Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.Comment: Technical repor

Excepting the future

This report makes the economic case for flexible copyright exceptions and extended safe harbour provisions. Copyright can strengthen the incentive to create by affording rights holders exclusive rights to exploit their work. This can bring into existence work that would not otherwise exist, generating economic benefits. A content owner’s exclusive rights are subject to limitations and exceptions.Excepting the Future makes the the economic case for flexible copyright exceptions and extended safe harbour provisions. These mediate the respective rights of the myriad participants in the copyright eco-system, where intellectual property (IP) outputs are, to an increasing extent, developed from IP inputs, where creators are also users, users are creators and copyright material cannot be distributed digitally without copies being made. A companion report, Exceptional Industries, reveals the economic contribution to Australia and other countries made by industries relying on such limitations and exceptions to copyright. In Australia in 2010 this includes: Contributing 14% of Australia’s annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or 182 billion;  Employing 21% of our paid workforce, almost 2.4 million people;  Paying wages and salaries of 116 billion.   This report was prepared for the Australian Digital Alliance by John Houghton and Nicholas Gruen, Lateral Economics

TopExNet: Entity-Centric Network Topic Exploration in News Streams

The recent introduction of entity-centric implicit network representations of unstructured text offers novel ways for exploring entity relations in document collections and streams efficiently and interactively. Here, we present TopExNet as a tool for exploring entity-centric network topics in streams of news articles. The application is available as a web service at https://topexnet.ifi.uni-heidelberg.de/ .Comment: Published in Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2019, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, February 11-15, 201

A policy context - eLib and the emergence of the subject gateways

This brief paper outlines some of the features of the policy environment which led to the setting up of the influential 'subject gateways' as part of the Electronic Libraries Programme. It has the modest and partial ambition of putting some of the discussions of the time on record. It should be read as a companion piece to two other articles. The first, Law 1994, develops the historical context for the emergence of the data centres, a central component of JISC information infrastructure, and collaterally discusses the broad thrust of JISC's developing informational activity. The second, Dempsey 2000, upon which this piece is partly based, provides a broad discussion of the emergence of the subject gateways and the historical trajectory which led to the setting up of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), which now provides an umbrella for JISC-funded subject-gateway activity. This article has a particular focus: it looks at some aspects of the policy background which led to the funding of the subject gateways. It does not discuss emerging services and approaches that also influenced developments

Symmetric Synchronous Collaborative Navigation

Synchronous collaborative navigation is a form of social navigation where users virtually share a web browser. In this paper, we present a symmetric, proxy-based architecture where each user can take the lead and guide others in visiting web sites, without the need for a special browser or other software. We show how we have applied this scheme to a problem-solving-oriented e-learning system