Lean Middleware

This paper describes an approach to achieving data integration across multiple sources in an enterprise, in a manner that is cost efficient and economically scalable. We present an approach that does not rely on major investment in structured, heavy-weight database systems for data storage or heavy-weight middleware responsible for integrated access. The approach is centered around pushing any required data structure and semantics functionality (schema) to application clients, as well as pushing integration specification and functionality to clients where integration can be performed on-the-fly

Personalizing Interactions with Information Systems

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms and technologies necessary to customize information access to the end-user. It can be defined as the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to the individual. In this chapter, we study personalization from the viewpoint of personalizing interaction. The survey covers mechanisms for information-finding on the web, advanced information retrieval systems, dialog-based applications, and mobile access paradigms. Specific emphasis is placed on studying how users interact with an information system and how the system can encourage and foster interaction. This helps bring out the role of the personalization system as a facilitator which reconciles the user’s mental model with the underlying information system’s organization. Three tiers of personalization systems are presented, paying careful attention to interaction considerations. These tiers show how progressive levels of sophistication in interaction can be achieved. The chapter also surveys systems support technologies and niche application domains

Mixing Querying and Navigation in MIX

Web-based information systems provide to their users the ability to interleave querying and browsing during their information discovery efforts. The MIX system provides an API called QDOM (Querible Document Object Model) that supports the interleaved querying and browsing of virtual XML views, specified in an XQuery-like language. QDOM is based on the DOM standard. It allows the client applications to navigate into the view using standard DOM navigation commands. Then the application can use any visited node as the root for a query that creates a new view. The query/navigation processing algorithms of MIX perform decontextualization, i.e., they translate a query that has been issued from within the context of other queries and navigations into efficient queries that are understood by the source outside of the context of previous operations. In addition, MIX provides a navigation-driven query evaluation model, where source data are retrieved only as needed by the subsequent navigations