Vol.2 No.3 February, 2004

In This Issue (pp129-130)
        B  White      
Research Articles and Reviews:      
Dynamic Service Matchmaking in Intelligent Web (pp131-147)
        Y-C Jiang, Z-Z Shi, H-J Zhang and M-K Dong
Intelligent Web functions essentially as an enormously autonomic entity, and it automatically regulates the functions and cooperation of related Web sites and available application services. Agent is the core component of the Intelligent Web. Intelligent Web not only can present the static information, but also can present dynamic services. In this paper, we study the problems of service management in Intelligent Web and analyze the insufficiencies of the service description language CDL, SDL and LARKS. Combining the features of the Intelligent Web, Web Services, and Grid Services, we propose an agent service description language SDLSIN which satisfies ten properties of agent service description. Based on SDLSIN, we mainly study the service matchmaking problem of Intelligent Web, and propose three kinds of service matchmaking algorithms which are adapted to open and dynamic Intelligent Web. At last, the development of SDLSIN and three kinds of service matchmaking algorithms in Multi-AGent Environment MAGE which we developed is introduced.

A Web Services Based Architecture for Digital Time Stamping (pp148-175)
         A. Cilardo, A. Mazzeo, L. Romano, G.P. Saggese and G. Cattaneo
This paper describes the results of a research activity conducted cooperatively by an academic and an industrial party. It presents a practical solution for and an experience in the implementation of time stamping services and their exposition to the Internet. We present the main state-of-the-art algorithms for time stamping applications, thoroughly discuss pros and cons of each technique, and highlight the crucial issues raised by their practical implementation. Then we present an architecture which provides both relative temporal authentication, based on a linear linking scheme, and absolute temporal authentication, based on publishing mechanisms as well as on a trusted time source. In order to guarantee ubiquity and interoperability, the actual implementation of the proposed architecture relies on the emerging Web services technology for exposing time stamping functions to the Internet. Experimental tests have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

A Preprocessing Framework and Approach for Web Applications  (pp176-192)
         Z-G Zhang, J. Chen, and X-M Li 
Aiming to meet the common requirements of several typical web applications, we propose a new preprocessing framework and the corresponding approach. The framework includes three parts: Web page cleaning, replica removal and Web page integration. After the preprocessing stage, Web pages are purified and transformed into a general model called DocView. The model consists of eight elements, identifier, type, content classification code, title, keywords, abstract, topic content, relevant hyperlinks. Most of them are meta data, while the latter two are content data. The approach first partitions a page into several content blocks according to some selected tags in the markup tag tree. Based on a set of heuristics, it identifies the blocks that contain the topic content of the page. Then a quantitative measure (a feature vector) of the blocks with respect to the topic is obtained. From the topic feature vector, the elements of DocView are extracted by corresponding algorithms. The main advantage of our approach is no need for other information beyond the raw page, while additional information is usually necessary for previous related work. The preprocessing framework and approach have been applied to our search engine (Tianwang [15]) and web page classification system. The strong evidence of improvement in applications shows the practicability of the framework and verifies the validity of the approach. It's not difficult to realize that after such a preprocessing stage, we can set up a well-formed, purified, easily manipulated information layer on top of any Web page collection (including WWW) for Web applications.

Requirements Engineering for Web Applications -- A Comparative Study  (pp193-212)
         M.J. Escalona and N. Koch
The requirements engineering discipline has become more and more important in the last years. Tasks such as the requirements elicitation, the specification of requirements or the requirements validation are essential to assure the quality of the resulting software. The development of Web systems usually involves more heterogeneous stakeholders than the construction of traditional software. In addition, Web systems have additional requirements for the navigational and multimedia aspects as well as for the usability as no training is possible. Therefore a thoroughly requirements analysis is even more relevant. In contrast, most of the methodologies that have been proposed for the development of Web applications focus on the design paying less attention to the requirements engineering. This paper is a comparative study of the requirements handling in Web methodologies showing trends in the use of techniques for capturing, specifying and validating Web requirements.

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