USF Department of Computer Science
Problem withToday’s Desktop 3 Topic Hierarchies
BookMark File Manager Internal LinksManager
WebSphinx (Miller, Bharat)
USF Department of Computer Science
Desktop tools are outdated
• Computer is not a storage container
• Barrier between local and web
• Computer is a communication tool, a node in the knowledge base of the world
USF Department of Computer Science
Interesting Information Sources
• Amazon
• OLD: Way-back machine
• NEW:Technorati– The World Live Web
• Domain Specific:– ACM Digital Library– Citeseer
USF Department of Computer Science
Associative Thinking Agent
Personal Personal Personal General-Purpose Search Engine
Specialized Search Engines
Associative Thinking Agent
Figure 1. The proposed system allows any entity that can provide associative data to interested parties to register as associative thinking agent source. This includes general-purpose search engines like Google, specialized search engines like the Internet Archive, and ordinary users of personal computers. Associative thinking agents, residing on personal computers, help the user identify sources and information relevant to the user’s current task.
USF Department of Computer Science
Web Services
• Programmatic interface to web data
• Software agent access to data
• Helps separate View/Model
• More robust than “web scrapers”
• XML/Soap
• Rest-ful Interfaces
USF Department of Computer Science
Associative Source API and Registry
• A common search/link info API
• A central UDDI registry
• Allows for meta-search clients with dynamic lists of sources.
Clients can access even those sources created after the client itself.
USF Department of Computer Science
Know more about yourself
Analysis of file system– Linking between documents– inward links– characteristic words of documents– what people are referred to– what web pages
USF Department of Computer Science
The Personal Web
2nd Degree
1st Degree
Nth Degree
PersonalWeb
Personal Space consists of highly interrelated files, i.e. a personal web
The Web should be personalized to each user, i.e., a personal web.
Personal Web-- local documents and “bookmarks”
N-degree Neighborhood– can be reached with n clicks.
USF Department of Computer Science
Connecting Personal Webs
People create knowledge-- bookmarking, annotating, linking, synthesizing-- every day.
People are lousy about taking the extra step to communicate this knowledge.