8 research outputs found
Controlled Caching of Dynamic WWW Pages
No full textAbstract. In order to increase flexibility and provide up-to-date information, more and more web sites use dynamic content. This practice, however, increases server load dramatically, since each request results to code execution, which may involve processing and/or access to information repositories. In this paper we present a scheme for maintaining a server-side cache of dynamically generated pages, allowing for cache consistency maintenance, without placing heavy burdens on application programmers. We also present insights to architecture scalability and some results obtained from conducted experiments
The Second Language Problem in User Support
No full textInteraction between humans and computers is seldom perfect. Interactive software often includes aspects of user support to reduce the uncertainty and propensity to error experienced by many users. The present paper briefly reviews some of the common strategies for helping users and characterises the `second-language problem' as a special case for support. Since most software packages are written for an English-speaking audience and presuppose reasonable proficiency in English comprehension non-native speakers of English face the daunting task of interacting via a second-language. One can reasonably expect greater confusion and interactive difficulties in this class of users. Software implementors have gone some way toward addressing this problem with occasional provision of font and native language support (localisation). Some of these attempts are outlined here. The paper concludes by advocating a strategy of selective native language support based upon reasonable expectations of trou..
SPREADING ACTIVATION OVER ONTOLOGY-BASED RESOURCES: FROM PERSONAL CONTEXT TO WEB SCALE REASONING
No full text This paper describes methods to allow spreading activation to be used on web-scale information resources. Existing work has shown that spreading activation can be used to model context over small personal ontologies, which can be used to assist in various user activities, for example, in auto-completing web forms. This previous work is extended and methods are developed by which large external repositories, including corporate information and the web, can be linked to the user's personal ontology and thus allow automated assistance that is able to draw on the entire web of data. The basic idea is to augment the personal ontology with cached data from external repositories, where the choice of data to fetch or discard is related to the level of activation of entities already in the personal ontology or cached data. This relies on the assumption that the working set of highly active entities is relatively small; empirical results are presented, which suggest these assumptions are likely to hold. Implications of the techniques are discussed for user interaction and for the social web. In addition, warm world reasoning is proposed, applying rule-based reasoning over activated entities, potentially merging symbolic and sub-symbolic reasoning over web-scale knowledge bases. </jats:p
From the web of data to a world of action
No full textThis paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring 'typing' of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip lt, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web. (C) 2010 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved
