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The SGF metadata framework and its support for social awareness on the World Wide Web

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Abstract

The widespread use of metadata is transforming the WWW into an information space that can be accessed not only by humans, but also by software agents. In this article, one application for metadata is more closely examined: the description of Web sites structures in a machine understandable way. The Structured Graph Format (SGF) is introduced as an XML‐based format supporting the description of Web spaces as structured graphs. The SGF framework, built around this format specification, is then described. This integrated and extensible set of software components supports the generation, the distribution and the processing of SGF metadata. Three approaches to the problem of generating SGF metadata are compared and highlight a tradeoff between quality and cost. SGF consumers are then presented as components that process the metadata for some purpose. An SGF consumer that uses the metadata to dynamically generate interactive site maps is presented. The discussion then argues for the need to increase social awareness on the WWW. In other words, it raises the issue of monitoring the activity occurring within Web sites. The notion of awareness is first introduced and situated in the context of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Different ways to apply awareness to the WWW are then reviewed. Finally, the SGF framework is described as a valuable foundation for building awareness systems on the Web, with two main advantages. First, because SGF metadata supports the definition of regions within a Web site, at different granularities, it ensures the scalability of monitoring systems. It thus gives users of these systems a very flexible way to define regions of interest and to monitor activity in more meaningful ways. Second, the site maps generated on the basis of SGF metadata provide an efficient way to represent the activity occurring within the monitored site. These explicit representations, which are useful to analyze activity, are contrasted with abstract representations, which are useful to maintain peripheral awareness about ongoing activity on the Web.

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  1. Information Systems Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering, Hiroshima University, 1‐4‐1 Kagamiyama, Higashi‐Hiroshima 739, Japan

    Olivier Liechti, Mark Sifer & Tadao Ichikawa

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  1. Olivier Liechti
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  2. Mark Sifer
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  3. Tadao Ichikawa
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Liechti, O., Sifer, M. & Ichikawa, T. The SGF metadata framework and its support for social awareness on the World Wide Web. World Wide Web 2, 191–208 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019209008366

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