2,510 research outputs found
Cloud WorkBench - Infrastructure-as-Code Based Cloud Benchmarking
To optimally deploy their applications, users of Infrastructure-as-a-Service
clouds are required to evaluate the costs and performance of different
combinations of cloud configurations to find out which combination provides the
best service level for their specific application. Unfortunately, benchmarking
cloud services is cumbersome and error-prone. In this paper, we propose an
architecture and concrete implementation of a cloud benchmarking Web service,
which fosters the definition of reusable and representative benchmarks. In
distinction to existing work, our system is based on the notion of
Infrastructure-as-Code, which is a state of the art concept to define IT
infrastructure in a reproducible, well-defined, and testable way. We
demonstrate our system based on an illustrative case study, in which we measure
and compare the disk IO speeds of different instance and storage types in
Amazon EC2
Automatic supervised information extraction of structured web data
The overall purpose of this project is, in short words, to create a system able to extract vital
information from product web pages just like a human would. Information like the name of the
product, its description, price tag, company that produces it, and so on. At a first glimpse, this
may not seem extraordinary or technically difficult, since web scraping techniques exist from long
ago (like the python library Beautiful Soup for instance, an HTML parser1 released in 2004). But
let us think for a second on what it actually means being able to extract desired information from
any given web source: the way information is displayed can be extremely varied, not only visually,
but also semantically. For instance, some hotel booking web pages display at once all prices for
the different room types, while medium-sized consumer products in websites like Amazon offer the
main product in detail and then more small-sized product recommendations further down the page,
being the latter the preferred way of displaying assets by most retail companies. And each with its
own styling and search engines. With the above said, the task of mining valuable data from the
web now does not sound as easy as it first seemed. Hence the purpose of this project is to shine
some light on the Automatic Supervised Information Extraction of Structured Web Data problem.
It is important to think if developing such a solution is really valuable at all. Such an endeavour
both in time and computing resources should lead to a useful end result, at least on paper, to
justify it. The opinion of this author is that it does lead to a potentially valuable result. The
targeted extraction of information of publicly available consumer-oriented content at large scale in
an accurate, reliable and future proof manner could provide an incredibly useful and large amount
of data. This data, if kept updated, could create endless opportunities for Business Intelligence,
although exactly which ones is beyond the scope of this work. A simple metaphor explains the
potential value of this work: if an oil company were to be told where are all the oil reserves in the
planet, it still should need to invest in machinery, workers and time to successfully exploit them,
but half of the job would have already been done2.
As the reader will see in this work, the way the issue is tackled is by building a somehow complex
architecture that ends in an Artificial Neural Network3. A quick overview of such architecture is
as follows: first find the URLs that lead to the product pages that contain the desired data that
is going to be extracted inside a given site (like URLs that lead to ”action figure” products inside
the site ebay.com); second, per each URL passed, extract its HTML and make a screenshot of the
page, and store this data in a suitable and scalable fashion; third, label the data that will be fed to
the NN4; fourth, prepare the aforementioned data to be input in an NN; fifth, train the NN; and
sixth, deploy the NN to make [hopefully accurate] predictions
Archiving the Relaxed Consistency Web
The historical, cultural, and intellectual importance of archiving the web
has been widely recognized. Today, all countries with high Internet penetration
rate have established high-profile archiving initiatives to crawl and archive
the fast-disappearing web content for long-term use. As web technologies
evolve, established web archiving techniques face challenges. This paper
focuses on the potential impact of the relaxed consistency web design on
crawler driven web archiving. Relaxed consistent websites may disseminate,
albeit ephemerally, inaccurate and even contradictory information. If captured
and preserved in the web archives as historical records, such information will
degrade the overall archival quality. To assess the extent of such quality
degradation, we build a simplified feed-following application and simulate its
operation with synthetic workloads. The results indicate that a non-trivial
portion of a relaxed consistency web archive may contain observable
inconsistency, and the inconsistency window may extend significantly longer
than that observed at the data store. We discuss the nature of such quality
degradation and propose a few possible remedies.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, CIKM 201
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