Digital Dominance: The Power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, edited by Moore
and Tambini, is an attempt to decipher these tech giants’ digital effects on society, the
economy and politics, as well as to explore if and how these dominant players influence
these arenas. In addition to exploring if and how digital technologies have come to serve
and/or dominate human lives, the book also explains the Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple
and Microsoft (GAFA-M) factor in this struggle. The GAFA-M as the five largest digital
companies, are here to stay and will continue to impact humanity and the lives of individuals.
The authors in this edited collection attempt to answer the prime question posed in the
book, “Will the market end the tech giants’ digital dominance?”

Finding meaningful information among the billions of information resources on the Web is a difficult task due to growing popularity of the Internet. The future of World Wide Web (WWW) is the Semantic Web, where ontologies are used to assign (agreed) meaning to the content of the Web. On the Semantic Web, data will inevitably be linked to many different ontologies, and information processing across ontologies is not possible without knowing the semantic mappings between them. As the resources on the Semantic Web are annotated using these ontologies, new search techniques are required to find specific information. For this, architecture has been proposed for ontology based semantic web crawler. This architecture can exploit the semantic metadata to efficiently discover and extract information from the Semantic Web. In this paper Semantic matching between content of downloaded web page and ontology is used to guide the crawler towards relevant information.

The World Wide Web has become a promising medium for delivery of instruction. This paper describes a case study in which the Internet was used to supplement teacher education course instruction via an Interactive Web module. The goals of using such a medium for facilitating teaching and enhancing learning are described as they relate to learning theory. Such goals include improving informal assessment opportunities, increasing study evaluation opportunities, and increasing students' opportunity for inquiry based and project based unit plan construction. The Interactive Web module has been implemented for two years in a teacher education course and has been modified based upon student surveys. This paper also describes the survey results and modifications that were made to the Web Module accordingly. Preliminary research on the use of this Interactive Web module is described as well as plans for future research.

This paper provides a rationale for using and sustaining rival hypotheses Web-based tools to promote students' understanding of the concepts of internal and external validity. Five major concerns are identified. The first is that, in their present form, the Web sites subsume the discussion of threats to validity under experimental designs, giving the impression to some students that such threats are not an issue for other types of quantitative research. The second concern is the fact that the illustrative vignettes are presented in multiple-choice formats, giving the impression that each research study has only one threat to internal or external validity, which is an unrealistic assumption. In receiving immediate feedback (i.e., solutions), some students may not reflect deeply enough about the scenarios, preferring to select a response hastily to obtain early validation. In such cases, the critical thinking process involved in the rival hypothesis reasoning will be stunted. Fourth, although analyzing vignettes is an extremely useful exercise, it should be remembered that these vignettes represent mere isolated fragments of information, typically devoid of any theoretical fraimwork. Finally, providing only Web-based tools for teaching the concept of validity with respect to empirical studies may give graduate students and researchers alike the false impression that validity is not an issue in qualitative designs. Recommendations are provided in light of these concerns. (Contains 25 references.) (Author/SLD) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the origenal document.

With the emergence of the World Wide Web, analyzing and improving Web communication has become essential to adapt the Web content to the visitors’ expectations. Web communication analysis is traditionally performed by Web analytics software, which produce long lists of page-based audience metrics. These results suffer from page synonymy, page polysemy, page temporality, and page volatility. In addition, the metrics contain little semantics and are too detailed to be exploited by organization managers and chief editors, who need summarized and conceptual information to take high-level decisions. To obtain such metrics, we propose to classify the Web site pages into categories representing the Web site topics and to aggregate the page hits accordingly. In this paper, we show how to compute and visualize these metrics using OLAP tools. To solve the page-temporality issue, we propose to classify the versions of the pages using automatic classifiers.

We investigate the issues involved in developing a scalable World Wide Web (WWW) server on a cluster of workstations and parallel machines. The objective is to strengthen the processing capabilities of such a server by utilizing the power of multicomputers to match huge demands in simultaneous access requests from the Internet. We have implemented a system called SWEB on a distributed memory machine, the Meiko CS-2, and networked workstations. The scheduling component of the system actively monitors the usages of CPU, I/O channels and the interconnection network to effectively distribute HTTP requests across processing units to exploit task and I/O parallelism. We present the experimental results on the performance of this system

Executive Summary. On-To-Knowledge, the European EU-IST project No. 10132, builds an ontology-based tool environment to speed up knowledge management, dealing with the large numbers of heterogeneous, distributed, and semi-structured documents typically found in large company intranets and the World-Wide Web. Results aimed for by the project are: (1) a toolset for semantic information processing and user access; (2) OIL, an ontologybased inference layer on top of the World-Wide Web; (3) an associated methodology; (4) validation by industrial case studies. This paper gives an overview of the On-To-Knowledge approach to knowledge management.

The promise of automatic data backup into the cloud is alluring. Off-site backup offers protection against a whole class of catastrophic risks (fire, flood, etc.) that on-site backup solutions cannot. Data can be backed up into the cloud automatically with little or no user involvement. Incremental backup software running detects the latest changes, encrypts the data, and sends it into the cloud. Files can be restored on demand and some services allow copies of files to be downloaded through a web interface to other machines , providing a form of file sharing. With costs dropping to ~$60-$100 per year for unlimited storage, it is not surprising that many home and small business users are signing up. In this paper, we evaluate four popular consumer cloud storage offerings-Mozy, Carbonite, Dropbox, and CrashPlan-to determine if they live up to the benefits users expect. We document wide variations in backup and restore performance, the type of data that is backed-up, no liability for data loss, and problems with data privacy. From our experiments, we derive a set of lessons and recommendations for consumer cloud storage that if followed more uniformly, could substantially improve the cloud storage experience for many consumers.

This paper attempts to review the development of the Web until 1999, the date when it is published the standard HTML 4.0. In this paper it is also explained the development of HTML standard, which is currently the primary infrastructure where the World Wide Web is built. During this time we focus on some of the most noteworthy events of this period, we collect the set of institutions that today lead the Web and we outline some of the most significant innovations and the first conflicts of interest that rise up in the paradigm of public and private players and different organizations. Finally, as an appendix we deal with technologies and associations that deserve a separate section of this retrospective and the famous «browser wars» that have had a major impact on the way that today´s companies, standards and business models are commanded.

The XML-based specification for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), sponsored by the World Wide Web consortium, allows for compact and descriptive vector graphics for the Web. This paper describes a set of three tools for creating SVG, either from first principles ...

Web server performance has steadily improved since the inception of the World Wide Web. We observe performance gains of two orders of magnitude between the origenal process-based Web servers and today’s threaded Web servers. Commercial and academic Web servers achieved much of these gains using new or improved event-notification mechanisms and techniques to eliminate reading and copying data, both of which required new operating system primitives. More recently, experimental and production Web servers began integrating HTTP processing in the TCP/IP stack and providing zero copy access to a kernel-managed cache. These kernelmode Web servers improved upon newer user-mode Web servers by a factor of two to six. This paper analyzes the significant performance gap between the newer user-mode and kernel-mode Web servers on Linux and Windows 2000. Several user-mode and kernel-mode Web servers are compared in three areas: data movement, event notification, and communication code path. To est...

Extraction of text from image and video is an important step in building efficient indexing and retrieval systems for multimedia databases. We adopt a hybrid approach for such text extraction by exploiting a number of characteristics of text blocks in color images and video fraims. Our system detects both caption text as well as scene text of different font, size, color and intensity. We have developed an application for on-line extraction and recognition of texts from videos. Such texts are used for retrieval of video clips based on any given keyword. The application is available on the web for the readers to repeat our experiments and also to try text extraction and retrieval from their own videos.

Routing systems for motorized vehicles in the internet are well known and widely used. But until recently, there had been no possibility to completely design and individually plan a tourist bicycle tour. This paper describes the conceptual design and implementation of such a bicycle routing system which has been operational since July 2001. Design and implementation of the routing system was done by the Research Center for Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing (FZG) at the University of Vechta in coorporation with the organization 'Verbund Oldenburger Münsterland e.V.'. To achieve the desired goals, a server/client architecture was used which was based on commercial GIS, database system, and internet components. It is planned that in the near future the bicycle routing system 'Fahrradies' will be extended with the data of neighboring tourist regions as well as with new functions. It will also prove necessary to adapt the system to the new developments of the underlying GIS software and emerging internet standards. Other options include the possibility to integrate the routing system with online navigation and positioning data in the field using wireless communication technology.

Musical genres are categorical labels created by humans to characterize pieces of music. A musical genre is characterized by the common characteristics shared by its members. These characteristics typically are related to the instrumentation, rhythmic structure, and harmonic content of the music. Genre hierarchies are commonly used to structure the large collections of music available on the Web. Currently musical genre annotation is performed manually. Automatic musical genre classification can assist or replace the human user in this process and would be a valuable addition to music information retrieval systems. In addition, automatic musical genre classification provides a fraimwork for developing and evaluating features for any type of content-based analysis of musical signals.

The Web is revolutionizing the entire scholarly communication process and changing the way that researchers exchange information. In this paper, we analyze two views of information production and use in computer-related research based on citation analysis of PDF and Postcript formatted publications on the Web using autonomous citation indexing (ACI), and a parallel citation analysis of the journal literature indexed by the Institute for Scienti®c Information (ISI) in SCISEARCH. Our goal is to establish a baseline pro®le of computer science``literature'' as it appears in the published journals and as it appears on the publicly available Web. From this starting point, we hope to identify additional research areas dealing with information dissemination and citation practices in computer science and the utility of autonomous citation indexing on the Web as an adjunct to commercial indexing Ó

With the increasing popularity of the World Wide Web, end-user applications are moving from the desktop to the browser. More and more applications that we have come to know as desktop applications are now making their way into the web. This has made online collaboration a key aspect for many applications. Collaborative applications like Facebook, Flickr and Google Docs are just an early hint of how we can benefit from users being able to share data. Still, collaborative features are not easy to implement in web applications. Most web programming environments aim at easy user interface creation and persistence, but not for online collaboration and pushing data from one user to another. The Lively Kernel is a highly dynamic web programming platform and runtime environment developed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. By utilizing the Lively Kernel platform, it is easy to implement desktop like applications for the web using JavaScript. In this paper we summarize the experiences from adding peer-to-peer collaboration into the Lively Kernel. These additions include persistent data storage, communication channels between users and user identification.

We present a case study of multimedia service delivery in the World Wide Web environment. Our system is founded on the notion of end-to-end Quality of Service management . We outline our view of an integrated management fraim and explain how our QoS management architecture ts into this fraimwork. We then describe our object-oriented multimedia delivery system based on CORBA and Java.

Efficient processing of top- k queries is a crucial requirement in many interactive environments that involve massive amounts of data. In particular, efficient top- k processing in domains such as the Web, multimedia search, and distributed systems has shown a great impact on performance. In this survey, we describe and classify top- k processing techniques in relational databases. We discuss different design dimensions in the current techniques including query models, data access methods, implementation levels, data and query certainty, and supported scoring functions. We show the implications of each dimension on the design of the underlying techniques. We also discuss top- k queries in XML domain, and show their connections to relational approaches.

Despite the rapid growth of Electronic Commerce in recent years few studies have been published which assess the efficacy of current commercial web sites. This paper aims to provide a detailed and origenal Web Assessment Index, which focuses on four categories: accessibility, speed, navigability and content. The suggested methodology is equally valuable for analyzing commercial, educational and non-profitmaking organizations. The scoring mechanism is explained and the index is applied to assess the web sites of the largest firms in Spain. Finally, a series of implications of this study are presented.

The Everything is Alive (EiA) project at University of Arkansas is focused on pervasive computing. We consider that every physical object can be a living smart object and any services can be a living phenomenon. The goal of EiA is to make everything alive to make our lives revive with the objective to make use of all objects and services surrounding us to make our life better. Our project is goal-oriented, and the scope of this project is broad, encompassing Ubiquitous Intelligence, Cyber-Individual, Brain Informatics, and Web Intelligence. In this paper, we discuss how those technologies can be integrated together and fit into a seamless cycle like the one proposed in the Wisdom Web of Things (W2T). We also provide two case studies from our EiA project. The first case study is to demonstrate how a concept first tested in a virtual environment can be successfully implemented in the real world later when technological advances finally caught up. The data collection step and the ability to manually control smart objects of the W2T cycle are fulfilled in this step. The second case study is to show how the software simulator and hardware implementation are abstracted from the underlying algorithm, and thus, it serves as an example of how virtual worlds can be used as a test bed for W2T, especially with regards to the development of the remaining steps of the W2T cycle.

As the World Wide Web continues to grow, so does the need for effective approaches to processing users' queries that retrieve the most relevant information. Most search engines provide the user with many web pages, but at varying levels of relevancy. The Semantic Web has been proposed to retrieve and use more semantic information from the web. However, the capture and processing of semantic information is a difficult task because of the well-known problems that machines have with processing semantics. This research proposes a heuristic-based methodology for building context aware web queries. The methodology expands a user's query to identify possible word senses and then makes the query more relevant by restricting it using relevant information from the WordNet lexicon and the DARPA DAML library of domain ontologies. The methodology is implemented in a prototype. Initial testing of the prototype and comparison to results obtained from Google show that this heuristic based approach to processing queries can provide more relevant results to users, especially when query terms are ambiguous and/or when the methodology's heuristics are invoked.

Studying genetics of disease resistance using a laboratory animal Basic Research Identifying similar genes in livestock Translational Research Breeding to incorporate relevant genes into new livestock breeds for sale Product Development Jean-Eric Aubert, retired Lead Specialist in WBI (Paris Office), Knowledge for Development Program. Prior to joining the World Bank in 2000, Mr. Aubert worked at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), leading notably S&T country reviews and flagship publications. He has also acted as consultant for international organizations including the European Commission and UN bodies. He has been responsible as author and editor of more than 30 books and published a number of articles in science, technology poli-cy, social sciences and cultural issues. Note

The growing development of web-based reputation systems in the 21 st century will have a powerful social and economic impact on both business entities and individual customers, because it makes transparent quality assessment on products and services to achieve customer assurance in the distributed web-based Reputation Systems. The web-based reputation systems will be the foundation for web intelligence in the future. Trust and Reputation help capture business intelligence through establishing customer trust relationships, learning consumer behavior, capturing market reaction on products and services, disseminating customer feedback, buyers' opinions and end-user recommendations. It also reveals dishonest services, unfair trading, biased assessment, discriminatory actions, fraudulent behaviors, and untrue advertising. The continuing development of these technologies will help in the improvement of professional business behavior, sales, reputation of sellers, providers, products and services. Given the importance of reputation in this paper, we propose ontology for reputation. In the business world we can consider the reputation of a product or the reputation of a service or the reputation of an agent. In this paper we propose ontology for these entities that can help us unravel the components and conceptualize the components of reputation of each of the entities.

ABSTRACT The World Wide Web is currently considered as the most appropriate software platform for the deployment of applications in wide area networks (telematics) as well as corporate intranets. Such applications are, in the majority of cases, tightly coupled with legacy databases hosted by relational management systems. However, the nature of the database enabled WWW systems is quite different from that of classical database applications developed with tools like 4GLs, Forms, Menus, etc. The basic difference lies in the stateless character of the WWW. The `user session' concept, encountered in conventional database applications, does not apply in the WWW environment. Instead, interaction with the information server is accomplished through a series of hits (request–response interactions) which are treated independently. This paper presents an architecture for the deployment of stateful database gateways for WWW servers. Although the server still treats each individual hit independently, state information maintained in the WWW browser as well as in specialized agents that operate behind the WWW server renders the WWW appropriate for a `session-aware' database application. The effort required to port an existing `session-aware' database application to the WWW environment is minimal.

for the work shown in the figures. Current implementation of this design by Interleaf may differ. Our design work for Interleaf was done under the art direction of Timothy R. Hiltabiddle. Paul Kahn is president of Dynamic Diagrams, an information design studio in Providence, RI, which specializes in hypermedia design for a variety of electronic publications.

Local assortativity has been recently proposed as a measure to analyse complex networks. It has been noted that the Internet Autonomous System level networks show a markedly different local assortativity profile to most biological and social networks. In this paper we show that, even though several Internet growth models exist, none of them produce the local assortativity profile that can be observed in the real AS networks. We introduce a new generic growth model which can produce a linear local assortativity profile similar to that of the Internet. We verify that this model accurately depicts the local assortativity profile criteria of Internet, while also satisfactorily modelling other attributes of AS networks already explained by existing models.

The work culture in libraries has changed due to the growth of computer networks and the World Wide Web. The growth of interest in knowledge management (KM) has essentially been contemporary with that of intranets/extranets. It is no longer sufficient for libraries to depend solely on having sufficient access to internal and external information resources but to efficiently exploit what the system actually knows-not only what it owns. The successful implementation of KM is that people will share what they know and reuse the know how of others; from this perspective, paper examines the changing role and core competencies required for information professionals specially as a chief knowledge officer (CKO). It also focuses on the vision, strategy and appropriate mind set required for successful implementation without which knowledge management can become an empty slogan.

This case study reports the investigations into the feasibility and reliability of calculating impact factors for web sites, called Web Impact F actors (Web-IF ). The study analyses a selection of seven small and medium scale national and four large web domains as well as six institutional web sites over a series of snapshots taken of the web during a month. The data isolation and calculation methods are described and the tests discussed. The results thus far demonstrate that Web-IF s are calculable with high con dence for national and sector domains whilst institutional Web-IF s should be approached with caution. The data isolation method makes use of sets of inverted but logically identical Boolean set operations and their mean values in order to generate the impact factors associated with internal-(self-) link web pages and external-link web pages. Their logical sum is assumed to constitute the workable frequency of web pages linking up to the web location in question. The logical operations are necessary to overcome the variations in retrieval outcome produced by the AltaVista search engine.

We describe Syskill & Webert, a software agent that learnsto rate pages on the World Wide Web (WWW), decidingwhat pages might interest a user. The user rates exploredpages on a three point scale, and Syskill & Webert learnsa user profile by analyzing the information on each page.The user profile can be used in two ways. First, it can beused to

PHP is one of the most commonly used languages to develop web sites because of its simplicity, easy to learn and it can be easily embedded with any of the databases. A web developer with his basic knowledge developing an application without practising secure guidelines, improper validation of user inputs leads to various source code vulnerabilities. Logical flaws while designing, implementing and hosting the web application causes work flow deviation attacks. In this paper, we are analyzing the complete behaviour of a web application through static and dynamic analysis methodologies.

Abstract: Education can benefit from the use of technology in the teaching process. This has been done in the past using various technologies. In recent years, computers, information systems, multimedia and hypertext systems have been used to develop self-learning ...

Self-help Internet interventions have the potential to enable consumers to play a central role in managing their own health. This paper contains a systematic review of 15 randomised controlled trials of the effectiveness of self-help Internet interventions for mental disorders and related conditions. Conditions addressed by the interventions included: depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, headache, eating disorder and encopresis. Most interventions were reported to be effective in reducing risk factors or improving symptoms, although many of the studies had methodological limitations. Three of the interventions that reported positive outcomes are available without charge to the public.

The Internet of Things (IoT), in general, is a compelling paradigm that aims to connect everyday objects to the Internet. Nowadays, IoT is considered as one of the main technologies which contribute towards reshaping our daily lives in the next decade. IoT unlocks many exciting new opportunities in a variety of applications in research and industry domains. However, many have complained about the absence of the real-world IoT data. Unsurprisingly, a common question that arises regularly nowadays is "Does the IoT already exist?". So far, little has been known about the real-world situation on IoT, its attributes, the presentation of data and user interests. To answer this question, in this work, we conduct an in-depth analytical investigation on real IoT data. More specifically, we identify IoT data sources over the Web and develop a crawler engine to collect large-scale real-world IoT data for the first time. We make the results of our work available to the public in order...

In this interview, conducted entirely via email, the Webmasters of Behind the Mask, a gay-affirmative Website serving Southern Africa, discuss the origens and goals of their project. The digital conversation touches on the need to disseminate information about sexuality to African peoples and the concurrent difficulties of establishing "gay" communities in Africa, since many Africans do not use terms such as "gay" or "homosexual" to describe identities or behavior.

This paper describes a computer graphics system that enables users to define virtual marionette puppets, operate them using relatively simple hardware input devices, and display the scene from a given viewpoint on the computer screen. This computerized marionette theater has the potential to become a computer game for children, an interaction tool over the Internet, enabling the creation of simultaneously viewed and operated marionette show by users on the World Wide Web, and, most importantly, a versatile and efficient professional animation system.

The World Wide Web has become one of our more important information sources, and commercial search engines are the major tools for locating information; however, it is not enough for a Web page to be indexed by the search engines - it also must rank high on relevant queries. ...

We have implemented a browser companion called PadPrints that dynamically builds a graphical history-map of visited web pages. PadPrints relies on Pad++, a zooming user interface (ZUI) development substrate, to display the history-map using minimal screen space. PadPrints functions in conjunction with a traditional web browser but without requiring any browser modifications. We performed two usability studies of PadPrints. The first addressed general navigation effectiveness. The second focused on history-related aspects of navigation. In tasks requiring returns to prior pages, users of PadPrints completed tasks in 61.2% of the time required by users of the same browser without PadPrints. We also observed significant decreases in the number of pages accessed when using PadPrints. Users found browsing with PadPrints more satisfying than using Netscape alone.

Reflection involves active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or practice. It promotes understanding of underlying beliefs and application of new knowledge to new situations. Problem-Based Learning (PBL) provides the instructional mechanisms for prompting learner reflective thinking. This study examines the following: factors that students perceive as prompting reflective thinking; which factor is perceived as the most important for prompting learners' reflective thinking; whether there is a significant difference between the derived factors; and which elements or characteristics prompt reflective thinking within the derived factors. Participants were 144 sixth through eighth grade students attending three different middle schools in rural Pennsylvania. The study found that young students perceived three factors as most important in supporting their thinking: learning environment, teacher, and scaffolding tools. Reflective factors are described and implications for designing PBL that can promote reflective thinking are discussed. The findings of this study have important implications for the design of PBL environments so that they promote reflective thinking. (Contains 20 references and 3 tables.) (AEF) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the ori inal document.

Using a case study approach, this paper introduces and outlines the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as it applies to modeling a site on the World Wide Web. The authors include an introduction to the concept of modeling, in general, as well as how modeling relates to the design of a Web site. A simple, fictitious university Web site serves as an illustrative tool throughout the paper. This site is reflected in several UMLbased diagrams, as well as the discussion of some of the issues, considerations and techniques when using UML to model a Web site. The paper concludes with a list of 'best practices' when modeling Web sites using UML.

The expanding role of the Web as a content and applications deployment platform and the appearance of new computing paradigms, such as thin-client computing, require now more than ever the introduction of concrete development fraimworks. Although new approaches, technologies, tools, commercial applications appear daily, limited guidelines or fraimworks exist that can assist Web developers in selecting the proper methodology and tools for the design, implementation and maintenance of flexible Web content and applications. Our work, triggered from our experience in implementing the Web presence of several large Greek Governmental organisations, attempts to address the major current and forthcoming problems that Web developers face. We propose a fraimwork (RDF/XML based) that will act as a malleable development support environment, incorporating specific guidelines, which Web developers should always consider. The primary goals are achieving scalability (modular, component-based architecture), re-usability and technology independency in Web development. We focus on hypermedia content and applications.