that if we want to build real content into a system, one should rely on the conceptual methodology. A remarkable feature of human thinking is our ability to combine concepts and, in particular, to understand new combinations of concepts [16]. Nobody has problems grasping the meaning of combinations like pink elephant, striped apple and cubic soapbubble, even if one never will encounter any object with these properties. In all kinds of web applications, for example query answering systems, inputs in form of combinations of concepts are ubiquitous. Consequently, an important criterion for a successful computational model of the semantics of concepts is that it should be able to handle combinations of concepts. In classical logic and in the Semantic Web, combinations of concepts are expressed by conjunctions of properties. This means that the reference of the combination of two concepts is taken to be the intersection of the classes representing of the two individual concepts. However, it turns out there are many everyday combinations of concepts that cannot be analysed in this simplistic manner. For example, tall squirrel, honey bee, stone lion, and white Zinfandel (which happens to be a rose wine) cannot be analysed in terms of intersections of classes. In general, current symbolic methods have serious problems handling concept combinations in the way humans do.

Abstract: This chapter describes recent and ongoing research to automatically personalize a learning experience through adaptive educational hypermedia. The Web has made it possible to give a very large audience access to the same learning material. Rather than offering several versions of learning material about a certain subject, for different types of learners, adaptive educational hypermedia offers personalized learning material without the need to know a detailed classification of users before starting the learning process. We describe different approaches to making a learning experience personalized, all using adaptive hypermedia technology. We include research on authoring for adaptive learning material (the AIMS and MOT projects) and research on modeling adaptive educational applications (the LAOS project). We also cover some of our ongoing work on the AHA! system, which has been used mostly for educational hypermedia but has the potential to be used in very different application areas as well.

Abstract: The advent of Web services has made automated workflow composition relevant to Web based applications. One technique, that has received some attention, for automatically composing workflows is AI-based classical planning. However, classical planning suffers from the paradox of first assuming deterministic behavior of Web services, then requiring the additional overhead of execution monitoring to recover from unexpected behavior of services. To address these concerns, we propose using Markov decision processes (MDPs), to model workflow composition. Our method models both, the inherent stochastic nature of Web services, and the dynamic nature of the environment. The resulting workflows are robust to nondeterministic behaviors of Web services and adaptive to a changing environment. Using an example scenario, we demonstrate our method and provide empirical results in its support.