On the Move to Semantic Web Services

Semantic Web services will enable the semiautomatic and automatic annotation, advertisement, discovery, selection, composition, and execution of inter-organization business logic, making the Internet become a common global platform where organizations and individuals communicate with each other to carry out various commercial activities and to provide value-added services. There is a growing consensus that Web services alone will not be sufficient to develop valuable solutions due the degree of heterogeneity, autonomy, and distribution of the Web. This paper deals with two of the hottest R&D and technology areas currently associated with the Web – Web services and the Semantic Web. It presents the synergies that can be created between Web Services and Semantic Web technologies to provide a new generation of eservices.

Exploring the Destination Image of Mainland China Tourists to Taiwan by Word-of-Mouth on Web

After allowing direct flights from Mainland China to Taiwan, Chinese tourists increased according to Tourism Bureaustatistics. There are from 0.19 to 2 million tourists from 2008 to 2011. Mainland China has become the main source of Taiwan developing tourism industry. Taiwanese government should know more about comments from Chinese tourists to Taiwan in order toproperly market Taiwan tourism and enhance the overall quality of tourism. In order to understand Chinese visitors’ comments, this study adopts content analysis to analyze electronic word-of-mouth on Web. This study collects 375 blog articles of Chinese tourists from Ctrip.com as a database during 2009 to 2011. Through the qualitative data analysis the traveling destination imagesis divided into seven dimensions, such as senic spots, shopping, food and beverages, accommodations, transportation, festivals and recreation activities. Finally, this study proposes some practical managerial implication to know both positive and negative images of the seven dimensions from Chinese tourists, providing marketing strategies and suggestions to traveling agency industry.

The Impact of Semantic Web on E-Commerce

Semantic Web Technologies enable machines to interpret data published in a machine-interpretable form on the web. At the present time, only human beings are able to understand the product information published online. The emerging semantic Web technologies have the potential to deeply influence the further development of the Internet Economy. In this paper we propose a scenario based research approach to predict the effects of these new technologies on electronic markets and business models of traders and intermediaries and customers. Over 300 million searches are conducted everyday on the Internet by people trying to find what they need. A majority of these searches are in the domain of consumer ecommerce, where a web user is looking for something to buy. This represents a huge cost in terms of people hours and an enormous drain of resources. Agent enabled semantic search will have a dramatic impact on the precision of these searches. It will reduce and possibly eliminate information asymmetry where a better informed buyer gets the best value. By impacting this key determinant of market prices semantic web will foster the evolution of different business and economic models. We submit that there is a need for developing these futuristic models based on our current understanding of e-commerce models and nascent semantic web technologies. We believe these business models will encourage mainstream web developers and businesses to join the “semantic web revolution."

Building Virtual Reality Environments for Distance Education on the Web: A Case Study in Medical Education

The paper presents an investigation into the role of virtual reality and web technologies in the field of distance education. Within this frame, special emphasis is given on the building of web-based virtual learning environments so as to successfully fulfill their educational objectives. In particular, basic pedagogical methods are studied, focusing mainly on the efficient preparation, approach and presentation of learning content, and specific designing rules are presented considering the hypermedia, virtual and educational nature of this kind of applications. The paper also aims to highlight the educational benefits arising from the use of virtual reality technology in medicine and study the emerging area of web-based medical simulations. Finally, an innovative virtual reality environment for distance education in medicine is demonstrated. The proposed environment reproduces conditions of the real learning process and enhances learning through a real-time interactive simulator.

A New Version of Annotation Method with a XML-based Knowledge Base

Machine-understandable data when strongly interlinked constitutes the basis for the SemanticWeb. Annotating web documents is one of the major techniques for creating metadata on the Web. Annotating websitexs defines the containing data in a form which is suitable for interpretation by machines. In this paper, we present a better and improved approach than previous [1] to annotate the texts of the websites depends on the knowledge base.

A Comparative Study of Page Ranking Algorithms for Information Retrieval

This paper gives an introduction to Web mining, then describes Web Structure mining in detail, and explores the data structure used by the Web. This paper also explores different Page Rank algorithms and compare those algorithms used for Information Retrieval. In Web Mining, the basics of Web mining and the Web mining categories are explained. Different Page Rank based algorithms like PageRank (PR), WPR (Weighted PageRank), HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search), DistanceRank and DirichletRank algorithms are discussed and compared. PageRanks are calculated for PageRank and Weighted PageRank algorithms for a given hyperlink structure. Simulation Program is developed for PageRank algorithm because PageRank is the only ranking algorithm implemented in the search engine (Google). The outputs are shown in a table and chart format.

Deep iCrawl: An Intelligent Vision-Based Deep Web Crawler

The explosive growth of World Wide Web has posed a challenging problem in extracting relevant data. Traditional web crawlers focus only on the surface web while the deep web keeps expanding behind the scene. Deep web pages are created dynamically as a result of queries posed to specific web databases. The structure of the deep web pages makes it impossible for traditional web crawlers to access deep web contents. This paper, Deep iCrawl, gives a novel and vision-based approach for extracting data from the deep web. Deep iCrawl splits the process into two phases. The first phase includes Query analysis and Query translation and the second covers vision-based extraction of data from the dynamically created deep web pages. There are several established approaches for the extraction of deep web pages but the proposed method aims at overcoming the inherent limitations of the former. This paper also aims at comparing the data items and presenting them in the required order.

Semi-Automatic Approach for Semantic Annotation

The third phase of web means semantic web requires many web pages which are annotated with metadata. Thus, a crucial question is where to acquire these metadata. In this paper we propose our approach, a semi-automatic method to annotate the texts of documents and web pages and employs with a quite comprehensive knowledge base to categorize instances with regard to ontology. The approach is evaluated against the manual annotations and one of the most popular annotation tools which works the same as our tool. The approach is implemented in .net framework and uses the WordNet for knowledge base, an annotation tool for the Semantic Web.

IFDewey: A New Insert-Friendly Labeling Schemafor XML Data

XML has become a popular standard for information exchange via web. Each XML document can be presented as a rooted, ordered, labeled tree. The Node label shows the exact position of a node in the original document. Region and Dewey encoding are two famous methods of labeling trees. In this paper, we propose a new insert friendly labeling method named IFDewey based on recently proposed scheme, called Extended Dewey. In Extended Dewey many labels must be modified when a new node is inserted into the XML tree. Our method eliminates this problem by reserving even numbers for future insertion. Numbers generated by Extended Dewey may be even or odd. IFDewey modifies Extended Dewey so that only odd numbers are generated and even numbers can then be used for a much easier insertion of nodes.

Web Page Watermarking: XML files using Synonyms and Acronyms

Advent enhancements in the field of computing have increased massive use of web based electronic documents. Current Copyright protection laws are inadequate to prove the ownership for electronic documents and do not provide strong features against copying and manipulating information from the web. This has opened many channels for securing information and significant evolutions have been made in the area of information security. Digital Watermarking has developed into a very dynamic area of research and has addressed challenging issues for digital content. Watermarking can be visible (logos or signatures) and invisible (encoding and decoding). Many visible watermarking techniques have been studied for text documents but there are very few for web based text. XML files are used to trade information on the internet and contain important information. In this paper, two invisible watermarking techniques using Synonyms and Acronyms are proposed for XML files to prove the intellectual ownership and to achieve the security. Analysis is made for different attacks and amount of capacity to be embedded in the XML file is also noticed. A comparative analysis for capacity is also made for both methods. The system has been implemented using C# language and all tests are made practically to get the results.

A Design and Implementation Model for Web Caching Using Server “URL Rewriting“

In order to make surfing the internet faster, and to save redundant processing load with each request for the same web page, many caching techniques have been developed to reduce latency of retrieving data on World Wide Web. In this paper we will give a quick overview of existing web caching techniques used for dynamic web pages then we will introduce a design and implementation model that take advantage of “URL Rewriting" feature in some popular web servers, e.g. Apache, to provide an effective approach of caching dynamic web pages.

A Semantic Assistant Agent for Digital Libraries

In this paper we present semantic assistant agent (SAA), an open source digital library agent which takes user query for finding information in the digital library and takes resources- metadata and stores it semantically. SAA uses Semantic Web to improve browsing and searching for resources in digital library. All metadata stored in the library are available in RDF format for querying and processing by SemanSreach which is a part of SAA architecture. The architecture includes a generic RDF-based model that represents relationships among objects and their components. Queries against these relationships are supported by an RDF triple store.

Online Computing System for Cctuple-Precision Computation with Fortran

Computations with higher than the IEEE 754 standard double-precision (about 16 significant digits) are required recently. Although there are available software routines in Fortran and C for high-precision computation, users are required to implement such routines in their own computers with detailed knowledges about them. We have constructed an user-friendly online system for octupleprecision computation. In our Web system users with no knowledges about high-precision computation can easily perform octupleprecision computations, by choosing mathematical functions with argument(s) inputted, by writing simple mathematical expression(s) or by uploading C program(s). In this paper we enhance the Web system above by adding the facility of uploading Fortran programs, which have been widely used in scientific computing. To this end we construct converter routines in two stages.