Alleviating information overload caused by volumes of numerical web data: the concept and development process

Abstract

The really simple syndication (RSS), a popular information dissemination mechanism, to some extent, eases the overloaded users on the Web. However, because of the limitation in its original design, currently available RSS applications cannot salvage overloaded information consumers from volumes of numerical Web data. The present work aims to change the working pattern of users who rely on processing numerical Web data to accomplish their tasks and correspondingly to improve their productivity. An extended schema was developed for formally representing numerical data items in RSS documents, and thus data providers can distribute numerical data and textual messages to subscribers. A client-side productive tool was designed to support retrieval and manipulation of numerical data from RSS feeds, its prototype was developed to realise the proposed idea and demonstrate its usefulness. Based on the observation of actual usage, the foreseeable effect of this kind of applications is reducing users’ time spent on surfing, collecting, calculating and tracking numerical data on the Web. To make the present work more versatile and serve diverse users, it is rational to augment the prototyped tool as a general-purpose computing platform.