Selective Just-In-Time (JIT) Information Propagation in Large Network-Centric Environments

University Of Texas At Arlington, Arlington TX

Investigators

Abstract

Efficient and effective change detection and notification is becoming increasingly important for environments such as WWW and distributed heterogeneous systems. Change detection for structured data has been studied extensively. Change detection and notification for unstructured data in the form of html and XML documents is the goal of this project. The objectives of this proposal are to investigate the specification, management, and propagation of changes as requested by a user in a timely manner, and meeting the quality of service requirements. The user is allowed to specify the kind of changes to documents s/he is interested in, at different levels of granularity. They also specify how they need to be notified (email, mobile host, PDA, etc.) when the requested information becomes available. Quality of service (QoS) information such as timing constraints, aggregated vs. individual changes is part of the user specification. User specifications are translated into a set of rules that are used for extracting documents, monitoring changes, and propagation of relevant information. Special attention is paid to scalability issues, as it is an important aspect of the solution. The ability to selectively monitor and be informed of changes (push) augments the current strategy of pulling information periodically and checking for interesting changes. By disseminating the resulting prototype and the results over the Internet, scientists can benefit from it. Through integration of research into courses taught at UTA and into student research, this project will impact education at UTA and other universities.