non-Web Applications Research Articles

Predicting Representations of Information Needs from Digital Activity Context

Information retrieval systems often consider search-session and immediately preceding web-browsing history as the context for predicting users’ present information needs. However, such context is only available when a user’s information needs originate from web context or when users have issued preceding queries in the search session. Here, we study the effect of more extensive context information recorded from users’ everyday digital activities by monitoring all information interacted with and communicated using personal computers. Twenty individuals were recruited for 14 days of 24/7 continuous monitoring of their digital activities, including screen contents, clicks, and operating system logs on Web and non-Web applications. Using this data, a transformer architecture is applied to model the digital activity context and predict representations of personalized information needs. Subsequently, the representations of information needs are used for query prediction, query auto-completion, selected search result prediction, and Web search re-ranking. The predictions of the models are evaluated against the ground truth data obtained from the activity recordings. The results reveal that the models accurately predict representations of information needs improving over the conventional search session and web-browsing contexts. The results indicate that the present practice for utilizing users’ contextual information is limited and can be significantly extended to achieve improved search interaction support and performance.

Internet Architecture and Disability

The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet, including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach for fully facilitating Internet accessibility. The prevailing doctrinal approach to Internet accessibility seeks to treat websites as metaphorical “places” subject to Title III of the ADA, which requires places of public accommodations to be accessible to people with disabilities. While this place-centric approach to Title III has succeeded to a significant degree in making websites accessible over the last two decades, large swaths of the Internet — more broadly construed to include Internet technologies beyond websites — remain inaccessible to millions of people with a variety of disabilities. As limitations of a place-based approach to Title III become clearer, a new framework for disability law is needed in an increasingly intermediated Internet. Leveraging the Internet law literature on perspectives, this article recognizes the place-centric approach to Title III as normatively and doctrinally “internal,” in the terminology of internet law scholars It offers a framework for supplementing this internal approach with an external approach that contemplates the layered architecture of the Internet, including its constituent content, Web and non-Web applications, access networks operated by Internet service providers, and devices and the role of disability and other bodies of law, particularly including telecommunications law and attendant policy issues, such as net neutrality, in making them accessible.

A Uniform and Coherent Mashup Technique Based on the OSGi Framework

A mashup is a web page or application that combines data from two or more sources so as to create new services or enhance original services. Mashup technique is usually implemented in web-based applications at web browser via drag-and-drop actions. These web-based applications usually require extra programming efforts when integrating with a non-web application, and they usually cannot drop out the APIs style programming. The developers require indicating specific data source for their new mashup applications, and usually the functions of these applications are limited due to developers’ design in developing time. This kind of programming style is difficult to mashup more data sources coherently, and it is high coupling, resource limited, and difficult to be extended. To solve these issues, this paper proposes a uniform and coherent mashup technique based on the OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative) framework. OSGi is a module system and service platform that implements a complete and dynamic component model. By using the OSGi’s dynamic and flexible features, applications could be easily to deploy, remove, discovery, and combine with each other. The key features of proposed mashup technique include the definition of uniform identity terms and invoking chains. The uniform identity term is used to match each application service. Developers can leverage non-web mashup applications by declaring the simple definition of uniform identity term without providing and using any APIs. The invoking chains could link and combine relative application services or data with unlimited length and irregular mixing. After that, the system could build up invoking chains to perform mashup technique automatically. Therefore, developers could mashup certain application functions or data to unknown applications in runtime phase. Finally, we present two different use cases to evaluate the capabilities of the proposed technique.

Designing user interfaces for “ordinary users in extraordinary circumstances”: a keyboard-only web-based application for use in airports

Universal Access is commonly interpreted as focusing on designing for users with atypical requirements--specifically users with disabilities or older adults. However, Universal Access is also about providing access to users in all situations and circumstances, including those that place extraordinary or unusual demands on the users who might otherwise not need assistance. This paper examines the design of a user interface (UI) for use in an airport environment and explains how the lessons learned from research into designing for users with disabilities, in particular, have been applied in this new context. The paper further describes a series of experiments that were performed to demonstrate the usability of the new interface and also compares the efficiency and effectiveness of three different input strategies developed for the new UI. The most efficient method of input was a strategy of combined keyboard shortcuts offering access to the full functionality of the UI. The case study also highlights that new Web 2.0 technologies support the implementation of accessibility solutions more typically only associated with non-Web applications. Further, it demonstrates that relying on only the TAB key for supporting keyboard-only access is comparatively inefficient, and that Web developers should be actively encouraged to use all of the available functionality from Web 2.0 technologies to produce more flexible and efficient keyboard-only support.

Build Your Next Web Application with Erlang

The Erlang programming language, together with its Open Telecom Platform (OTP) framework, is renowned for its exceptional concurrency and fault-tolerance capabilities. Developers are often initially attracted to Erlang just so they can try out these features, and experienced Erlang server application developers make heavy use of these and other Erlang traits. Successful Erlang server applications often must be Web-accessible, even if not initially designed that way, which means developers must integrate such services into the world of HTTP. Fortunately, building a Web application in Erlang isn't necessarily difficult; it mostly requires a change in thinking. For a small investment in learning, your Web application can take advantage of all the exceptional features Erlang provides to non-Web applications: scalability, fault tolerance, concurrency, relatively painless distributed system capabilities, and live system upgrades. The growing interest in applying Erlang/OTP to Web services and Web applications is driving the development of several interesting open source projects. In this column, we'll look at some of the more popular Erlang Web frameworks and Web servers.

A Case Study - Selecting a Code Review Approach

This case study from company ABC will analyze and identify an approach to develop and maintain secure systems and applications, including selecting suitable static-analysis code scanning tools for application development. ABC is planning an enterprise data protection approach and protects data across the information life cycle. ABC acknowledges that secure development will take a long time to implement, partly based on expensive and time-consuming manual code reviews. ABC is selecting a solution including code reviews and scanning of internal code non-web applications. ABC also identified a long term project that will include penetration testing and scanning and review of the web application code base. This article is based on a project case study in protecting an enterprise application that are not web related. Extending the code reviews into the non-web applications, we also briefly discuss other types of protections. An effective code-scanning tool would definitely be useful in ABC development. Being a security oriented organization, it's very important to minimize the number of bugs. The use of code scanning tools is also mandated by Microsoft's SDL. No matter what tool used, this should be accompanied with code reviews, appropriate testing including such as fuzzy testing, code standards that are followed, and proper education. No matter what tool configuration selected, manual code reviews, education, coding standards and proper testing must also be applied.

Enterprise Application Security - How to Balance the Use of Code Reviews and Web Application Firewalls for PCI Compliance

Organizations handling credit cards feel pressure building as the deadline for PCI Requirement 6.6 compliance [1] has passed and well documented breaches have heightened the public and regulatory agencies' concerns about how well companies are securing consumer-specific information. Despite some initial advances, sensitive information is still frequently stolen. Internal threat an issue, magnified by extended partnerships which ultimately lead to more tasks will be performed outside company facilities. In increasingly complex technical and business environments, no one security approach can deal with all the new and innovative intrusions. But the lack of a security silver bullet doesn't mean data security is impossible. It simply means that businesses have to take a multi-pronged approach to data security. This article is based on a project case study in protecting an enterprise application environment, including web-oriented applications. The article is PCI 6.6-oriented and compares the use of Web Application Firewalls (WAF) or code reviews for web-facing applications. It also addresses code scanning that is not web related. Extending the code reviews into the non-web applications, we also briefly discuss other types of protections. Other articles already discussed how to protect from SQL Injection into the database, or internal threats, including a DBA that impersonates a user. The section Protecting the Data Flow includes a few pointers to resources discussing protection of the enterprise data flow. The code review section is longer since this is an evolving area from a PCI perspective focusing on WAF and complementary code scanning. This article will compare WAF and web-based code reviews, and point to resources [15] discussing the whole data flow, which then involves much more than C/C code scanning. The part concerning code analysis isn't web-oriented, but it's about C/C /Java source code scanning, though it has some general parts. The case study from company ABC recommended using both WAF and coding reviews.