Abmash: Mashing Up Legacy Web Applications by Automated Imitation of Human Actions

Many business web-based applications do not offer applications programming interfaces (APIs) to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult (for instance to synchronize data between two applications). To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) of web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bi-directional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write since they deal with end-user, visual user-interface elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a "mashup".Comment: Software: Practice and Experience (2013)

Web Data Extraction, Applications and Techniques: A Survey

Web Data Extraction is an important problem that has been studied by means of different scientific tools and in a broad range of applications. Many approaches to extracting data from the Web have been designed to solve specific problems and operate in ad-hoc domains. Other approaches, instead, heavily reuse techniques and algorithms developed in the field of Information Extraction. This survey aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of Web Data Extraction. We provided a simple classification framework in which existing Web Data Extraction applications are grouped into two main classes, namely applications at the Enterprise level and at the Social Web level. At the Enterprise level, Web Data Extraction techniques emerge as a key tool to perform data analysis in Business and Competitive Intelligence systems as well as for business process re-engineering. At the Social Web level, Web Data Extraction techniques allow to gather a large amount of structured data continuously generated and disseminated by Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Social Network users and this offers unprecedented opportunities to analyze human behavior at a very large scale. We discuss also the potential of cross-fertilization, i.e., on the possibility of re-using Web Data Extraction techniques originally designed to work in a given domain, in other domains.Comment: Knowledge-based System

Web and Semantic Web Query Languages

A number of techniques have been developed to facilitate powerful data retrieval on the Web and Semantic Web. Three categories of Web query languages can be distinguished, according to the format of the data they can retrieve: XML, RDF and Topic Maps. This article introduces the spectrum of languages falling into these categories and summarises their salient aspects. The languages are introduced using common sample data and query types. Key aspects of the query languages considered are stressed in a conclusion

Multi-layer Architecture For Storing Visual Data Based on WCF and Microsoft SQL Server Database

In this paper we present a novel architecture for storing visual data. Effective storing, browsing and searching collections of images is one of the most important challenges of computer science. The design of architecture for storing such data requires a set of tools and frameworks such as SQL database management systems and service-oriented frameworks. The proposed solution is based on a multi-layer architecture, which allows to replace any component without recompilation of other components. The approach contains five components, i.e. Model, Base Engine, Concrete Engine, CBIR service and Presentation. They were based on two well-known design patterns: Dependency Injection and Inverse of Control. For experimental purposes we implemented the SURF local interest point detector as a feature extractor and $K$-means clustering as indexer. The presented architecture is intended for content-based retrieval systems simulation purposes as well as for real-world CBIR tasks.Comment: Accepted for the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, ICAISC, June 14-18, 2015, Zakopane, Polan

Design of Automatically Adaptable Web Wrappers

Nowadays, the huge amount of information distributed through the Web motivates studying techniques to\ud be adopted in order to extract relevant data in an efficient and reliable way. Both academia and enterprises\ud developed several approaches of Web data extraction, for example using techniques of artificial intelligence or\ud machine learning. Some commonly adopted procedures, namely wrappers, ensure a high degree of precision\ud of information extracted from Web pages, and, at the same time, have to prove robustness in order not to\ud compromise quality and reliability of data themselves.\ud In this paper we focus on some experimental aspects related to the robustness of the data extraction process\ud and the possibility of automatically adapting wrappers. We discuss the implementation of algorithms for\ud finding similarities between two different version of a Web page, in order to handle modifications, avoiding\ud the failure of data extraction tasks and ensuring reliability of information extracted. Our purpose is to evaluate\ud performances, advantages and draw-backs of our novel system of automatic wrapper adaptation

Towards a Scalable Hardware/Software Co-Design Platform for Real-time Pedestrian Tracking Based on a ZYNQ-7000 Device

Currently, most designers face a daunting task to research different design flows and learn the intricacies of specific software from various manufacturers in hardware/software co-design. An urgent need of creating a scalable hardware/software co-design platform has become a key strategic element for developing hardware/software integrated systems. In this paper, we propose a new design flow for building a scalable co-design platform on FPGA-based system-on-chip. We employ an integrated approach to implement a histogram oriented gradients (HOG) and a support vector machine (SVM) classification on a programmable device for pedestrian tracking. Not only was hardware resource analysis reported, but the precision and success rates of pedestrian tracking on nine open access image data sets are also analysed. Finally, our proposed design flow can be used for any real-time image processingrelated products on programmable ZYNQ-based embedded systems, which benefits from a reduced design time and provide a scalable solution for embedded image processing products

Logic-Based Decision Support for Strategic Environmental Assessment

Strategic Environmental Assessment is a procedure aimed at introducing systematic assessment of the environmental effects of plans and programs. This procedure is based on the so-called coaxial matrices that define dependencies between plan activities (infrastructures, plants, resource extractions, buildings, etc.) and positive and negative environmental impacts, and dependencies between these impacts and environmental receptors. Up to now, this procedure is manually implemented by environmental experts for checking the environmental effects of a given plan or program, but it is never applied during the plan/program construction. A decision support system, based on a clear logic semantics, would be an invaluable tool not only in assessing a single, already defined plan, but also during the planning process in order to produce an optimized, environmentally assessed plan and to study possible alternative scenarios. We propose two logic-based approaches to the problem, one based on Constraint Logic Programming and one on Probabilistic Logic Programming that could be, in the future, conveniently merged to exploit the advantages of both. We test the proposed approaches on a real energy plan and we discuss their limitations and advantages.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure, 26th Int'l. Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP'10

A CHR-based Implementation of Known Arc-Consistency

In classical CLP(FD) systems, domains of variables are completely known at the beginning of the constraint propagation process. However, in systems interacting with an external environment, acquiring the whole domains of variables before the beginning of constraint propagation may cause waste of computation time, or even obsolescence of the acquired data at the time of use. For such cases, the Interactive Constraint Satisfaction Problem (ICSP) model has been proposed as an extension of the CSP model, to make it possible to start constraint propagation even when domains are not fully known, performing acquisition of domain elements only when necessary, and without the need for restarting the propagation after every acquisition. In this paper, we show how a solver for the two sorted CLP language, defined in previous work, to express ICSPs, has been implemented in the Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) language, a declarative language particularly suitable for high level implementation of constraint solvers.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures, 1 table To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP