End-users are accustomed to filtering and browsing styled collections of data on professional web sites, but they have few ways to create and publish such information architectures for themselves. This paper presents a full-lifecycle analysis of the Exhibit framework - an end-user tool which provides such functionality - to understand the needs, capabilities, and practices of this class of users. We include interviews, as well as analysis of over 1,800 visualizations and 200,000 web interactions with these visualizations. Our analysis reveals important findings about this user population which generalize to the task of providing better end-user structured content publication tools.

Creating and publishing read-write-compute web applications requires programming skills beyond what most end users possess. But many end users know how to make spreadsheets that act as simple information management applications, some even with computation. We present a system for creating basic web applications using such spreadsheets in place of a server and using HTML to describe the client UI. Authors connect the two by placing spreadsheet references inside HTML attributes. Data computation is provided by spreadsheet formulas. The result is a reactive read-write-compute web page without a single line of Javascript code. Nearly all of the fifteen HTML novices we studied were able to connect HTML to spreadsheets using our method with minimal instruction. We draw conclusions from their experience and discuss future extensions to this programming model.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) took a valuable step towards separating web content from presentation. But HTML pages still contain large amounts of "design scaffolding" needed to hierarchically layer content for proper presentation. This paper presents Cascading Tree Sheets (CTS), a CSS-like language for separating this presentational HTML from real content. With CTS, authors can use standard CSS selectors to describe how to graft presentational scaffolding onto their pure-content HTML. This improved separation of content from presentation enables even naive authors to incorporate rich layouts (including interactive Javascript) into their own pages simply by linking to a tree sheet and adding some class names to their HTML.

We describe a system for the refinement of spoken search queries. Given an initial query (Northern Italian restaurants in New York), instead of requiring a fully-specified followup query (Korean restaurants in New York), a more natural, abbreviated update query (Korean instead) may be spoken. The system consists of a parsing step to identify the type and arguments of the refinement, a candidate generation step to enumerate the possible refinements, and a model classification step to select the best refinement. We present results on test query refinements given both to this system and to human judges that show the automated system outperforms the human judges on that data set. Index terms: spoken dialog systems, voice search, query refinement 1.

The web has dramatically enhanced people's ability to communicate ideas, knowledge, and opinions. But the authoring tools that most people understand, blogs and wikis, primarily guide users toward authoring text. In this work, we show that substantial gains in expressivity and communication would accrue if people could easily share richly structured information in meaningful visualizations. We then describe several extensions we have created for blogs and wikis that enable users to publish, share, and aggregate such structured information using the same workflows they apply to text. In particular, we aim to preserve those attributes that make blogs and wikis so effective: one-click access to the information, one-click publishing of content, natural authoring interfaces, and the ability to easily copy-and-paste information and visualizations from other sources.

We introduce a client-server toolkit called Sync Kit that demonstrates how client-side database storage can improve the performance of data intensive websites. Sync Kit is designed to make use of the embedded relational database defined in the upcoming HTML5 standard to offload some data storage and processing from a web server onto the web browsers to which it serves content. Our toolkit provides various strategies for synchronizing relational database tables between the browser and the web server, along with a client-side template library so that portions web applications may be executed client-side. Unlike prior work in this area, Sync Kit persists both templates and data in the browser across web sessions, increasing the number of concurrent connections a server can handle by up to a factor of four versus that of a traditional server-only web stack and a factor of three versus a recent template caching approach.

Grid computing involves networks of heterogeneous resources working in collaboration to solve problems that cannot be addressed by the resources of any one organization. A pervasive problem for grid users is how best to discover the resources they need given dynamic grid environments. UDDI, the universal description, discovery and integration framework, is an OASIS standard for publishing and querying discovery information for Web services, which to date, has received surprisingly little analysis as a discovery mechanism for Web service-based grids, e.g. those based on the open grid services architecture (OGSA). This work identifies issues that must be addressed in order to make UDDI meet the requirements of OGSA discovery. We examine the performance implications of these issues using a freely available implementation of UDDI version 2. Based on our experimental results, we conclude that UDDI can be used for OGSA discovery, but the cost may be prohibitive for large grids.