OWDEAH: Online Web Data Extraction based on Access History

Web data extraction systems are the kernel of information mediators between users and heterogeneous Web data resources. How to extract structured data from semi-structured documents has been a problem of active research. Supervised and unsupervised methods have been devised to learn extraction rules from training sets. However, trying to prepare training sets (especially to annotate them for supervised methods), is very time-consuming. We propose a framework for Web data extraction, which logged usersrsquo access history and exploit them to assist automatic training set generation. We cluster accessed Web documents according to their structural details; define criteria to measure the importance of sub-structures; and then generate extraction rules. We also propose a method to adjust the rules according to historical data. Our experiments confirm the viability of our proposal.

What was web 2.0? Versions as the dominant mode of internet history

This paper explores Web 2.0 as the marker of a discourse about the nature and purpose of the internet in the recent past. It focuses on how Web 2.0 introduced to our thinking about the internet a discourse of versions. Such a discourse enables the telling of a ‘history’ of the internet which involves a complex interweaving of past, present and future, as represented by the additional versions which the introduction of Web 2.0 enabled. The paper concludes that the discourse of versions embodied in Web 2.0 obscures as much as it reveals, and suggests a new project based on investigations of the everyday memories of the internet by which individual users create their own histories of online technology.

Evil and the complexity of history : a response to Durston

Kirk Durston recently presented an argument aimed against evidential arguments from evil predicated on instances of suffering that appear to be gratuitous; ‘The consequential complexity of history and gratuitous evil’, Religious Studies, 36 (2000), 65–80. He begins with the notion that history consists of an intricate web of causal chains, so that a single event in one such chain may have countless unforeseen consequences. According to Durston, this consequential complexity exhibited by history negatively impacts on our grasp of the data necessary to determine whether or not an evil is gratuitous. He therefore concludes that our epistemic condition poses an insurmountable barrier towards the inference from inscrutability to pointlessness. By way of reply, I contend that Durston's argument is flawed in two significant respects, and thus the evidential argument emerges unscathed from his critique.

Gaining a past, losing a future : Web 2.0 and internet historicity

This article explore how, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the internet became historicised, meaning that its public existence is now explicitly framed through a narrative that locates the current internet in relation to a past internet. Up until this time, in popular culture, the internet had been understood mainly as the future-in-the-present, as if it had no past. The internet might have had a history, but it had no historicity. That has changed because of Web 2.0, and the effects of Tim O'Reilly's creative marketing of that label. Web 2.0, in this sense not a technology or practice but the marker of a discourse of historical interpretation dependent on versions, created for us a second version of the web, different from (and yet connected to) that of the 1990s. This historicising moment aligned the past and future in ways suitable to those who might control or manage the present. And while Web 3.0, implied or real, suggests the 'future', it also marks out a loss of other times, or the possibility of alterity understood through temporality.

Tim O'Reilly and web 2.0 : the economics of memetic liberty and control

This article presents an account of the role of Tim O'Reilly, both as an individual and as a corporate entity (O'Reilly Group), in the creation, spread and use of the concept of Web 2.0. It demonstrates that, whatever Web 2.0's current uses to describe variously the technologies, politics, commerce or social meaning of the Internet, it originates as a deliberately open signifier of novel and potential internet development in the mid-2000s. The article argues that O'Reilly has promoted the diversity of the term's meanings and uses - celebrating textual liberties - but has also emphasised the special role that O'Reilly plays in providing the authoritative definition of that term. In essence, O'Reilly profits from this 'control' of the idea of Web 2.0 but that, to enjoy that control O'Reilly must also allow differences in meaning. The article concludes by suggesting that Web 2.0 therefore signifies a new kind of economics that brings together freedom and control in a new way.

Web services for things

In this chapter, we introduce an interesting type of Web services for "things". Existing Web services are applications across the Web that perform functions mainly to satisfy users' social needs "from simple requests to complicated business processes". Throughout history, humans have accumulated lots of knowledge about diverse things in the physical world. However, human knowledge about the world has not been fully used on the current Web which focuses on social communication; the prospect of interacting with things other than people on the future Web is very exciting. The purpose of Web services for "things" is to provide a tunnel for people to interact with things in the physical world from anywhere through the Internet. Extending the service targets from people to anything challenges the existing techniques of Web services from three aspects: first, an unified interface should be provided for people to describe the needs of things; then basic components should be designed in a Web service for things; finally, implementation of a Web service for things should be optimized when mashing up multiple sub Web services. We tackle the challenges faced by a Web service for things and make the best use of human knowledge from the following aspects. We first define a context of things as an unified interface. The users' description (semantic context) and sensors (sensing context) are two channels for acquiring the context of things. Then, we define three basic modules for a Web service for things: ontology Web services to unify the context of things, machine readable domain knowledge Web services and event report Web services (such as weather report services and sensor event report services). Meanwhile, we develop a Thing-REST framework to optimally mashup structures to loosely couple the three basic modules. We employ a smart plant watering service application to demonstrate all the techniques we have developed.