Third International World-Wide Web Conference

Workshop A: Web-wide Indexing/Semantic Header or Cover Page


Chair: Bipin C. Desai, Brian Pinkerton
WWW Indexing Workshop Proposal for Participation Nancy B. Lehrer ISX Corporation 4353 Park Terrace Drive Westlake Village, CA 91360 email: nlehrer@isx.com URL: http://isx.com/~nlehrer/ phone: 818-706-2020 VIeW (Virtual Information Web) Project at ISX ISX is currently undertaking several projects aimed at making Web information more accessible. Our main domain focus has been ARPA project information webs, but we will soon be branching out into the education domain to support the sharing of K-12 educational curricula. This work is currently supported by the ARPA Intelligent Information Integration (I3) Initiative.* The project is described in detail at the URL http://isx.com/~nlehrer/I3/view/view.html. You can also see the humble beginnings of a VIeW tool kit from the Intelligent Integration of Information (I3) Initiative home page at http://isx.com/pub/I3. Go to the I3 Project Lists link. The VIeW (Virtual Information Web) Project The purpose of the Virtual Information Web (VIeW) project is to build tools which aid in the dissemination of ARPA project information using the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is primarily a passive environment. When a person or organization has some information to share, they create a web to describe their ideas, products, research, and hope that others take a look and get interested. There is a lot of information out there and there are a lot of people looking for information, yet there are few tools for querying information beyond indexed searches. Additionally, the synthesis of information available on the web is a difficult task due to widely varying presentation styles and information organization. The Virtual Information Web Project attempts to address the some of the issues by abstracting project webs into structured information which can be viewed and queried in multiple ways. Additionally, the VIeW project has experimented with distributed database search over the web. Unfortunately, this approach is currently sidelined due to the large amount of support it requires at each individual site. ARPA sponsored research and technology initiatives will provide the initial domain and requirements for this project. Goals The goal of the VIeW Project is to enable a virtual initiative information web where each ARPA contractor maintains their portion of the web locally in a locally preferred style, yet the information is made available on an aggregate level in a globally consistent style. The general approach is to have ARPA initiative participants develop local information webs including: - Project Overviews and Technical Summaries - Address books, Calendars, Bibliographies - Administrative data The goals of the VIeW project are to enable project information abstraction to support multiple project information views, project queries, and aggregate initiative information. Virtual Information Web Challenges The Virtual Information Web project faces the following challenges for acceptance. Near zero-energy for technologists The VIeW solution must support a near zero-energy approach for the technologists. Perceived Benefit for Technologists The benefit from ARPA point of view is clear. There must also be a perceived benefit for a Technologist to use the VIeW tools. VIeW must illuminate the increased visibility of their project to both their customer and other technologists. Security VIeW must be secure. Sensitive information must be guarded. VIeW tools must not open security holes in the host system. Usability VIeW must be easy to use and must not require learning a large new set of tools. Optimally, VIeW would support using tools the user is currently familiar with. VIeW Approach: The success of the VIeW will depend upon finding the specific project information and project description structure underlying the generally unstructured environment of the Web. To enable structure discovery, the VIeW approach asks that technologists re-visit their webs and add annotations which identify the project information such as project motivation, overview, goal statements, recent accomplishments, and unique technology contributions. A web crawler, the VIeW Maker, will then be responsible for parsing web documents and creating a structured database on the VIeW server. Additionally, the VIeW Maker will index project webs using one of the currently available text indexing schemes to add keyword search capabilities to the webs. *This work funded by the Intelligent Information Integration Initiative of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, SISTO F33615-94-1556. Mr. Dave Gunning ARPA Program Manager.