Automating Web navigation with the WebVCR

Interacting with Computers, 2001

The World Wide Web is increasingly becoming the preferred repository of information. The strength of this information infrastructure is also its weakness. Faced with the chaos of millions of places to go and thousands of places to remember having been, the thousands of new Web users who join every day, need a helping hand. The aim of this paper is, to highlight possible components of technologies supporting web navigation and the maintenance of indexes to web resources. The BASE framework is suggested as a means of understanding the pragmatic technological choices, and six experimental prototypes are presented and discussed. The prototypes support various aspects of bookmark maintenance and information filtering.

2000

ABSTRACT Current commercial web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer attempt to make it easier for users to return to previously visited web pages. They offer three separate but important facilities: the back button, a bookmark system, and a history list. However, research indicates that users are not utilizing all of these systems effectively. In this paper, we present a single integrated history that unifies functionality similar to the back button, bookmarks and history lists.

Computer Networks, 1999

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

In this paper we present a new approach to add intelligence to Internet browsers user interface. Our contribution is based on improving browsers revisitation capabilities by learning a model from user's navigation behaviour, that later is used to predict a set of bookmarks likely to be used next. These set of bookmarks must be a list of moderate size (≤ 10) because our goal is to show them in the browser bookmarks personal toolbar. We think that dealing with this part of the user interface is beneficial for revisitation because it is always visible and on the contrary to history or bookmarks list (tree) the user can access the desired web page by using a single mouse click. In this work we focus on performing the comparison of several (computationally) simple classifiers in order to identify a good candidate to be used as user navigation model. From the experiments carried out we identify that a combination of Naive Bayes with OneR could be a good choice.

Cognitively Informed Intelligent Interfaces: Systems Design and Development E. M., Alkhalifa & K. Gaid (Eds.)

ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing, 2003

Bookmarks are shortcuts that enable quick access of the desired Web content. They have become a standard feature in any browser and recent studies have shown that they can be very useful for non-visual Web access as well. Current bookmarking techniques in assistive Web browsers are rigidly tied to the structure of Web pages. Consequently they are susceptible to even slight changes in the structure of Web pages. In this paper we propose semantic bookmarking for non-visual Web access. With the help of an ontology that represents concepts in a domain, content in Web pages can be semantically associated with bookmarks. As long as these associations can be identified, semantic bookmarks are resilient in the face of structural changes to the Web page. The use of ontologies allows semantic bookmarks to span multiple Web sites covered by a common domain. This contributes to the ease of information retrieval and bookmark maintenance. In this paper we describe highly automated techniques for creating and retrieving semantic bookmarks. These techniques have been incorporated into an assistive Web browser. Preliminary experimental evidence suggests the effectiveness of semantic bookmarks for non-visual Web access.

Proceedings of the …, 2007

PageLinker is a browser extension that contextualises navigation by linking web pages together and allows navigation through a network of related web pages without prior planning. The design is based on extensive interviews with biologists, which highlighted their difficulties finding previously visited web pages. They found current browser tools inadequate, resulting in poorly organised bookmarks and rarely used history lists. In a four-week controlled field experiment, PageLinker significantly reduced time, page loads and mouse clicks. By presenting links in context, PageLinker facilitates web page revisitation, is less prone to bookmark overload and is highly robust to change.

proceedings of RIAO, 2000

Bookmark systems are now recognised as a practical mean that allow users to land mark interesting sites in the huge information space that constitute the World Wide Web. In this paper we argue that, by building collaborative bookmark management tools where a group of people can ...

Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1997

Web browser bookmarking facilities predominate as the method of choice for managing URLs. In this paper, we describe some deficiencies of current bookmarking schemes, and examine an alternative to current approaches. We present WebTagge?, an implemented prototype of a personal bookmarking service that provides both individuals and groups with a customizable means of organizing and accessing Web-based information resources. In addition, the service enables users to supply feedback on the utility of these resources relative to their information needs, and provides dynamically-updated ranking of resources based on incremental user feedback. Individuals may access the service from anywhere on the Internet, and require no special software. This service greatly simplifies the process of sharing URLs within groups, in comparison with manua1 methods involving email. The underlying bookmark organization scheme is more natural and flexible than current hierarchical schemes supported by the major Web browsers, and enables rapid access to stored bookmarks. 0 1997 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans, 2000

Widespread adoption of Web technologies, particularly in professional and educational areas, has motivated new research efforts with the objective of designing new interaction mechanisms based on Web technologies. Within this framework, collaborative Web browsing (cobrowsing) aims at extending currently available Web browsing capabilities in order to allow several users to "browse together" on the Web. Such a browsing paradigm can have many useful applications, for instance, in e-learning, for collaboratively searching and retrieving documents, and for online assistance (helpdesk). A cobrowsing system should provide all the facilities required for allowing users to establish and release, in a very simple and flexible way, browsing synchronization relations as well as interactions with continuous media presentations embedded within Web pages. This paper presents the design, modeling, and implementation of the cobrowsing system called CoLab. CoLab provides all the functionalities required for allowing users to collaboratively browse the Web, and a first experimental version of the tool has been implemented and is fully operational.