Search

Research organisations and individual researchers increasingly choose to share their research findings by providing lists of their published works on the World Wide Web. To facilitate the exchange of ideas, the lists often include links to published papers in portable document format (PDF) or Postscript (PS) format. Generally, these publication Web sites are updated regularly to include new works. While manual monitoring of relevant Web sites is tedious, commercial search engines and information monitoring systems are ineffective in finding and tracking scholarly publications. Analyses the characteristics of publication index pages and describes effective automatic extraction techniques that the authors have developed. The authors' techniques combine lexical and syntactic analyses with heuristics. The proposed techniques have been implemented and tested for more than 14,000 Web pages and achieved consistently high success rates of around 90 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamic nature of information content on the Web has posed a serious problem to users who need constantly to keep track of the latest updates on specific information. Traditional search engines enable users to retrieve potentially relevant Web information, but they do not track and monitor Web pages based on users' interests. On the other hand, Web information monitoring systems are designed specifically to help users track and monitor Web information. However, to make Web monitoring effective, it is necessary to identify and understand typical Web page update characteristics so that useful monitoring features and functions can be designed and built into these systems. In this study, a total of 105 Web pages from the Internet were collected and monitored over a one-month period. These pages are selected from seven domains under Yahoo!'s directories. The analysis results are presented according to Web site domains, Web page types, Web page attributes and change frequency. Based on this study, different functions and features for a Web monitoring system are identified. These features have been incorporated into a Web monitoring system, WebMon, that has been developed at the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]