Memex: a browsing assistant for collaborative archiving and mining of surf trails

Keyword indices, topic directories and link-based rankings are used to search and structure the rapidly growing Web today. Surprisingly little use is made of years of browsing experience of millions of people. Indeed, this information is routinely discarded by browsers. Even deliberate bookmarks are stored in a passive and isolated manner. All this goes against Vannevar Bush’s dream of the Memex: An enhanced supplement to personal and community memory. We propose to demonstrate the beginnings of a ‘Memex’ for the Web: A browsing assistant for individuals and groups with focused interests. Memex blurs the artificial distinction between browsing history and deliberate bookmarks. The resulting glut of data is analyzed in a number of ways at the individual and community levels. Memex constructs a topic directory customized to the community, mapping their interests naturally to nodes in this directory. This lets the user recall topic-based browsing contexts by asking questions like “What trails was I following when I was last surfing about classical music?” and “What are some popular pages in or near my community’s recent trail graph related to music?

Modeling interactive memex-like applications based on self-modifiable petri nets

This paper introduces an interactive Memex-like application using a self-modifiable Petri Net model – Self-modifiable Color Petri Net (SCPN). The Memex (“memory extender”) device proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945 focused on the problems of “locating relevant information in the published records and recording how that information is intellectually connected.” The important features of Memex include associative indexing and retrieval. In this paper, the self-modifiable functions of SCPN are used to achieve trail recording and retrieval. A place in SCPN represents a website and an arc indicates the trail direction. Each time when a new website is visited, a place corresponding to this website will be added. After a trail is built, users can use it to retrieve the websites they have visited. Besides, useful user interactions are supported by SCPN to achieve Memex functions. The types of user interactions include: forward, backward, history, search, etc. A simulator has been built to demonstrate that the SCPN model can realize Memex functions. Petri net instances can be designed to model trail record, back, and forward operations using this simulator. Furthermore, a client-server based application system has been built. Using this system, a user can surf online and record his surfing history on the server according to different topics and share them with other users

Supporting Multiple Paths to Objects in Information Hierarchies: Faceted Classification, Faceted Search, and Symbolic Links

We present three fundamental, interrelated approaches to support multiple access paths to each terminal object in information hierarchies: faceted classification, faceted search, and web directories with embedded symbolic links. This survey aims to demonstrate how each approach supports users who seek information from multiple perspectives. We achieve this by exploring each approach, the relationships between these approaches, including tradeoffs, and how they can be used in concert, while focusing on a core set of hypermedia elements common to all. This approach provides a foundation from which to study, understand, and synthesize applications which employ these techniques. This survey does not aim to be comprehensive, but rather focuses on thematic issues

Personalization by website transformation: Theory and practice

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user’s interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built that enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site’s structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users to experience a vast number of paths through a site not traversable through browsing and demonstrate that it supports traversals with multiple steps, where the semblance of a hierarchy is preserved, as well as shortcuts directly to the desired information

From Social Tagging to Social Hierarchies: Sharing Deeper Structural Knowledge in Web 2.0

Social tagging systems, such as del.icio.us, have helped users find and reuse information by sharing individuals’ structural knowledge, i.e., the knowledge of relationships among documents and concepts. Besides being an Internet phenomenon, social tagging can help organizations manage their intranet document repositories. The structural knowledge embedded in tags is flat, shallow, and often ambiguous however. We develop a theoretical model to argue for potential benefits of sharing deeper structural knowledge in an electronic document repository through personal document hierarchies. Based on the theoretical model, we design a “social hierarchies” system. Deployment and exploratory study confirm the benefits of sharing personal hierarchies in a collaborative knowledge work environment and suggest future research directions

Mining the Web for Law Related Jobs in Intellectual Property in the United States

Intellectual property law has remained the hottest practice group for over a decade; it is one of the fastest-growing and most exciting fields today. The trend was clearly recognized as early as 1995 in an article Lesley Ellen Harris. 2 As far back as 1997, according to The National Law Journal, IP has been reported to be the most highly compensated segment of the legal profession for both trial and non-trial attorneys. 3 This article examines the process of finding IP jobs on the web

Web-based forensic information management system

The focus of this work was on the design and implementation of a web based forensic information management system for the West Virginia State Police Forensics Laboratory (WVSPFL). The software tool enables law enforcement agents to submit crime information to the Forensic Laboratory via a secure Internet connection. The tool also enables each of the nine units of WVSPFL to process the information electronically. Online electronic forms were created to mirror the existing paper based forms, making the transition easier. The existing processes were standardized and streamlined, there by minimizing information inconsistency. The crime information once gathered is automatically uploaded to a database. It can then be viewed and queried by any authorized law enforcement officer at anytime from anywhere. The software tool was implemented in ASP.NET with MS SQL Server as the database. The key benefits of the system are streamlining of information flow, around the clock availability of case information, and sharing of information between the various law enforcement agencies

Supporting Database Designers in Entity-Relationship Modeling: An Ontology- Based Approach

Database design has long been recognized as a difficult problem, requiring a great deal of skill on the part of the designer. Research has been carried out that provides methodologies and rules for creating good designs. There have even been attempts to automate the design process. However, before these can be truly successful, methodologies and tools are needed that can incorporate and use domain knowledge. In this research, a methodology for supporting database design is proposed that makes use of domain-specific knowledge about an application, which is stored in the form of ontologies. The ontologies provide information that is useful in both the creation of new designs and the verification of existing ones. They also capture the constraints of an application domain. A methodology for assisting database design that takes advantage of the ontologies has been implemented in a prototype system. Initial testing of the prototype illustrates that the incorporation and use of ontologies are effective in creating database design

Exploring Faculty Perceptions of a Case Library as an Online Teaching Resource

Professors need alternative programs to support their online teaching. This dissertation reports an initial study in a long-term research agenda for developing a faculty online teaching solution. The primary purpose of the study is to explore faculty perceptions of a case library to help decision makers and researchers determine whether they would pursue the use of such a tool to support faculty online teaching. The secondary purpose of the study is to generate design knowledge to inform future development of and research on this or similar case libraries. The methodology of this study includes three components: development research, rapid prototyping, and qualitative methods. Development research and rapid prototyping provided a three-stage framework for this study: conceptualization, development, and research. I synthesized the literature to create conceptual models of an Online Teaching Case Library (OTCL) at the conceptualization stage, built a prototype to implement the models at the development stage, and conducted research to evaluate the prototype at the research stage. Qualitative methods guided data gathering and analysis. I recruited seven faculty participants based on a purposeful sampling technique. To gather the data, I followed a three-step data collection process: initial interviews, contextual interviews, and final interviews. This process allowed me to observe and interview faculty participants while they were exploring the prototype. I analyzed the data by following an 11-step procedure synthesized from the works of Miles and Huberman (1994) as well as LeCompte and Schensul (1999a). This study found that on one hand, faculty members might use an OTCL, because they perceived that this tool could support their apprenticeship approach to learning to teach. On the other hand, however, their perceived decision to use an OTCL would also be influenced by the perceptions of the usefulness and usability of the tool. The study identified the initial evidence supporting an OTCL as an online teaching resource and the challenges involved in developing and implementing such a solution. It provides a base for decision makers to determine whether they would adopt this tool. It also offers some design guidance for those who do want to pursue this solution to faculty development

Collaborative software agents support for the texpros document management system

This dissertation investigates the use of active rules that are embedded in markup documents. Active rules are used in a markup representation by integrating Collaborative Software Agents with TEXPROS (abbreviation for TEXt PROcessing System) [Liu and Ng 1996] to create a powerful distributed document management system. Such markup documents with embedded active rules are called Active Documents. For fast retrieval purposes, when we need to generate a customized Internet folder organization, we first define the Folder Organization Query Language (FO-QL) to solve data categorization problems. FO-QL defines the folder organization query process that automatically retrieves links of documents deposited into folders and then constructs a folder organization in either a centralized document repository or multiple distributed document repositories. Traditional documents are stored as static data that do not provide any dynamic capabilities for accessing or interacting with the document environment. The dynamic and distributed nature of both markup data and markup rules do not merely respond to requests for information, but intelligently anticipate, adapt, and actively seek ways to support the computing processes. This outcome feature conquers the static nature of the traditional documents. An Office Automation Definition Language (OADL) with active rules is defined for constructing the TEXPROS \u27s dual modeling approach and workflow events representation. Active Documents are such agent-supported OADL documents. With embedded rules and self-describing data features, Active Documents provide capability of collaborative interactions with software agents. Data transformation and data integration are both data processing problems but little research has focused on the markup documents to generate a versatile folder organization. Some of the research merely provides manual browsing in a document repository to find the right document. This browsing is time consuming and unrealistic, especially in multiple document repositories. With FO-QL, one can create a customized folder organization on demand