2,124 research outputs found
Hypermedia Information Systems in Industry
No full textThe requirements for industrial strength hypermedia are well known. If hypermedia applications are to be used successfully in the industrial environment, then considerable effort is required to integrate them into with the organisation’s current business practices. This implies that any proposed model must be simple to maintain and implement, as well as bringing real benefits to the organisation as a whole. This article discusses the development of such a system, its implementation and evaluation to support manufacturing operations at Pirelli Cables, Eastleigh
The Ever Evolving Web: the Power of Networks
No full textIn this paper we consider the Web as a network of networks and reflect on its evolution, firstly by analyzing the reasons why it became the first truly ubiquitous hypertext system against all competitors and secondly by looking at how it has evolved from a network of linked documents to a system that facilitates social networking on a scale previously unimaginable and how it will evolve in the future as a network of linked data and beyond. The study of the Web—its evolution and its impact on society, on business and on government—is referred to as Web Science. We consider some of the major challenges of Web Science and discuss possible Web worlds of the future
Web evolution and Web Science
Get PDFThis paper examines the evolution of the World Wide Web as a network of networks and discusses the emergence of Web Science as an interdisciplinary area that can provide us with insights on how the Web developed, and how it has affected and is affected by society. Through its different stages of evolution, the Web has gradually changed from a technological network of documents to a network where documents, data, people and organisations are interlinked in various and often unexpected ways. It has developed from a technological artefact separate from people to an integral part of human activity that is having an increasingly significant impact on the world. This paper outlines the lessons from this retrospective examination of the evolution of the Web, presents the main outcomes of Web Science activities and discusses directions along which future developments could be anticipated
Web Science and Reflective Practice
No full textThe notion of reflective practice has been influential in professional practice of all kinds, including engineering. Reflective practice suggests that knowledge and practice are linked, that improvisation based on actual practice, as opposed to the application of formalised theory, drives understanding in many applied fields. A key feature of reflective practice is a feedback loop between actions and their effects, which need to be evaluated to produce understanding. The WWW is of course a piece of socially-embedded technology, and in many ways its progress can be seen in terms of such feedback loops, as development of formalisms and applications have social effects which are evaluated to create new opportunities for innovation. However, as we shall describe in this chapter, the WWW is embedded very deeply, and innovation can create social effects on extreme scales – for example, the creation of the practice of blogging and the massive linked blogosphere, which appeared in a very short space of time. The discipline which is called Web Science is intended to address the problem of reflective practice in a space where the feedback loops which facilitate learning happen at large scales over small time periods, increasing the danger that learning will happen at the cost of large-scale social damage (or damage to the WWW itself). In this chapter we will interpret the practice of Web engineering through the lens of the reflective practice concept, using the development of the Google search engine as a case study, in order to articulate the particular issues that individuate Web engineering from other types of engineering
You've Got Hypertext
No full textIn this paper we consider possible “future everyday hypertext systems.” To ground our discussion, we look first at the functional and conceptual definitions of hypertext that have evolved in the hypertext research community. We then consider these definitions against the Web, the best known current everyday hypertext, but one that the hypertext community has regarded as only partially a hypertext system at best. We propose, however, that a full, rich hypertext is alive and well and living in an equally successful everyday system, and that that system is email. We look at how email meets the criteria, both functionally and conceptually for rich hypertext. We then use email-as-hypertext as our touchstone for assessing future hypertext systems. In particular, we consider the newest system on the Web event horizon, the Semantic Web, and show how the potential hypertextness of the Semantic Web has been anticipated by pre- and co-Web hypertext research systems. We consider how, if informed by the attributes of our email model, the Semantic Web may be able to break away from the limited hypertext model of the Web to become a rich, everyday hypertext system like email. We present three current hypertext research efforts that use the Semantic Web platform to show how these may be seen to embody such email-like hypertext qualities
Web science
No full textThis chapter examines some of the ideas behind the emerging discipline of Web Science, whose ambition is to shape the future development of the World Wide Web and the research agenda that that requires. There are formidable obstacles to this ambition, not least the large scale of the Web, the most complex piece of technology ever devised, and the co-constitution of the Web with its communities of users. Web Science must therefore straddle and integrate computing, mathematics, complexity and network studies on the one hand, together with studies of the social context, using the methods of sociology, law and economics on the other. The chapter defines the Web and differentiates it from the Internet, upon whose infrastructure it depends. Web Science is shown to be a type of reflective practice, made problematic by its scale and by the complexity of its interrelation with embedding societies; in particular it is difficult to integrate the micro-scale of the protocols which define it, with the macro-scale of the social effects that follow from widespread use of particular systems. The example of the development of the Web of Linked Data is used to illustrate difficulties and potential solutions
The Semantic Web Revisited
No full textThe original Scientific American article on the Semantic Web appeared in 2001. It described the evolution of a Web that consisted largely of documents for humans to read to one that included data and information for computers to manipulate. The Semantic Web is a Web of actionable information--information derived from data through a semantic theory for interpreting the symbols.This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized. Shopbots and auction bots abound on the Web, but these are essentially handcrafted for particular tasks; they have little ability to interact with heterogeneous data and information types. Because we haven't yet delivered large-scale, agent-based mediation, some commentators argue that the Semantic Web has failed to deliver. We argue that agents can only flourish when standards are well established and that the Web standards for expressing shared meaning have progressed steadily over the past five years. Furthermore, we see the use of ontologies in the e-science community presaging ultimate success for the Semantic Web--just as the use of HTTP within the CERN particle physics community led to the revolutionary success of the original Web. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of AI
Semantic Web
No full textThe Semantic Web is a proposed extension to the World Wide Web (WWW) that aims to provide a common framework for sharing and reusing data across applications. The most common interfaces to the World Wide Web present it as a Web of Documents, linked in various ways including hyperlinks. But from the data point of view, each document is a black box – the data are not given independently of their representation in the document. This reduces its power, and also (as most information needs to be extracted from documents by a human agent) inhibits the use of automatic information processing methods on the Web. The Semantic Web is an effort, steered by the World Wide Web Consortium, to develop a set of protocols, formalisms and standards to transform the Web into a Web of Data. Links would be between data, and data could be accessed independently of the applications that created them. This would allow both the sharing of data, and the amalgamation of data from different sources, using heterogeneous formats, in new contexts
Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces
No full textIn this thesis the theory of automorphisms and coverings of compact Klein surfaces is discussed by considering a Klein surface as the orbit space of a non-Euclidean crystallographic group. In chapter 1 we set out some of the well-established theory concerning these ideas. In chapter 2 maximal automorphism groups of compact Klein surfaces without boundary are considered. We solve the problem of which groups PSL (2,q) act as maximal automorphism groups of non-orientable Klein surface without boundary. In chapter 3 we discuss cyclic groups acting as automorphism groups of compact Klein surfaces without boundary. It is shown that the maximum order for a cyclic group to be an automorphism group of a compact non-orientable Klein surface without boundary of genus g ?3 is 2g, if g is odd and 2 (g – 1) if g is even. Chapter 4 is the largest section of the thesis. It is concerned with coverings (possibly folded and ramified) of compact Klein surfaces, mainly Klein surfaces with boundary. All possible two-sheeted connected unramified covering surfaces of a Klein surface are classified and the orientability of a normal n-sheeted cover, for odd n, is determine
Trust on the Web: Some Web Science Research Challenges
No full textWeb Science is the interdisciplinary study of the World Wide Web as a first-order object in order to understand its relationship with the wider societies in which it is embedded, and in order to facilitate its future engineering as a beneficial object. In this paper, research issues and challenges relating to the vital topic of trust are reviewed, showing how the Web Science agenda requires trust to be addressed, and how addressing the challenges requires a range of disciplinary skills applied in an integrated manner
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