Web Content Extraction - a Meta-Analysis of its Past and Thoughts on its Future

In this paper, we present a meta-analysis of several Web content extraction algorithms, and make recommendations for the future of content extraction on the Web. First, we find that nearly all Web content extractors do not consider a very large, and growing, portion of modern Web pages. Second, it is well understood that wrapper induction extractors tend to break as the Web changes; heuristic/feature engineering extractors were thought to be immune to a Web site's evolution, but we find that this is not the case: heuristic content extractor performance also tends to degrade over time due to the evolution of Web site forms and practices. We conclude with recommendations for future work that address these and other findings.Comment: Accepted for publication in SIGKDD Exploration

Energetic constraints to chemo-photometric evolution of spiral galaxies

The problem of chemo-photometric evolution of late-type galaxies is dealt with relying on prime physical arguments of energetic self-consistency between chemical enhancement of galaxy mass, through nuclear processing inside stars, and luminosity evolution of the system. Chemical enhancement is assessed in terms of the so-called "yield metallicity", that is the metal abundance of processed mass inside stars, as constrained by the galaxy photometric history.Comment: Ready to appear in the MNRAS. A total of 24 pages with 17 figures & 6 tables. Further info at author's web site (see http://www.bo.astro.it/~eps/home.html

MACiE: a database of enzyme reaction mechanisms.

SUMMARY: MACiE (mechanism, annotation and classification in enzymes) is a publicly available web-based database, held in CMLReact (an XML application), that aims to help our understanding of the evolution of enzyme catalytic mechanisms and also to create a classification system which reflects the actual chemical mechanism (catalytic steps) of an enzyme reaction, not only the overall reaction. AVAILABILITY: http://www-mitchell.ch.cam.ac.uk/macie/.EPSRC (G.L.H. and J.B.O.M.), the BBSRC (G.J.B. and J.M.T.—CASE studentship in association with Roche Products Ltd; N.M.O.B. and J.B.O.M.—grant BB/C51320X/1), the Chilean Government’s Ministerio de Planificacio´n y Cooperacio´n and Cambridge Overseas Trust (D.E.A.) for funding and Unilever for supporting the Centre for Molecular Science Informatics.application note restricted to 2 printed pages web site: http://www-mitchell.ch.cam.ac.uk/macie

A new model to support the personalised management of a quality e-commerce service

The paper presents an aiding model to support the management of a high quality e-commerce service. The approach focuses on the service quality aspects related to customer relationship management (CRM). Knowing the individual characteristics of a customer, it is possible to supply a personalised and high quality service. A segmentation model, based on the "relationship evolution" between users and Web site, is developed. The method permits the provision of a specific service management for each user segment. Finally, some preliminary experimental results for a sport-clothing industry application are described

Design activities: how to analyze cognitive effort associated to cognitive treatments?

Working memory issues are important in many real activities. Thus, measuring cognitive effort (or mental load) has been a main research topic for years in cognitive ergonomics, though no consensual method to study such aspect has been proposed. In addition, we argue that cognitive effort has to be related to an analysis of the evolution of cognitive processes, which has been called "time processing". Towards this end, we present and discuss paradigms that have been used for years to study writing activities and, in experiments reported in this paper, for studying design activities, such as computer-graphic tasks or web site desig

Getting information to the public and our users : the OECD Experience

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has opened a web site called SourceOECD that allows the purchase of its publications over the Internet. SourceOECD has the facility to allow clients to purchase parts of a publication, for instance a statistical table or even parts of a database. This allows much better precision for the customers than if they have to purchase the complete printed or PDF publication, the principle of SourceOECD being that our customers can buy online as little or as much as they need. It also allows them to download their purchases in advance of receiving a paper copy. This paper will demonstrate the practical aspects of using SourceOECD. The Centre for Documentation and Information (CDI) at the OECD embarked on a radical change of its Internet site in 1999 and since then has offered to its clients a desktop catalogue in HTML with thousands of links to electronic periodicals and relevant Internet sites. A brief demonstration of the CDI’s Intranet site and explanation of its evolution will be of interest to other librarians who are at either at this stage of development or are considering mounting their catalogue onto an Intranet/Internet site