From the web of data to a world of action

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 8.4 (2010): 10.1016/j.websem.2010.04.007This paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring 'typing' of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip!t, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web.Parts of this work were supported by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Program of the European Commission as part of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (Contract G038- 507618). Thanks also to Emanuele Tracanna, Marco Piva, and Raffaele Giuliano for their work on On Time

Controlled Caching of Dynamic WWW Pages

Abstract. In order to increase flexibility and provide up-to-date information, more and more web sites use dynamic content. This practice, however, increases server load dramatically, since each request results to code execution, which may involve processing and/or access to information repositories. In this paper we present a scheme for maintaining a server-side cache of dynamically generated pages, allowing for cache consistency maintenance, without placing heavy burdens on application programmers. We also present insights to architecture scalability and some results obtained from conducted experiments

The Second Language Problem in User Support

Interaction between humans and computers is seldom perfect. Interactive software often includes aspects of user support to reduce the uncertainty and propensity to error experienced by many users. The present paper briefly reviews some of the common strategies for helping users and characterises the `second-language problem' as a special case for support. Since most software packages are written for an English-speaking audience and presuppose reasonable proficiency in English comprehension non-native speakers of English face the daunting task of interacting via a second-language. One can reasonably expect greater confusion and interactive difficulties in this class of users. Software implementors have gone some way toward addressing this problem with occasional provision of font and native language support (localisation). Some of these attempts are outlined here. The paper concludes by advocating a strategy of selective native language support based upon reasonable expectations of trou..