This thesis investigates the visual aesthetic performance of Web sites. An experiment was conducted in which a Web site, designed with three controlled levels of 'visual enrichment', was evaluated on a number of measures by two subject groups. The measures used represent facets of the Categorical-Motivation model of aesthetics, plus others directly related to the performance of Web sites. The results of the experiment indicate that the drivers of site evaluation were primarily exploratory variables that represent 'novelty', 'interest' and 'fun'. This supports the argument that an important question to consider when designing a Web site is not merely 'can the site's audience use the Web site?', but also 'does the site's audience want to use the Web site?' Visual, audio and interactive appeal are, as the findings show, very important design considerations. This research adds to a body of knowledge that seeks to understand aesthetic phenomena and develops a theoretical framework that will prove useful for the investigation of visual interfaces.

<p>Den här uppsatsen redogör för en studie om hur intranät används i organisationerna Ericsson och KPMG och hur intranätets möjligheter att stödja organisationens verksamhet förändras i en Webb 2.0 miljö. Syftet med studien var att underlätta olika organisationers överväganden om att ta till sig och använda sig av en Webb 2.0 standard i deras intranät. Studien består av en teoretisk referensram som sedan kopplas ihop med de intervjuer vi genomfört som mynnar ut i olika förslag på hur intranätet kan förbättras med Webb 2.0. Den teoretiska referensramen behandlar litteratur och artiklar inom området intranät och Webb 2.0. Vi kom bland annat fram till i vår studie att båda dessa organisationers intranät knappt eller inte alls stödjer den tvärfunktionella kommunikation och sökningar på intranätet gav ofta alldeles för många träffar som resulterade i att personalen inte alltid fick tag i det material de var ute efter och vi visade på hur Webb 2.0 kan lösa många av de här problemen.</p>

This dissertation investigates the utility of the web for anaphora resolution. Aside from offering a highly accurate, web-based method for pleonastic it detection, which eliminates up to 4% of errors in pronominal anaphora resolution, it also introduces a web-assisted model for definite description anaphoricity determination and a prototype system of anaphora resolution that uses the web for virtually all subtasks. The thesis starts with a thorough analysis of the relationship between anaphora and definiteness, a study that bridges the gap between previously reported empirical studies of definite description anaphora and the linguistic theories developed around the concept of definiteness. Various naturally-occurring definite descriptions found in the WSJ corpus are analyzed from both perspectives of familiarity and uniqueness, and a new classification scheme for definite descriptions is developed. With the fundamental issues solved, the rest of the thesis focuses on the various ways the web can be exploited for the purpose of anaphora resolution. This thesis presents methods of high-precision, high-recall anaphoricity determination for both pronouns and definite descriptions. Evaluation results suggest that the performance of the pleonastic it identification module is on par with casually-trained human annotators. When used together with a pronominal anaphora resolution system, the module offers a statistically significant performance gain of 4%. The performance of the anaphoricity determination module for definite descriptions, which benefits from both the insight gained from the study on anaphora and definiteness and the significantly expanded coverage offered by the web, is also one of the highest among existing studies. The thesis also introduces a web-centric anaphora resolution system. Aside from serving as the information source for implementing selectional restrictions and discovering hyponym/synonym relationships, the web is additionally used for gender/number determination and many other auxiliary tasks, such as determining the semantic subjects of as-prepositions, identifying antecedents for certain empty categories, and assigning appropriate labels for proper names using information available from the text itself. With a design that specifically leaves room for the application of verb-argument and genitive co-occurrence statistics, the web-based features provide statistically significant gains to the system's performance. / Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems

Modern Web based GIS systems have responded significantly to semantic Web technology as it offers opportunities to overcome interoperability and integration problems. There are abundant needs especially for the systems intending to provide more than just a map with basic geographical information. More sophisticated systems can offer more than navigation services and can integrate with several data sources, thereby providing a richer, wider and highly usable information service to be used in business, governmental and different life domains. Search is an essential part of any GIS system because of the huge amount of data representing different meanings that are stored in one or distributed data sources. A model is presented which focuses on searching for geospatial information to answer query semantics rather than query syntax. This model used the most recent and approved standards among the semantic Web communities, and was applied on TerraFly a GIS system. Since ranking is a critical factor in measuring the quality of any search engine, a ranking algorithm is also proposed and evaluated.

Conventional storage technologies do not always give sufficient guarantees of security for critical information. Databases and file servers are regularly compromised, with consequential theft of identities and unauthorized use of sensitive information. Some cryptographic technologies increase the security guarantees, but rely on a key, and key secrecy and maintenance are difficult problems. Meanwhile, there is an accelerating trend of moving data from local storage to Internet storage. As a result, automatic security of critical information without the need for key management promises to be an important technology for Web Applications. This thesis presents such solution for Internet data storage that uses a secret sharing scheme. The shared secrets are packaged as JSON objects and delivered to various endpoints using HTTP semantics. A shopping website is developed to demonstrate the solution.

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This thesis revolves  around the implementation and design of a social discovery web service called Go&amp;Grow whose beta version was launched in september 2012. The aim of this study was to conduct a theoretical analysis of service design, putting it in comparison to other design disciplines, and finding key points in designing this web service. Another purpose was to start the implementation of the service using the web framework Django and further to evaluate different web techniques used to build such a system. Methods applied in this study were taken from literature describing the service design process.Based on these ndings, the identication of persons that should be involved in the design process was found. Also, prototypes of the design proposals were created to test user interaction and experience. The system has been implemented by using web techniques including Python and the Django framework, HTML, CSS, AJAX and JavaScript. Bothback-end as well as front-end development has been perfomed, though this thesis mainlyfocuses on the front-end aspects of implementation.The results of the study were a new design proposal of the web site as well as a launchedbeta version of the Go&amp;Grow service.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) and web services make it possible to construct rich and complex distributed systems which operate at internet scales. However, the underlying design principles of SOA can lead to management problems for processes over web services.<p> This thesis identifies several potential problems with the management of processes over web services, and proposes the use of explicit context as a possible solution. The available options are explored, and the WS-Context specification is implemented and evaluated.<p> The SOA design principles of loose coupling, interaction at an interface, autonomy, and composablity can lead to management problems for processes over web services. Processes over web services where one composite service invokes other composite services which in turn invoke other composite services can lead to complex invocation trees. These invocation trees may be different at different times due to the shifting effect of loose coupling, as new services are swapped in to replace those in previous invocations. In such an environment how well can we define the interface of the top level service in a static document such as a WSDL? Because there is a separation between the ultimate service consumer, and the ultimate service provider how can the service consumer correctly assign fault when a service fails? When concurrency is used, and encouraged, how can we deal with the inevitable race conditions and deadlock? In distributed systems where portions of processes execute on systems beyond our organizational control, how can we pause, or kill these processes? Many of these systems model long-running business processes. How do we communicate changes in process requirements?<p> The use of an explicit context is a potential solution to these types of problems. The abstraction context provides an environment in which the process participants can describe their requirements, query those of other process participants, and react to changes in the environment.<p> A sample context server, based on the WS-Context specification, was implemented using the Erlang language. The sample context server provides the basic operations required to manage and store contextual information about a process.<p> The sample context server was evaluated to determine the cost of employing a context as part of a web service based software system. The performance of the sample server was also evaluated.<p> Test were conducted on the time costs of the basic operations of the context server, and they were found to have a constant time cost. The operations for getting and setting the contents of the context were found to have a time cost dependant on the size of the context. The cost of propagating the context along a chain of service invocations was tested and found to have an overhead which increased linearly with the length of the service invocation chain.<p> The context server was stress tested using a closed loop test which simulated the interaction of a number of concurrent clients, and an open loop test which simulated bursts of arriving requests. The open loop testing showed that the context server could handle 75 concurrent clients. Beyond 75 concurrent clients, the response times of the context server began to slowly increase. The closed loop testing showed that the context server had a maximum throughput of 190 requests per second for bursts of 200 requests with an interarrival time of 4 milliseconds.

As mobile network infrastructures continuously improve, they are becoming popular clients to consume any Web resources, especially Web Services (WS). However, there are problems in connecting mobile devices to existing WS. This thesis focuses on three of the following challenge: loss of connection, bandwidth/latency, and limited resources. This research implements and develops a cross-platform architecture for connecting mobile devices to the WS. The architecture includes a platform independent design of mobile service client and a middleware for enhancing the interaction between mobile clients and WS. The middleware also provides a personal service mashup platform for the mobile client. Finally, the middleware can be deployed on Cloud Platforms, like Google App Engine and Amazon EC2, to enhance the scalability and reliability. The experiments evaluate the optimization/adaptation, overhead of the middleware, middleware pushing via email, and performance of Cloud Platforms.

We have inorganically increased the use of web applications to the point of using them for almost everything and making them an essential part of our everyday lives. As a result, the enhancement of privacy and security policies for the web applications is becoming increasingly essential. The importance and stateless nature of the web infrastructure made the web a preferred target of attacks. The current web access control system is a reason behind the victory of attacks. The current web consists of two major components, the browser and the server, where the effective access control system needs to be implemented. In terms of an access control system, the current web has adopted the inadequate same origin policy and same session policy for the browser and server, respectively. The current web access control system policies are sufficient for the earlier day's web, which became inadequate to address the protection needs of today's web. In order to protect the web application from un-trusted contents, we provide an enhanced browser based access control system by enabling the dynamic scoping. Our security model for the browser will allow the client and trusted web application contents to share a common library and protect web contents from each other, while they still get executed at different trust levels. We have implemented a working model of an enhanced browser based access control system in Java, under the Lobo browser.