Finding good users to follow in social network services such as Twitter is one way to communicate and share information about a topic of interest with other users efficiently. However, it is not easy to find such users due to a massive number of users. In this paper, we classify Twitter users according to tweet frequency, tweet content, communication style, and follow relation, then present a method for finding good users to follow based on the user classification. The method is incorporated with our previous work on Twitter user search, and we show that the search performance is improved by the method.

With the rapid increase in popularity of mobile devices, a huge number of mobile applications are published with rich functionalities. However, the available functionalities still do not satisfy the variety of users' needs. Some common tasks cannot be accomplished by using an individual application, but require the interoperability of multiple applications. Unfortunately, most of the applications are not ready to be integrated due to the lack of formal descriptions of its offered functionalities. Accordingly, it becomes essential to describe the shared functionalities of mobile applications in a structured way. We address this problem by proposing an XML-based modeling language, called LIMA (Language for Interoperability of Mobile Applications), that allows developers to describe the shared functionalities of mobile applications. In order to enhance the interoperability, LIMA is designed to abstract the functionalities of mobile applications from the concrete details on how to invoke those functions. We demonstrate our modeling language by implementing a parser tool that generates proxy classes to leverage the mobile application development process. Moreover, we apply our modeling language with a mobile mashup approach to demonstrate automatic mobile application integration.

Twitter is one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Although Twitter can be used as a tool for getting valuable information related to a topic of interest, it is a hard task for us to find users to follow for this purpose. In this paper, we present a method for Twitter user recommendation based on user relations and taxonomical analysis. This method first finds some users to follow related to the topic of interest by giving keywords representing the topic, then picks up users who continuously provide related tweets from the user list. In the first phase we rank users based on user relations obtained from tweet behaviour of each user such as retweet and mention (reply), and we create topic taxonomies of each user from tweets posted during different time periods in the second phase. Experimental results show that our method is very effective in recommending users who post tweets related to the topic of interest all the time rather than users who post related tweets just temporarily.

The Internet is providing a huge amount of information/knowledge through Web pages. For personal and effective use of such resources, the partial information extraction technology breaks a new path to enable end-users to obtain and integrate only needed information from various Web pages into original compositions. However the traditional XPath-only extraction method would fail in case Web sites use different templates to construct Web pages or change the layout of Web pages, which we call as the stability problem. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid extraction mechanism for stably extract the partial information. We compare the original and changed Web pages to get the unchanged nodes as a stable-part list and use them to generate new paths. Since the list will be re-ranked after new stable-parts are found, the success rates of extraction can be self evolving and correspondingly reduce manual intervention. We show the usefulness of our approach by experiment on real Web sites in practice.

Twitter has attracted attention recently as a new way of collecting, providing and sharing information on the Internet. However, it is difficult for us to find Twitter users to follow for getting valuable information related to a topic of interest. In this paper, we propose a method for ranking Twitter users using the Twitter keyword search. This method utilizes tweet relation among Twitter users and tweets (retweet and reply) as well as tweet count of each Twitter user. Experimental results show our method outperforms methods using only tweet count, tweet relation, or follow relation.

Nowadays modern Web applications provide desktop-application-like flexible user experiences without using explicit requests. Modern Web applications need complex components: sever-side logic programs, server-side communication programs, output Web pages, client-side logic programs, and client-side communication programs. We present a new generation model called client-side centric model. This model allows us to define one-page modern Web applications dealing with databases easily. From GUI based declarative definitions, we can generate COMET technology based modern Web applications such as chat applications and calendar applications.

A large number of news articles are published on the Web every day, and demand of discovering news articles on new/important topics has been growing. In this paper, we present a method for detecting characteristic words co-occurring with a target word (characteristic co-occurrence words) to help users find important topics related to the target word. The method divides news articles published in a certain period of time into two groups by whether the target word is included or not, then computes score of each word co-occurring with the target word in some news articles by counting the number of news articles including the co-occurring word for each of the news article groups. We can detect characteristic co-occurrence words more effectively by clustering news articles in advance and computing the score only in clusters which news articles including the target word belong to.

An application based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) consists of an assembly of services, which is referred to as a composite service. A composite service can be implemented from other composite services, and hence, the application could have a recursive structure. Securing an SOA application is an important nonfunctional requirement. However, specifying a security policy for a composite service is not easy because the policy should be consistent with the policies of the external services invoked in the composite process. Therefore, this paper proposes a security policy composition mechanism that uses the existing policies of the external services. Our contribution is defining the process-independent policy composition rules and providing a method for semiautomatically creating a security policy of the composite service. Our method supports two approaches of policy composition: top-down and bottom-up. Our study makes it possible to verify the consistency of the policies without increasing a developer's workload, even if the composite service has a recursive structure.

Recent developments in mobile technology have enabled mobile phones to work as mobile Web servers. However, the composition of mobile phone applications and Web resources to form new mashup applications requires mobile programming knowledge ranging from how to create user interfaces, network connections and access to Web resources. Furthermore, the unique capabilities of mobile phone applications such as access to camera inputs or sensor data are often limited to local use only. To address these problems, we present a description-based approach and an Integration Model for the composition of mobile mashup applications combining Web applications, Web services and mobile phone applications (i.e., generic components). The compositions appear to require less native mobile programming knowledge. In the current work, to leverage access to these services and applications, an Interface Wrapper was used to transform generic components into mashup components. Composers were able to transform and reuse form-based query results from Web applications and integrate them with wrapped output from users' interaction with mobile phone applications, and other Web services. The final applications can be configured to work two ways: 1) as native mobile phone applications or 2) as a Web application accessible externally via a mobile Web server application.

We present a role accessibility definition based Web application generation. A role accessibility definition specifies what kind of data access can be done by which type of roles of users. From a given role accessibility definition, we can automatically derive data model, business logic and user interface to generate simple Web applications. With additional definitions of page transition and general computation using existing Web service functions, then we can generate more general type of Web applications. We can use fine grained Web service functions for handling tables or external Web service functions on the Web. Our approach will help us (esp. non-programmers) create a variety of Web applications such as questionnaire systems, student assignment evaluation systems, and so on.

In this paper, we present a description-based mashup framework for lightweight integration of Web contents. Our implementation shows that we can integrate not only the Web services but also the Web applications easily, even the Web contents dynamically generated by client-side scripts.

Nowadays more and more Web sites generate Web pages containing client-side scripts such as JavaScript and Flash instead of ordinary static HTML pages. These scripts create dynamic HTML pages and provide modern interfaces to Web applications such as AJAX applications. Unfortunately, for partial information extraction of Web pages, existing methods cannot extract dynamic Web contents.

Currently, a lot of news articles are published on the Web, and it is getting easier for us to read them. However, the number of articles are too large for us to read all of them. Although some Web sites cluster/classify news articles into some topics (categories), it is not enough since a large number of articles are still in each topic. Detecting difference between articles on one topic will be one of the solution to comprehend the whole topic. In this paper, we propose a method for detection of difference between news articles on the same topic. Articles are sequentially compared by three different comparison units: paragraphs, sentences, and simple sentences. Our method is evaluated by applying it to Japanese news articles.

This paper contains five contributions of the participants of the panel discussion on “Multi-agent Knowledge Modelling” in the EJC 2008 conference. We addressed four main topics: (a) Semantic Web technologies, (b) reality vs. agents, (c) cross-cultural knowledge and (d) communication of agents. Each of the discussants presented his/her view of the addressed problem. Some views were rather pessimistic, other optimistic or realistic, but all of them posed questions and raised open problems as well as solution proposals. Thus this paper is a contribution to the topic of multi-agent knowledge modelling from different points of view.

With the development of the Internet, Web services, such as Google Maps API and YouTube Data API, become more important and convenient for the Web knowledge distribution and integration. However, currently, most existing Web sites do not provide Web services. In this paper, we present a partial information extraction technology to construct the Web services from the general Web applications quickly and easily. Our implementation shows that our approach is applicable to different kinds of Web applications.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have been attractive solutions for resource distribution and sharing because of their self-organizing and fault-tolerant features. However, due to the decentralized nature, search efficiency is a challenging problem for large scale knowledge resource distribution P2P systems. In this paper, peer-similarity based P2P overlay clustering algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that search efficiency using overlay clustering of similar peers is substantially improved.

In this paper, we propose a news index system which supports users who would like to observe difference in various topics (e.g. politics, economy, education, and culture) among countries/regions. General news sites just provide news articles and we can only read articles which we are interested in by using a keyword search engine or selecting some topic categories provided by each site. Our system has a large index word list, a news index database, and a news directory system. The word list is constructed, expanded, and updated by collecting topic keywords from various Web sites. The news directory system consists of the word list. News articles are collected by using keyword search engines which news sites provide, then index of the collected articles is stored in the database and classified by the news directory system. We can see the difference in various topics among countries/regions by observing co-occurrence of two or more words in the word list.

Integration of Web services from different Web sites has brought new creativity and functionality to Web applications. These integration technologies, called mashup or mixup, have made a shift in Web service development and created a new generation of widely popular and successful Web services such as Google Maps API and YouTube Data API. However, the integration is limited to the Web sites that provide the open Web service APIs, and currently, most existing Web sites do not provide Web services. In this paper, we present a method to integrate the general Web applications. For this purpose, we propose a Web information extraction method to generate the virtual Web service functions from Web applications at client side. Our implementation shows that the general Web applications can be also integrated easily.

We have a tremendous amount of information/knowledge available on the Web today. We often have a situation in which we need to collect partial contents of a whole page from one or a number of Web sites. Examples are collection of capital city names and population data from country profile sites or collection of company names and their industrial fields from finance sites. We present WIKE, a system for partial information extraction from Web pages without programming. We also give its applications to Web service generation.

An application based Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA) consists of an assembly of external services and the application is called as a composite service. Acomposite service could be implemented by other composite services hence the application could have a recursive structure, which is one of the features of SOA application. Securing an SOA application is an important non-functional requirement. However, specifying a security policy of a composite service is not so easy because the policy should keep the consistency with other policies of external services which are invoked in the process. We need the way to assure the consistency of policies, but the concrete way is not developed yet to specify a consistent policy for a composite service. Therefore, this paper proposes a security policy composition mechanism from existing policies of external services. Our contribution is creating a security policy of a composite service automatically based on predicate logic, with support for two approaches of policy composition: bottom-up and top-down. Also, we focus on three kinds of security policies, such as a Data Protection Policy, an Access Control Policy, and a Composite Process Policy, and propose the policy composition rules for each policy. Our mechanism makes it possible to validate the consistency of policies by inference without increasing a developer's workload, even if a composite service has a recursive structure.

Abstract We present a modification of the DeltaBlue constraint solver called DeltaUp. DeltaBlue is an incremental constraint solver based on local propagation, which is widely used for constructing graphical user interfaces and algorithm animations. DeltaUp minimizes the number of time‐consuming tasks of DeltaBlue, namely method selections, in each planning phase. To compute the exact number of needed method selections, we introduced a cost function up‐cost to DeltaBlue. Our benchmarks show that DeltaUp is approximately two times faster than DeltaBlue in the best case. Even in the worst case, it is only slightly slower than DeltaBlue. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We present a new software generator model for the construction of network applications. Our model is called Communicating Timed Attribute Grammars (CTAG) model, which is an extension of attribute grammars. Our CTAG model allows us to describe dynamic behavior of network applications. We represent one application program by an attributed tree. Communication between application programs is achieved by the exchange of attribute values between connected attributed trees. Traditionally network applications are constructed by procedural programming languages, but it is not easy to produce the whole codes of network application programs. Our CTAG model allows us to construct network applications based on a set of simple computing rules instead of using complex knowledge of existing function libraries and class hierarchies. We give examples of constructing a chat system and a POP client system using our CTAG model. We give comparisons of our method with previous approaches.

Presents a timed attribute hypergraph grammar (TAHG) model-based software generator system. A TAHG model consists of a syntax definition, a semantic definition, and object definitions. In the syntax definition, a designer uses a parameterized context-free grammar, called a hypergraph grammar. In the semantic definition, the designer describes the dynamic behavior of target objects using a generalization of attribute grammars. In the object definitions, the designer describes views of objects and interactions with the user. Our TAHG-model based software generator allows us to produce an interactive software system, which can deal with graph-structure based 2D information processing systems such as Petri net editors, logic circuit editors and program chart editors.>

One dominant approach to automate tool invocation in software development environments (SDEs) is to describe software development processes (SDPs) in terms of when and how to invoke tools. However, this causes difficulties in writing and understanding such descriptions. In contrast to this traditional approach (we refer to such descriptions as activity-centered descriptions), it is possible to describe constraints among software objects as specifications of SDPs that express what constraints to maintain. We refer to these descriptions as constraint-centered descriptions. This paper shows that constraint-centered descriptions are easier for designers to write and help users to understand specifications of SDPs, and that imperative constraint grammars are suitable to express constraint-centered specifications of SDPs.>