3

A CONCURRENCY COMTROL MODEL FOR MULTIPARTY BUSINESS PROCESSES

Juha Puustjärvi

Although the issue of atomicity of multiparty business processes is well understood and widely studied, the concurrency control issues of multiparty business processes is not studied nor well understood. In this paper, we restrict ourselves on this issue. First we motivate the need of concurrency control in this context. Then, we present a liberal correctness criterion, called set-serializability and a scheduler based on timestamp ordering rule that produces set-serializable executions. Technically the scheduler is very simple and it can be easily integrated with the protocol that ensures the atomicity of the multiparty business processes. In implementing the atomicity protocol and the scheduler we utilize the WS-Coordination, which is a general and extensible framework for defining protocols for coordinating activities that are part of business processes.

5

MODELING THE WEB AS A FOREST OF TREES

Fathi Tenzakhti

This study tries to demonstrate that the World Wide Web (the Web for short) could be modeled as a forest of trees. Each Web site has its own tree for which it is the root. Since trees were extensively studied in the literature, many problems related to performance, fault-tolerance and availability of the Web could be understood more easily and the existing body of knowledge about trees could be applied to solve these problems.

33

GEO-GAMING: THE MOBILE MONOPOLY EXPERIENCE

Mao Li, M. J. O'Grady and G. M. P. O'Hare

Advances in mobile computing technologies have proved an unheralded boon to mobile games developers. Increasingly, position-sensing technologies such as GPS and cellular techniques can be harnessed. This offers exciting opportunities for novel game development. However, classic board games can also be refined and extended, leading to, amongst other things, alternative modalities of interaction. The popular game of monopoly is one example. In this paper, a prototype game, termed Mobile Monopoly, is introduced. This game can be modelled on any arbitrary urban environment. Gamers participate by roaming about the environment, acquiring properties and paying rents as they proceed.

43

COLLABORATIVE OLAP WITH TAG CLOUDS - Web 2.0 OLAP Formalism and Experimental Evaluation

Kamel Aouiche, Daniel Lemire and Robert Godin

Increasingly, business projects are ephemeral. New Business Intelligence tools must support ad-lib data sources and quick perusal. Meanwhile, tag clouds are a popular community-driven visualization technique. Hence, we investigate tag-cloud views with support for OLAP operations such as roll-ups, slices, dices, clustering, and drill-downs. As a case study, we implemented an application where users can upload data and immediately navigate through its ad hoc dimensions. Algorithmically, our tag-cloud views are approximate range top-k queries over spontaneous data cubes. We present experimental evidence that iceberg cuboids provide adequate online approximations. We benchmark several browser-oblivious tag-cloud layout optimizations.

44

EVALUATION OF A READ-OPTIMIZED DATABASE FOR DYNAMIC WEB APPLICATIONS

Anderson Supriano, Gustavo M. D. Vieira and Luiz E. Buzato

In this paper we investigate the use of a specialized data warehousing database management system as a data back-end for web applications and assess the performance of this solution. We have used the Monet database as a drop-in replacement for traditional databases, and performed benchmarks comparing its performance to the performance of two of the most commonly used databases for web applications: MySQL and PostgreSQL. Our main contribution is to show for the first time how a read-optimized database performs in comparison to established general purpose database management systems for the domain of web applications. Monet's performance in relation to MySQL and PostgresSQL allows us to affirm that the widely accepted assumption that relational database management systems are fit for all applications can be reconsidered in the case of dynamic web applications.

47

ANALYSIS, DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF IDS USING DATA MINING

B. V. Patel and B. B. Meshram

To achieve the implementation of intrusion detection system(IDS), we have integrated the Fuzzy Logic with extended Aprori Association Data Mining to extract more abstract patterns at a higher level which look for deviations from stored patterns of normal behaviour of the computer network. Here the various packet formats of TCP, UDP, IP etc are used to study the normal behaviour of the network. Genetic algorithms are used to tune the fuzzy membership functions. The tuned data by genetic algorithms is processed by the modified Apriori algorithm. The association pattern is populated by genetic algorithm for the selection of best population of the network traffic. This best populated data is classified by the C4.5 algorithms to find intrusions. The deployment of IDS is done under the control of secure environment and the system is tested in the distributed environment.

51

A CONSTRAINT-AWARE QUERY OPTIMIZER FOR WEB-BASED DATA INTEGRATION

Jing Lu and Bernhard Mitschang

Web has brought forth opportunities to connect information sources across all types of boundaries. The information sources include databases, XML documents, and other unstructured sources. Data integration is to combine data residing at different sources and providing the user with a unified view of these data. Currently users are expecting more efficient services from such data integration systems. Indeed, querying multiple data sources scattered on the web encounters many barriers for achieving efficiency due to the heterogeneity and autonomy of the information sources. This paper describes a query optimizer, which uses constraints to semantically optimize the queries. The optimizer first translates heterogeneous constraints from data sources into constraints expressed at the global level, e.g., in the common schema and stores them in the constraint repository, again, at the global level. Then the optimizer can use semantic query optimization technologies including detection of empty results, join elimination, and predicate elimination to generate a more efficient but semantically equivalent query for the user. The optmizer is published as a web service and thus, can be invoked by many data integration systems. We carry out experiments using our semantic query optimizer and the first results show that performance can be greatly improved.

56

NDT & METRICA V3 - An Approach for Public Organizations based on Model Driven Engineering

M. J. Escalona, J. J. Gutiérrez, J. A. Ortega, I. Ramos and G. Aragón

In Spain, the Ministry of Public Administrations defined a methodological environment, named Métrica v3, to develop software system in public administrations in Spain. External companies that work for public administrations, internal software departments or software engineer have to follow the life cycle of Métrica for developing their software systems. However, when Web systems are developed, Métrica could be enriched with new approaches from the Web Engineering environment. In this paper, a fusion between Métrica and NDT, a web approach for requirements treatment and analysis, is presented. This fusion is being applying in real projects with very good results.

62

A TUPLE SPACE WEB SERVICE FOR DISTRIBUTED PROGRAMMING - Simplifying Distributed Web Services Applications

George C. Wells, Barbara Mueller and Loïc Schulé

This paper describes a new tuple space web service for coordination and communication in distributed web applications. This web service is based on the Linda programming model. Linda is a coordination language for parallel and distributed processing, providing a communication mechanism based on a logically shared memory space. The original Linda model has been extended through the provision of a programmable mechanism, providing additional flexibility and improved performance. The implementation of the web services is discussed, together with the details of the programmable matching mechanism. Some results from the implementation of a location-based mobile application, using the tuple space web service are presented, demonstrating the benefits of our system.

65

A DESCRIPTIVE APPROACH FOR THE LIFECYCLE SUPPORT OF DISTRIBUTED WEB-BASED SYSTEMS

Frederic Majer, Martin Nussbaumer and Martin Gaedke

Through the advancement in technology and the spreading of the internet, a wide range of different application types has evolved. To cope with the increased complexity of today’s Web-based systems, approaches facilitating development, operations and evolution of these heterogeneous and distributed systems are vital. The approach, presented in this contribution, is based on a dedicated information model allowing the description of the overall system and its components characteristics. At runtime, the relevant model information is processed and provided to different in the system’s lifecycle involved stakeholders and supports them to fulfill their activities. Due to this use in terms of orientation and guidance, our approach is called the Integrated Information Map (i²map). Furthermore, the descriptive information regarding the nominal status and behavior of the components is used for automated monitoring and testing to assure the quality of the overall system at deployment and throughout operations.

88

BSBC: TOWARDS A SUCCINCT DATA FORMAT FOR XML STREAMS

Stefan Böttcher, Rita Hartel and Christian Heinzemann

XML data compression is an important feature in XML data exchange, particularly when the data size may cause bottlenecks or when bandwidth and energy consumption limitations require reducing the amount of the exchanged XML data. However, applications based on XML data streams also require efficient path query processing on the structure of compressed XML data streams. We present a succinct representation of XML data streams, called Bit-Stream-Based-Compression (BSBC) that fulfills these requirements and additionally provides a compression ratio that is significantly better than that of other queriable compression techniques and that of non-queriable compression techniques like gzip. Finally, we present an empirical evaluation comparing BSBC with several other XML compression techniques that demonstrates the benefits of BSBC.

91

WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION USING THE WEB SERVICES MANAGEMENT LAYER

Niels Joncheere, Bart Verheecke, Viviane Jonckers, Sofie Van Hoecke, Gregory Van Seghbroeck and Bart Dhoedt

The Web Services Management Layer (WSML) is an academic middleware platform that is placed in between clients and web services. It takes care of dynamic integration, selection, composition and client-side management of web services, thus removing the need to take care of these concerns in clients. This paper describes how the WSML can be used to express web service compositions, and presents the results of a number of experiments which evaluate the performance and scalability of the current WSML implementation. These results show that the WSML induces only a small overhead compared to systems in which the WSML has not been deployed. The advanced features of the WSML therefore come a low cost in terms of performance and scalability, which makes it a viable option in real-life web services applications.

97

USING CONTENT SYNDICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN DISTRIBUTING AND PUBLISHING INFORMATION TO REACH ALL USERS

Serena Pastore

Content syndication is widely used as the method to distribute information structured in feeds, since it provides an easy and useful way to reach the larger amount of people adding the immediacy of information. Based essentially on XML technology to be distributed and interoperable across numerous platforms, syndication benefits both the website providing information with an up-to-date structure regardless of the different techniques to stored and manage content and the website consuming information that is displayed in a specific form. Several different specifications and standards have been developed to support such technology as XML dialect, all used in every context. The paper describes how the syndication technology has been used to distribute central Institute information within each headquarters’ local web site composing it. It describes the choices done both for producing the feed with the content to be distributed coming from different sources and visualizing the feed in each website as a specific section of the home page

98

USING ONTOLOGIES TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE IN A WEB SYSTEM - A Web Caching System Case of Study

Carlos Guerrero, Carlos Juiz and Ramon Puigjaner

This paper gives the details of a web system architecture which uses ontologies to improve the behavior of the system from a performance point of view. As the performance of the web system depends on the state and parameters fixed in runtime period, the configuration of the system will be change during that period. We need to monitor the system and store that gather information. An knowledge base is use to store that information. We present the definition of an ontology, used in the knowledge base, to model the behavior and performance of the different elements in the web system. An example of the use of that ontology in the cache tier of the system is also presented. We propose the use of reasoners that use that gather information in the K.B. to change the configuration and setup of the system during runtime period. That configuration also is given by an ontological model in a knownledge base.

112

WORKFLOWS IN CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Pedro Pico and Alberto Rodrigues da Silva

. Content Management Systems (CMS) are application platforms that strongly contribute to make organizations more agile, flexible and dynamic in what concerns the management of their contents and business information. A common CMS’s extra feature is workflow support since it automates tasks, ultimately increasing enterprise productivity. While there are different kinds of Workflow platforms in this paper, we concentrate in Content Management Workflow and we analyse their key features like: workflow definition, representation, instance management, object mapping and third party application communication. Finally, we also analyse and discuss the workflow support in existing CMSs such as Alfresco, Typo3, OpenADMS and Vignette.

137

A BROADCASTING ALGORITHM USING ADJUSTABLE TRANSMISSION RANGES IN MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

Toshihiko Sasama, Yasuhiro Abe and Hiroshi Masuyama

Reducing energy consumption is one of the major subjects in designing a good broadcasting algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks. This paper discussed 2 approaches to communication algorithms; 2-level clustering mesh approach and 1-level flat mesh approach, and proposes one of them which makes it appear that the total amount of expended energy becomes lesser. Wu and Dai previously proposed 2 approaches; 2-level clustering approach and 1-level flat approach. In mobile ad hoc networks mobile hosts move frequently, and these moves may cause a change in communicating relationships. In designing a minimum energy routing protocol for these mobile ad hoc networks with this inherent property, the use of a virtual backbone has become popular. This study is based on the virtual backbone conception. Our 2 proposed approaches change the clustering performed in into mesh so that energy consumption becomes smaller. The efficiency of the 1 level flat mesh approach is confirmed through our sim ulation study.

138

EVALUATION OF K-/LATTICE-CLUSTERING ALGORITHMS FOR RANDOM WIRELESS MULTI-HOP NETWORKS

Toshihiko Sasama, Ryo Monde and Hiroshi Masuyama

A k-clustering protocol is an algorithm in which the wireless network is divided into non-overlapping subnetworks, referred to as clusters, and where every node of a sub network is at most k hops from a distinguished station called the cluster-head. A lattice-clustering protocol is an algorithm in which a given area is divided by lattices and randomly distributed hosts in a lattice are one hop from the cluster-head. In this paper, we evaluated the energy efficiencies for the broadcasts designed in both k-clustering and lattice-clustering protocols. The evaluation showed that the k-clustering protocol is characterized by the smallest broadcasting power of each node, and a lattice-clustering protocol constitutes a characteristic feature of the most minimal total energy consumption. The main source of greater energy consumption in k-clustering protocol is a large number of transmissions between adjacent node pairs.

147

HARMONY - A FRAMEWORK FOR AUTOMATIC WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION

Viorica R. Chifu, Ioan Salomie, Emil Şt. Chifu and Constantin Pârţac

Web services are software components that were designed to improve interoperability and integration of applications developed on different platforms. Web Service composition offers the facility to create new services out of the existing services satisfying a complex functionality. Automatic Web service composition together with dynamic service discovery and selection are the most promising features that can be provided by Web services. This paper presents HARMONY, a framework for automatic Web service composition. Our approach for automatic Web service composition is based on the GraphPlan algorithm which considers only the viable services during the composition process. In HARMONY we use ontologies for the semantic annotation of Web services, so that the automatic service discovery, composition and execution can be realized based on ontology inference.

150

TOWARDS MKDA: A DATA MINING SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE

Vincenzo Cannella, Giuseppe Russo and Roberto Pirrone

Nowadays a huge amount of raw medical data is generated. These data, analyzed with data mining techniques, could be used to produce new knowledge. Unluckily such tasks need skilled data analysts, and not so many researchers in medical field are also data mining experts. In this paper we present a web based system for knowledge discovery assistance in Medicine able to advice a medical researcher in this kind of tasks. The experiment specifications are expressed in a formal language we have defined. The system GUI helps the user in the their composition. The system plans a Knowledge Discovery Process (KDP). The KDP is designed on the basis of rules in a knowledge base. Finally the system executes the KDP and produces a model as result. The system works through the co-operation of different web services specialized in different tasks. The choice of web services is based on the semantic of their functionalities, according to a common OWL ontology. The system is still under development.

151

A SECURE WEB APPLICATION PROVIDING PUBLIC ACCESS TO HIGH-PERFORMANCE DATA INTENSIVE SCIENTIFIC RESOURCES - ScalaBLAST Web Application

Darren Curtis, Elena Peterson and Christopher Oehmen

This work presents the ScalaBLAST Web Application (SWA), a web based application implemented using the PHP script language, MySQL DBMS, and Apache web server under a GNU/Linux platform. SWA is an application built as part of the Data Intensive Computer for Complex Biological Systems (DICCBS) project at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). SWA delivers accelerated throughput of bioinformatics analysis via high-performance computing through a convenient, easy-to-use web interface. This approach greatly enhances emerging fields of study in biology such as ontology-based homology, and multiple whole genome comparisons which, in the absence of a tool like SWA, require a heroic effort to overcome the computational bottleneck associated with genome analysis. The current version of SWA includes a user account management system, a web based user interface, and a backend process that generates the files necessary for the Internet scientific community to submit a ScalaBLAST parallel processing job on a dedicated cluster.

159

MDA-BASED DEVELOPMENT OF DATA-DRIVEN WEB APPLICATIONS

Attila Adamkó and Lajos Kollár

In the past few years, the more or less static Web sites are evolving into Web-based distributed applications. This is due to the technological changes which took place in the last decade. Many competitive technologies have appeared but when modeling a Web application, details of current technologies should be detached from the model of the application domain since they are evolving very dinamically so they become obsolete relatively soon. We propose a method based on the Model Driven Architecture which can be used for designing and implementing Web Information Systems in the above mentioned manner. Web applications are composed of several models: structural model describes the underlying data structure, composition model defines an abstract page structure, while navigational paths are modeled by navigational diagrams and use cases capture common user activities. All of these models are expressed with UML2. By the help of XML, XSLT and XForms, prototypes can be generated from these UML models rapidly.

160

A DEVELOPMENT INFRASTRUCTURE FOR WEB SERVICES

Dionisis X. Adamopoulos

Web services are emerging technologies that can be considered as the result of the continuous improvement of Internet services due to the tremendous increase in demand that is being placed on them. They are rapidly evolving and are expected to change the paradigms of both software development and use, by promoting software reusability over the Internet, by facilitating the wrapping of underlying computing models with XML, and by providing diverse and sophisticated functionality fast and flexibly in the form of composite service offerings. In this paper, the different facets of Web services are identified and a flexible approach to engineering complex Web services is adopted in the form of a proposed framework for the development of Web services. After the examination of its main constituent parts, it is argued that its full potential and that of Web service engineering in general, is realized through the gradual formation of a rich service grid offering value-added supporting functionality and therefore the main desirable properties of such a service grid are highlighted. Finally, the paper outlines a validation approach for the proposed framework and assembles important pointers for future work and concluding remarks.

161

STRUCTURING DESIGN ACTIVITIES IN OPEN PROGRAMMABLE NETWORKS

Dionisis X. Adamopoulos

The advent of deregulation combined with new opportunities opened by advances in telecommunications technologies has significantly changed the paradigm of telecommunications services, leading to a dramatic increase in the number and type of services that telecommunication companies can offer. Building new advanced multimedia telecommunications services in a distributed and heterogeneous environment is very difficult, unless there is a methodology to support the entire service development process in a structured and systematic manner, and assist and constrain service designers and developers by setting out goals and providing specific means to achieve these goals. Therefore, in this paper, after a brief presentation of a proposed service creation methodology, its service design phase is examined in detail focusing on the essential activities and artifacts. In this process, the exploitation of important service engineering techniques and UML modelling principles is especially considered. Finally, alternative and complementary approaches for service design are highlighted and a validation attempt is briefly outlined.

164

A WEB-BASED SYSTEM TO REDUCE THE NOSOCOMIAL INFECTION IMPACT IN HEALTCARE UNITS

Hugo Rigor, José Machado, António Abelha, José Neves and Carlos Alberto

The nosocomial infection has a critical impact on the mortality and morbidity of the patients in healthcare units, especially in intensive care units, and has been studied in order to be mitigated. The registration of information about this phenomenon in databases is, more and more, a reality, turning viable the representation of this information through mathematical formalisms that, conjugated with the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques, will allow the discovery of knowledge related with the critical factors, processes and infectious agents. The ultimate goal has been to construct a web-based computational tool to automate the registration process to support the clinical body work, monitoring the performance and identifying the procedures that can be implemented in order to reduce the impact of the infections.

167

TRANSACTION SUPPORT FOR INTERACTIVE WEB APPLICATIONS

David Paul, Mark Wallis, Frans Henskens and Michael Hannaford

In the Web Services environment, traditional ACID transactions are not always sufficient to support the activities that businesses would like to process. While Web Services transactions standards do exist, it is still difficult for an end-user to combine services from loosely-coupled providers into a single action to be performed. We describe the use of a "Super Browser" that enables users to more easily find and combine Web Services into a single activity that they can view and manipulate throughout its life-cycle.

184

A SURVEY ON WEB SERVICE DISCOVERING AND COMPOSITION

Elena del Val Noguera and Miguel Rebollo Pedruelo

This paper reviews the existing techniques used in the discovering and composing of services. The task of selecting an adequate service can quickly grow tedious if all services that are listed under a certain description have to be compared manually for the final selection. And what is more, the final selection does not only depend on service parameters like executions costs or accuracy, but depends on the usefulness of objects or information that service offers. This problem is present in open environments where entities like web services or agents need to locate other entities to achieve cooperation, delegation or interoperation. For these reason these two approaches, web services an agents have deal with these problem proposing an automated and efficient mechanism to determine a structural and semantic match descriptions between entities.

185

IMPLEMENTATION OF A NEW SCHEDULING POLICY IN WEB SERVERS

Ahmad S. Al Sa'deh and Adnan H. Yahya

It is possible to reduce the response time of requests at a web server by simply changing the order in which we schedule the requests. Recently, the Shortest-Remaining-Processing-Time (SRPT) has been proposed for scheduling requests in web servers to reduce the mean response time. The SRPT assumes that the response time of the requested file is strongly proportional to its size. The correlation between the response time and the file size is unwarranted in Internet environment. Thus, we proposed a new scheduling policy for processing static HTTP requests in web servers that better estimates the response time by taking into consideration the client-server interaction on the Internet like diversity in bandwidth, round-trip-time (RTT) and packet loss in addition to file size. We call this policy, Shortest-Remaining-Response-Time (SRRT). The SRRT prioritizes requests based on a combination of the current RTT, TCP congestion window size (cwnd) and the size of what remains of the requested file. The RTT and cwnd were captured from the TCP implementation. The implementation of SRRT is done at the kernel level for controlling the order in which socket buffers are drained into the network. Our experiment uses the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. In the experiment the requests are generated by the Scalable URL Request GEnerator (SURGE) workload generator, and the WAN is represented by Network Emulation (netem). We compare SRRT to SRPT and Processor-Sharing (PS) policies. The SRRT shows the best improvement in the mean response time. SRRT gives an average improvement of about 7.5% over SRPT. This improvement comes at a negligible expense in response time for long requests. We found that under 100Mbps link, only 1.5% of long requests have longer response times than under PS. The longest request under SRRT has an increase in response time by a factor 1.7 over PS. For 10Mbps link, only 2.4% of requests are penalized, and SRRT increases the longest request time by a factor 2.2 over PS.

192

A MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH WITH VERIFICATION OF PREDICTIONS AND ASSISTED SUPERVISION FOR A RULE-BASED NETWORK INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM

José Ignacio Fernández-Villamor and Mercedes Garijo

Network security is a branch of network management in which network intrusion detection systems provide attack detection features by monitorization of traffic data. Rule-based misuse detection systems use a set of rules or signatures to detect attacks that exploit a particular vulnerability. These rules have to be hand-coded by experts to properly identify vulnerabilities, which results in misuse detection systems having limited extensibility. This paper proposes a machine learning layer on top of a rule-based misuse detection system that provides automatic generation of detection rules, prediction verification and assisted classification of new data. Our system offers an overall good performance, while adding an heuristic and adaptive approach to existing rule-based misuse detection systems.

194

BRINGING TOGETHER WHAT TOGETHER BELONGS - Applying Web Services to Couple SOA and Grid in Smaller Environments

Carsten Kleiner and Arne Koschel

This paper describes practical experiences from a project to couple Grid and SOA technologies in smaller environments. Web services have been applied in two structurally different case studies to solve tasks with a Grid that is integrated into a SOA and vice versa. The case studies have revealed important insight on how and when to couple SOA and Grid technologies including monitoring aspects. Some interesting general rules are derived on what has to be observed when combining SOA and grid in smaller environments. Performance and software technical analysis have been used in validating the results. They also clearly showed the benefits gained by employing SOA and grid concepts form both a performance as well as an architectural perspective.

195

FORENSIC CHARACTERISTICS OF PHISHING - Petty Theft or Organized Crime?

Stephen McCombie, Paul Watters, Alex Ng and Brett Watson

Phishing, as a means of pilfering private consumer information by deception, has become a major security concern for financial institutions and their customers. Gartner estimated losses in 2006 to phishing in the US were approximately USD$2.8 Billion. Little has been published on the forensic characteristics exhibited in phishing e-mail. We hypothesize that shared features of phishing e-mails can be used as the basis for grouping perpetrators using at least a common modus operandi, and at most, a level of criminal organization – i.e., we suggest that phishing activities are carried out by a small number of highly specialized phishing gangs, rather than a large number of random and unrelated individuals using similar techniques. Analysis of repeated phishing e-mails samples at a major Australian financial institution – using a criminal intelligence methodology - revealed that 6 groups, from a sample of 500,000 spam e-mails, could be uniquely classified by constructing simple decision rules based on observed feature sets, and that 3 groups were responsible for 86% of all incidents. These results suggest that – at least for the institution concerned – there appears to be a level of criminal organization in phishing attacks.

196

A LOGIC PROGRAMMING MODEL FORWEB RESOURCES

Giulio Piancastelli and Andrea Omicini

In the latest years, substantial achievements have been obtained in the description and formalization of the architectural principles and design criteria underlying the World Wide Web. First, the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems was introduced, defining the resource as the key abstraction of information; then, the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA) was presented as a REST-based set of guidelines and best practices for implementing services on Web resources. However, a resource programming model is still missing, since procedural and object-oriented web programming focussed on different abstractions, such as page, controller, and service. Instead, we adopt the logic declarative paradigm to define our model for resource-oriented programming, also showing how its peculiar features lead to novel possibilities for dynamic modification and extension of resource behavior at runtime. In this paper, we first map novel REST and ROA abstractions onto elements of structured logic programming. Then, we present Web Logic Programming as a Prolog-based language for the World Wide Web embedding the core REST and ROA principles, by defining its computation model and discussing a bookshelf sharing web application example.

198

XML-IS: ONTOLOGY-BASED INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE

Christophe Cruz and Christophe Nicolle

This paper presents a semantic architecture approach that aims at integrating XML documents. Today, information exchanges in business processes widely use XML to format data. But this is done without a common process management. For some applications it is necessary to archive data for future processes (error detections, logs, knowledge enquiry data mining). For this reason our architecture allows users to retrieve information from integrated XML. This is not possible without the help of a semantic level which shares the business knowledge on processes. To reach this goal we use the knowledge defined in an XML schema to build a domain ontology. of At a final step this ontology is used in the retrieval process by end-users to search and retrieve information.

202

IMPLEMENTING CONTENT SHARING AND SESSION HAND-OFF BETWEEN WEB BROWSERS - An Integration of SIP Stack into Mozilla Firefox Web Browser

Michael O. Adeyeye and Neco Ventura

A new idea referred to as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) Mobility is introduced into web browsing. It entails transferring existing web session between Web Browsers or User Agents. This HTTP mobility will be achieved by extending present-day Web Browsers to support Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Both HTTP and SIP are application layer protocols in the OSI (Open System Interconnection) Layer Model. SIP can be used to establish, modify and terminate multimedia sessions or calls. It has been chosen because it has clearly defined session mobility types namely Third-party Call Control and Session Hand-off. This paper identifies the modifications that will be made to the present-day Web Browsers Architectures and exhaustively explains the implementation of HTTP Mobility with the aid of SIP Stack integration. The two services that can be provided between two user agents during HTTP Mobility are Content Sharing and Session Hand-off.

205

DYNAMIC SLA-NEGOTIATION BASED ON WS-AGREEMENT

Antoine Pichot, Oliver Wäldrich, Wolfgang Ziegler and Philipp Wieder

In Grid, e-Science and e-Business environments, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are often used to establish frameworks for the delivery of services between service providers and the home organisations of the customers. While this high level SLAs define the overall quality of the services (QoS), it is desirable for the end-user to have dedicated QoS also for individual services like the orchestration of resources necessary for composed services. Grid level scheduling services typically are responsible for the orchestration and coordination of resources in the Grid. Co-allocation e.g. requires the Grid level scheduler to coordinate resource management systems located in different domains. As the site autonomy has to be respected negotiation is the only way to achieve the intended coordination. Electronic SLAs emerged as a new way to negotiate and manage usage of resources in the Grid and are already adopted by a number of management systems. Therefore, it is natural to look for ways to adopt SLAs for Grid level scheduling. In order to do this, efficient and flexible protocols are needed, which support dynamic negotiation and creation of SLAs. In this paper we propose and discuss ongoing work on extensions to the WS-Agreement protocol addressing these issues.

206

DECENTRALIZED DIAGNOSIS FOR BPEL WEB SERVICES

Lina Ye and Philippe Dague

This paper proposes a decentralized diagnosis approach for BPEL Web services, where a local diagnoser is provided to each BPEL service and should cooperate with a coordinator. The strategy of local consistencybased diagnosis consists in abstracting diagnostic knowledge base from data dependencies contained in the enriched BPEL Petri net model of each service and reasoning from the observations with a set of local possible source faults. The coordinator has to put together all the local diagnosis information from local diagnosers and infer global diagnoses. We also provide this decentralized diagnosis algorithm with its testing on a simple BPEL process example.

207

AN ANALYSIS OF RELATIONAL STORAGE STRATEGIES FOR PARTIALLY STRUCTURED XML

Yasser Abdel Kader, Barry Eaglestone and Siobhán North

This paper presents a performance analysis of strategies that can be used to store XML data sets in relational databases, focusing on applications where the XML data set is a combination of structured and semi-structured data. The analysis demonstrates advantages of using a hybrid approach combining structure mapping and XML data type instances. However problems remain with current technology with regards to scaling of the approach for large data sets. Also, anomalous results are identified and a threshold at which the cost of data shredding out weighs the advantages of structure mapping.

211

A NEW CONCEPT FOR REAL-TIME WEB GAMES - Developing Highly Real-Time Web Games

Yoshihiro Kawano, Masahiro Miyata, Dai Hanawa and Tatsuhiro Yonekura

The online game has been rapidly popularized recently, with the improvement of the network speed and the computer performance. Accordingly, the problem of network latency has been significant in applications with a requirement of high interactivity such as the action game and real-time sports game. In general, a server-client type of architecture may be employed in such games, namely a Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE). In this paper, we focus on the Web system that is widely widespread as the infrastructure of this type. However, strategy of designing web games is not explicitly established. We propose a new concept to design the real-time Web game. In the former paper, we introduced new schemes, namely, Dead Reckoning and Allocated Topographical Zone. These are what we employed in the real-time Web games to overcome limitation of HTTP communication. As an example of the application, Web based real-time avatar operation game is implemented. As a result, we confirmed that our concept may sufficiently expand to the various types of the real-time Web applications.

227

DQRDFS - Towards a Semantic Web Enhanced with Data Quality

Ismael Caballero, Eugenio Verbo, Coral Calero and Mario Piattini

Nowadays data has become in one of the most critical resources. Using data of poor quality can be the source of several problems when developing a work. Web is currently the main showcase for a main amount of data. It would be desirable that machines can process the quality of the data contained in the Web Documents. This paper introduces a new view of the Semantic Web based on the concept of Quantity of Data Quality (QDQ), in which Data Quality issues will be used as a basis to enable machines to process the Semantic Web Documents for different activities like information retrieval or document filtering. This view can open new challenges in Semantic Webs oriented to improve users’ satisfaction with Internet.

259

A MATHEMATICAL FORMULATION OF A MODEL FOR LANDFORM ATTRIBUTES REPRESENTATION FOR APPLICATION IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Leacir Nogueira Bastos, Rossini Pena Abrantes and Brauliro Gonçalves Leal

In this work we presented a methodology based on non linear regression for Landform Attributes representation. The equations to estimates the parameters of a two dimensional polynomial are shown and, for testing the methodology, it was used the data of Landform Attributes from the state of Minas Gerais (Brazil) obtained by the Digital Model of Elevation (DME) from GTOPO30 project, in the form of a regular grid, with spacing of approximately 900m. The presented methodology can be used to minimize time in sending Landform Attributes information through network, to minimize space by storing the parameters of the estimated function and to make possible the distribution of the processing in different CPU, through internet network, for coefficients calculations.

269

MULTIAGENT DESIGN FOR DYNAMIC JOB-SHOP SCHEDULING USING PASSI

Claudio Cubillos, Silvana Roncagliolo and Leonardo Espinoza

The present work details the experience on designing a multiagent system devoted to a dynamic Job Shop setting using the PASSI methodology. The agent system is in charge of the planning and scheduling of jobs and their operations on a set of available machines, while considering the materials assigned to each operation. Dynamicity concerns job orders scheduling on-the-fly and the re-schedule caused by changes to the original plan due to clients, machines or material stocks. The system has been modeled with the PASSI Toolkit (PTK) and implemented over the Jade agent platform.

271

TOWARDS AN AGENT FRAMEWORK FOR A PASSENGER TRANSPORTATION VIRTUAL ENTERPRISE

Claudio Cubillos and Daniel Cabrera

This work presents the first approach for obtaining a framework based on the agent technology for the passenger transportation problem, considering a virtual enterprise domain. The agent architecture obtained provides a baseline for the integration between end-users of the transport service and multiple transport operators affiliated to a virtual enterprise, which provides flexibility in the incorporation and leaving of transport operators. The participation of governmental organizations and active destinations within the system allows the virtual enterprise having additional information on potencial opportunities of business and assures to the users of the transport system a wider and more complete service search. The PASSI methodology has been used as base modelling methodology for leveraging the multiagent architecture.

278

BLACKBIRD MONITORING SYSTEM - Performance Analysis and Monitoring in Information Systems

João P. Germano, Alberto R. Silva and Fernando M. Silva

This work presents the BlackBird system, which is an analysis and monitoring service for data-intensive enterprise applications, without restrictions on the targeted architecture or employed technologies. Monitoring systems are an essential tool for the effective management of Enterprise Applications and the attainment of the demanding service level agreements imposed to these applications. However, due to the increasing complexity and diversity of these applications, adequate monitoring systems are rarely available. The BlackBird monitoring system is able to interact with these applications through different technologies employed by the Monitored Application, and able to produce Metrics regarding the application service level goals. The BlackBird architecture is composed by several Application Interface Modules, and by a central component responsible for Metrics calculation and presentation. Application Interface Modules interact with the target monitored Application in order to get performance data in a common format. These data are stored in a common repository and used for Metrics calculation and presentation. The BlackBird system can be specified through a set of pre-defined Configuration Objects, allowing it to be extensible and adaptable for applications with different architectures.

290

XML DATA INTEGRATION IN PEER-TO-PEER DATA MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Tadeusz Pankowski

P2P systems are commonly accepted as an efficient means of sharing data among large, diverse and dynamic set of users. Nowadays sharing data imposes new challenges in P2P systems concerning supporting advanced querying beyond simple keyword-based retrieval. We assume that each peer stores schema of its local data, mappings between the schema and schemas of some other peers, and schema constraints (functional dependencies). The goal of the integration is to answer queries formulated against arbitrarily chosen peers. The answer consists of data stored in the queried peer as well as data of its direct and indirect acquaintances. We focus on defining and using mappings, schema constraints, query propagation across the P2P system, and query reformulation in such scenario. We show how some missing data can be discovered while integrating data from many sources. We propose algorithms translating high-level specifications of schemas and schema mappings to XQuery programs performing required executions and transformations. We show how the discussed method has been implemented in SixP2P system ({\it Semantic Integration of XML data in P2P environment}).

308

OFF-THE-RECORD SECURE CHAT ROOM

Jiang Bian, Remzi Seker, Umit Topaloglu and Coskun Bayrak

GOTR was proposed to address the privacy protection concerns in online chat room systems. It extended the original two-party OTR protocol to support more users while preserving the same security properties. A literature survey of different Diffie-Hellman (D-H) conference key implementations will be given to justify that in an application like a chat room, the virtual server approach is truly the most efficient way to establish a private communication environment among a group of people. However, GOTR's virtual server approach raises a trustworthiness concern of the chosen chair member. Since the chair member has full control over all encryption keys, there is no constraint to prevent him / her from altering the messages while relaying them. In this paper, we present a study of the GOTR protocol and a solution to the virtual server's trustworthiness problem via employing an additional MD5 integrity check mechanism. Having such an algorithm, makes the GOTR protocol more secure, in that, it gives the other chat members an opportunity to be aware of any potential changes made by the chair member.

311

DEVELOPING OPEN TRAVEL ALLIANCE-BASED ONTOLOGY OF GOLF

Agnieszka Cieslik, Maria Ganzha and Marcin Paprzycki

For usage of ontologies to become more prevalent, not only new ontologies have to be created to represent the world, but also ontological support for existing domain-specific real-world standards has to be provided. One of such standards that gains popularity is the Open Travel Alliance (OTA) messaging system that defines, among others, the way that entities should communicate about golf as a travel-related entity. The aim of this paper is to outline our efforts leading toward creating an ontology of golf that would match the OTA messaging specification.

318

AN EFFICIENT STREAMING ALGORITHM FOR EVALUATING XPATH QUERIES

Yangjun Chen

With the growing importance of XML in data exchange, much research has been done in providing flexible query mechanisms to extract data from XML documents. In this paper, we focus on the query evaluation in an XML streaming environment, in which data streams arrive continuously and queries have to be evaluated even before all the data of an XML document is available. We will propose an algorithm for this issue, working in O(|T|ÞQleaf) time and O(|T|ÞQleaf) space, where Tleaf stands for the number of the leaf nodes in a document tree T and Qleaf for the number of the leaf nodes in a query tree Q.

322

TOWARDS EFFICIENT CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR PRIVACY PRESERVING DATA MINING IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Emmanouil Magkos and Vassilis Chrissikopoulos

A common fact for both businesses and physical entities is that sensitive, accurate information would be more easily diffused if adequate measures for protection were in place. This could also lead to higher quality data mining results, in a privacy preserving manner. Recent research has proved that it is possible to provide both privacy and accuracy assurances in a distributed computing scenario, where all participants may be mutually untrusted, without the presence of an unconditionally trusted third party. We believe that valuable knowledge can be borrowed from the vast body of literature on e-auction and e-voting systems, in order to be adapted to privacy preserving data mining systems in a distributed environment. These systems tend to balance well the efficiency and security criteria, because they need to be implementable in medium to large scale environments.

335

INTERNET ACCESS QUALITY MONITOR

Bruno P. Ramos, Vasco N. G. J. Soares and Alexandre J. P. D. Fonte

Assessing the perceived Quality of Service (QoS) offered on Broadband Internet accesses from end-User standpoint is important not only to monitor the performance, but also to assist end-Users to quantify the effective quality offered by their Internet accesses and compare it with the quality parameters specified in the Service Level Specification (SLS) of the connectivity service contracted to the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). Other key benefits are end-Users being aware about the Geographic quality distribution of the Internet accesses, pinpointing congestion links or areas, and being able to make price-performance tradeoffs and subscribe better ISPs. In this paper, we present the design principles of a practical and comprehensible Internet Access Quality Monitoring (IAQM) system and some aspects regarding its deployment and security. IAQM aims at supporting accurate assessment of the performance of Internet Broadband accesses and satisfaction of end-Users at large scale. A collection of tests are planned to measure several Quality of Service metrics of an Internet access, such as (but not limited to) download and upload rates, latency, jitter or DNS (Domain Name System) lookup times.

336

RAPID VIRTUAL DESIGN AND SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT BASED ON EXTENDED MVC-BASED WEB APPLICATION FRAMEWORK AND INTERACTIVE XML PRODUCT MODEL

Cao Yan and Yang Lina

To integrate multiple aspects of an enterprise to improve design decision-making and control at all process levels, rapid virtual design based on virtual prototyping simulation (RVDBVPS) is put forward to carry out distributed cooperative product design. Its architecture and key technologies are discussed. To develop the system on Internet/Intranet, satisfy current requirements of Web applications and solve the existing problems in web application development, an extended MVC-based web application framework based on XML on J2EE platform is put forward that is more flexible, expansible and maintainable. According to the characteristics of structured and unstructured product data in Web based distributed cooperative design environment, product design information exchange based on Interactive XML product model is investigated to realize interactive information transaction across heterogeneous platforms.

4

SEREBIF - Search Engine Result Enhancement by Implicit Feedback

Ralph Weires, Christoph Schommer and Sascha Kaufmann

Web search engines are steadily using more and more complex techniques and algorithms to deliver the proper results for a query to the users. Often enough though, results show up which are not really relevant for a user. This paper describes the SEREBIF system, which is an approach for incorporating information taken from the users into the search engine results to increase the result quality. We take user feedback into account to collect information from previous searches (and from other users) to see which of the results have probably really been relevant for the queries. To do this, we especially focus on implicit feedback, which does not require the users to put any additional effort than usual into the search process. So just the behaviour of the users is observed (e.g. entered queries, clicked results). The recorded information is afterwards analyzed, and the results are then included into later search sessions. SEREBIF can generally be used on top of an existing search engine to improve its results. In this paper, we explain the basic idea of SEREBIF, the current state of the prototype we realized and first results.

8

QUERY ROUTING IN NOMADIC ENVIRONMENTS WITH PUMAS

Angela Carrillo-Ramos, Marlène Villanova-Oliver, Jérôme Gense Hervé Martin and Miguel Torres

PUMAS is a framework based on agents and a Peer to Peer (P2P) approach, which allows nomadic users to access several information sources through different types of devices (eventually mobile). PUMAS provide the nomadic user with information adapted to her/his preferences and to the characteristics of the context of use (i.e. location, connection moment, inherent characteristics of the connection device). In order to deliver adapted results, PUMAS has mechanisms of enrichment of the initial query, by means of adding criteria based on user preferences and context of use. This phase of query enrichment precedes a query routing process composed of three activities: query analysis, the selection of sources that are able to answer to the query and the redirection of the query towards these sources. We present PUMAS,, and a use scenario which describes the processes of enrichment and query routing which PUMAS executes in order to deliver adapted information.

30

FINDING THE WAY: SERVICES FOR A MULTI-VIEW AND MULTI-PLATFORM GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM

Sergio Martín, Elio Sancristobal, Rosario Gil, Gabriel Díaz, Nuria Oliva, Manuel Castro and Juan Peire

Geographic information systems are getting more importance in the last years, especially in organizations where it is important to find an easy way to get to some place. The present paper describes the development carried out in order to make easier the business in organizations with high mobility requirements. The main result of this development is a system that generates in real time several views of the geographic information of an organization. The first view is a web information system that shows graphically all the points in a map, giving multimedia information. It allows interacting with all of them, creating the most suitable routes from one to another, finding hotel, restaurants, etc near the centre. On the other hand, the system also provides information of the points of interest through the main commercial GPS navigators.

36

AUTOMATIC TRANSFORMATION OF SQL RELATIONAL DATABASES TO OWL ONTOLOGIES

Irina Astrova and Ahto Kalja

This paper proposes a novel approach to automatic transformation of relational databases to ontologies, where the quality of transformation is also considered. The proposed approach is implemented in a tool called QUALEG DB. This tool parses an SQL script and generates an OWL file that contains an ontology, including classes, properties, restrictions and instances. The proposed approach can be used for making the vast amount of relational database information on the Web machine-processable.

41

DEALING WITH CONFLICTING MODIFICATIONS IN A WIKI

Stephan Lukosch and Andrea Leisen

Collaborative web-based applications support users when creating and sharing information. Wikis are prominent examples for that kind of applications. Wikis, like e.g. Wikipedia, attract loads of users that modify its content. Normally, wikis do not employ any mechanisms to avoid parallel modification of the same page. As result, conflicting changes can occur. Most wikis record all versions of a page to allow users to review recent changes. However, just recording all versions does not guarantee that conflicting modifications are reflected in the most recent version of a page. In this paper, we identify the requirements for efficiently dealing with conflicting modifications and present a web-based tool which allows to compare and merge different versions of a wiki page.

42

MoRe: A USER CONTROLLED CONTENT BASED MOVIE RECOMMENDER WITH EXPLANATION AND NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

Oznur Kirmemis and Aysenur Birturk

Recommendation systems have become a popular approach for accessing to relevant products and information. Existing approaches for movie recommendation systems are insufficient, because they do not provide transparency to the users through enabling them to view and edit their profiles. In addition, negative feedback, which is an important clue for the recommender, is not taken into account. In this paper we concentrate on the ideas of automatically generating user profiles from the user’s item preferences, and enabling users to view and edit their profiles to get satisfaction. In addition, taking negative feedback for specific values is examined and discussed, which is observed to produce more accurate recommendations. The system also provides the explanations for the produced recommendations and allows users to modify their profile accordingly and see their modifications’ effects on the results directly. Initial experimental results demonstrate that the system produces accurate recommendations and gets user trust and satisfaction with the transparency and explanation facility.

46

AUTOMATIC EVALUATION OF INFORMATION CREDIBILITY IN SEMANTIC WEB AND KNOWLEDGE GRID

Adam L. Kaczmarek

This article presents a novel algorithm for automatic estimation of information credibility. It concerns information collected in Knowledge Grid and Semantic Web. Possibilities to evaluate the credibility of information in such structures are much greater than those available for WWW sites which use natural language. The Internet enables everyone to publish information however this information is not always credible and it can be contradictory. When processed information is contradictory there are two possibilities. Either paraconsistent, Non-Boolean logic which enables reasoning with contradictions can be used, or it can be assumed that some of information is wrong. This article focuses on the second approach. The evaluation of information credibility is based on comparing data from different sources and analyzing their relations with other information. This information which is not credible and causes contradictions is excluded.

57

A FRAMEWORK AUTOMATING DOMAIN ONTOLOGY CONSTRUCTION

Yin-Fu Huang and Yu-Yu Huang

This paper proposed a general framework that could automatically construct domain ontology on a collection of documents with the help of The Free Dictionary, WordNet, and Wikipedia Categories. Both explicit and implicit features of index terms in documents are used to evaluate word correlations and then to construct Is-A relationships in the framework. Thus, the built ontology would consist of 1) concepts, 2) Is-A and Parts-of relationships among concepts, and 3) word relationships. Besides, the built ontology could be further refined by learning from incremental documents periodically. To help users browse the built ontology, an ontology browsing system was implemented and provided different search modes and functionality to facilitate searching a variety of relationships.

58

ADOPTING BUILDING AUTOMATION IN WEBLABS - Analysis of Requirements and Solutions

Ricardo J. Costa, Gustavo R. Alves and Domingos S. Santos

Several companies have been developing domotic Stds. for building automation, enabling users to locally and remotely control several home devices, like: lights, power sockets, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, among others. Besides contributing to improve the building comfort, these Stds. may also be adopted for other purposes, namely in weblabs used in sciences and engineering remote experiments. To increase the sense of immersion in weblabs, we identify domotic Stds. as a standard solution for turning on/off the power infrastructure and controlling the light and temperature conditions of the physical space where a specific experiment may run, thus approaching the sense of being in the lab facilities while accessing them through the corresponding weblab interface. After identifying the added value to weblabs in terms of power savings and in the control of the environmental conditions, we used our knowledge and the WWW to conduct an extensive search on domotic Stds., and after analysing the results obtained, we choose the most appropriated one to be implemented in a Weblab. Regarding the adopted Std., a proof-of-concept is also described, enabling the control of an halogen lamp and a power socket, using a specific Web interface.

68

SENSOR DATA PUBLICATION ON THE WEB FOR SCIENTIFIC APPLICATIONS

Gilberto Zonta Pastorello Jr., Luiz Gomes Jr., Claudia Bauzer Medeiros and André Santanchè

This paper considers the problems of sensor data publication, taking advantage of research on components and Web service standards. Sensor data is widely used in scientific experiments -- e.g., for model validation, environment monitoring, and calibrating running applications. Heterogeneity in sensing devices hamper effective use of their data, requiring new solutions for publication mechanisms. Our solution is based on applying a specific component technology, CPT, which is capable of uniformly encapsulating data and software. Sensor data publication is tackled by extending CPTs to comply with geospatial standards for Web services from OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). Using this approach, Web services can be implemented by CPTs, with publication of sensor data following standards. Furthermore, this solution allows client applications to request the execution of pre-processing functions before data is published. The approach enables scientists to share, find, process and access geospatial sensor data in a flexible and homogeneous manner.

90

XETA: EXTENSIBLE METADATA SYSTEM - For Extensibility, Accuracy, Suitability and Convenience

Yeojin Kim, SukBong Lee, SungJun Lee and SangGyoo Sim

This paper presents an eXtensible mETAdata system (XETA System) which makes it possible for the user to organize and extend the structure of metadata. We discuss four requirements of the advanced metadata system in semantic web and a methodology to implement the requirements. Using the XETA system, the user can flexibly extend metadata, enhance its semantic accuracy and selectively apply the metadata in context.

93

PANGAEA - An ICSU World Data Center as a Networked Publication and Library System for Geoscientific Data

Michael Diepenbroek, Uwe Schindler and Hannes Grobe

Since 1992 PANGAEA serves as an archive for all types of geoscientific and environmental data. From the beginning the PANGAEA group started initiatives and aimed at an organisation structure which -- beyond the technical structure and operation of the system -- would help to improve the quality and general availability of scientific data. Project data management is done since 1996. 2001 the ICSU World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE) was founded and since 2003 -- together with other German WDC -- the group was working on the development of data publications as a new publication type. To achieve interoperability with other data centers and portals the system was adapted to global information standards. PANGAEA has implemented a number of community specific data portals. 2007 - under the coordination of the PANGAEA group - an initiative for networking all WDC was started. On the long range ISCU supports plans to develop the WDC system into a global network of publishers and open access libraries for scientific data.

101

FINDING DISTINCT ANSWERS IN WEB SNIPPETS

Alejandro Figueroa and Günter Neumann

This paper presents ListWebQA, a question answering system aimed specifically at discovering answers to list questions in web snippets. ListWebQA retrieves snippets likely to contain answers by means of a query rewriting strategy, and extracts answers according to their syntactic and semantic similarities afterwards. These similarities are determined by means of a set of surface syntactic patterns and a Latent Semantic Kernel. Results show that our strategy is effective in strengthening current web question answering techniques.

105

A NEW APPROACH TO RECYCLE WEB CONTENTS - The DOM Tree as the Support for Building New Web Pages

Luis Álvarez Sabucedo and Luis Anido Rifón

After an initial period of populating the web with a large amount of resources; a new situation has to be faced in the scope of the WWW: the over production of web contents. Currently, there is a lot of resources available in the web and new approaches are scanned to improve some features. In particular, this paper tackles the reusability of contents. The aim of this paper is an alternative method to provide a simple and effective manner to reuse contents in order to create new web resources. This approach is based on the use of the DOM tree that defines the web resource to build up new web pages. The presented method involves minor changes on the server side and no change at all on the client side. Besides, this proposal can take advantage of resources already developed using on-the-fly technologies.

120

QUERY EXPANSION WITH MATRIX CORRELATION TECHNIQUES - A Systematic Approach

Claudio Biancalana, Antonello Lapolla and Alessandro Micarelli

This paper presents an Information Retrieval system that employs techniques based on Personalization and Query Expansion (QE). The system was developed in an incremental and iterative way, starting from a simpler system and reaching a more complex one, to the point that it is possible to talk about several systems each based on a specific, deeply analyzed approach: four systems sharing the concept of term co-occurrence. Starting from a simple system based on bigrams, we moved onto a system based on term proximity, through an approach known in the literature as Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL), and eventually developing a solution based on co-occurrence at page level. The latter presents a hybrid approach based on term proximity. This novel architecture is shown here for the first time to our knowledge.

130

A 3D WEB BASED GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR REGIONAL PLANNING

Giuseppe Conti, Michele Andreolli, Stefano Piffer and Raffaele de Amicis

Managing a territory through web based Geobrowsers requires very interactive and scalable architectures, capable to access vast scale repositories and capable to provide real-time behaviour. This paper illustrates a web-service based infrastructure developed by Graphitech to access geographical information of environmental interest. The paper shows that a 3D Geobrowser, deployed as a web-start application, is used to access a variety of different remote repositories containing a wide range of geographical information at a regional scale. Each user can interactively navigate within the 3D environment and can also interactively send real-time information on environmental features using GeoRSS technology. The paper illustrates how the resulting system is currently in use by a urban planning authority during their daily activities.

131

EXPERIENCE WITH USABILITY TESTING OF WEB PORTALS

Andrina Granić, Ivica Mitrović and Nikola Marangunić

The paper reports on the experience regarding usability assessment of broad-reach web portals. Designed methodology, which argues scenario-guided user evaluations used to collect both quantitative data and qualitative "remarks" along with specialists' valuation, provided a comprehensive assessment feedback. Our experience accords with the claim that we should not rely on isolated evaluations, but instead combine assessment methods. In this paper we present and discuss the results obtained through employed usability test methods. They indicate that chosen research instruments, measures and methods for user-based usability evaluation were consistent. Conversely, results of the designed guideline inspection did not confirm to the ones obtained through the user test methods.

143

TAXONOMY LEARNING FOR THE ROMANIAN LANGUAGE USING SOTA AND WORDNET

Viorica R. Chifu, Ioan Salomie, Emil Şt. Chifu and Corina Grumazescu

Ontologies are widely used today in various domains such as information retrieval, semantic Web, NLP tasks or for describing specific domains like certain branches of medicine. While there are many tools that can be used for learning domain ontologies for English, when learning domain specific ontologies for Romanian, we face a lack of available tools and resources. Moreover, due to the complexity of the Romanian grammar, processing of Romanian text corpora is also difficult. This paper focuses on building a domain specific ontology for the Romanian language using machine learning techniques. The taxonomy learning process is based on an unsupervised neural network. The resulting modules are intended to be used for semantic annotations of traceability services in meat industry.

146

ONTOLOGY-BASED MODEL ANNOTATION OF HETEROGENEOUS GEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Laura Silveira Mastella, Yamine Ait-Ameur, Michel Perrin and Jean-François Rainaud

In this work we will study the process of petroleum reservoir modelling as a case of study for applying ontology-based integration techniques and model annotation. This application domain is