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)

Visual Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries

The emergence of information highways and multimedia computing has resulted in redefining the concept of libraries. It is widely believed that in the next few years, a significant portion of information in libraries will be in the form of multimedia electronic documents. Many approaches are being proposed for storing, retrieving, assimilating, harvesting, and prospecting information from these multimedia documents. Digital libraries are expected to allow users to access information independent of the locations and types of data sources and will provide a unified picture of information. In this paper, we discuss requirements of these emerging information systems and present query methods and data models for these systems. Finally, we briefly present a few examples of approaches that provide a preview of how things will be done in the digital libraries in the near future.published or submitted for publicatio

Interactive visual exploration of a large spatio-temporal dataset: Reflections on a geovisualization mashup

Exploratory visual analysis is useful for the preliminary investigation of large structured, multifaceted spatio-temporal datasets. This process requires the selection and aggregation of records by time, space and attribute, the ability to transform data and the flexibility to apply appropriate visual encodings and interactions. We propose an approach inspired by geographical 'mashups' in which freely-available functionality and data are loosely but flexibly combined using de facto exchange standards. Our case study combines MySQL, PHP and the LandSerf GIS to allow Google Earth to be used for visual synthesis and interaction with encodings described in KML. This approach is applied to the exploration of a log of 1.42 million requests made of a mobile directory service. Novel combinations of interaction and visual encoding are developed including spatial 'tag clouds', 'tag maps', 'data dials' and multi-scale density surfaces. Four aspects of the approach are informally evaluated: the visual encodings employed, their success in the visual exploration of the clataset, the specific tools used and the 'rnashup' approach. Preliminary findings will be beneficial to others considering using mashups for visualization. The specific techniques developed may be more widely applied to offer insights into the structure of multifarious spatio-temporal data of the type explored here

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

Services surround you:physical-virtual linkage with contextual bookmarks

Our daily life is pervaded by digital information and devices, not least the common mobile phone. However, a seamless connection between our physical world, such as a movie trailer on a screen in the main rail station and its digital counterparts, such as an online ticket service, remains difficult. In this paper, we present contextual bookmarks that enable users to capture information of interest with a mobile camera phone. Depending on the user’s context, the snapshot is mapped to a digital service such as ordering tickets for a movie theater close by or a link to the upcoming movie’s Web page

NewsPaperBox – Online News Space: a visual model for representing the social space of a website

NewsPaperBox propounds an alternative visual model utilizing the treemap algorithm to represent the collective use of a website that evolves in response to user interaction. While the technology currently exists to track various user behaviors such as number of clicks, duration of stay on a given web site, these statistics are not yet employed to influence the visual representation of that site’s design in real time. In that sense, this project propounds an alternative modeling of a representational outlook of a website that is developed by collaborations and competitions of its global users. This paper proposes the experience of cyberspace as a generative process driven by its effective user participation

A Benchmark for Image Retrieval using Distributed Systems over the Internet: BIRDS-I

The performance of CBIR algorithms is usually measured on an isolated workstation. In a real-world environment the algorithms would only constitute a minor component among the many interacting components. The Internet dramati-cally changes many of the usual assumptions about measuring CBIR performance. Any CBIR benchmark should be designed from a networked systems standpoint. These benchmarks typically introduce communication overhead because the real systems they model are distributed applications. We present our implementation of a client/server benchmark called BIRDS-I to measure image retrieval performance over the Internet. It has been designed with the trend toward the use of small personalized wireless systems in mind. Web-based CBIR implies the use of heteroge-neous image sets, imposing certain constraints on how the images are organized and the type of performance metrics applicable. BIRDS-I only requires controlled human intervention for the compilation of the image collection and none for the generation of ground truth in the measurement of retrieval accuracy. Benchmark image collections need to be evolved incrementally toward the storage of millions of images and that scaleup can only be achieved through the use of computer-aided compilation. Finally, our scoring metric introduces a tightly optimized image-ranking window.Comment: 24 pages, To appear in the Proc. SPIE Internet Imaging Conference 200