Integrated Query on the Web

Recently, I read an interesting paper about an integrated query interface for Websites [1]. There can be a big amount of Websites where we can retrieve information about a certain domain. Many of those data can be retrieved through queries to complex Web forms. It could be costly for a user to query individual Websites respectively. Therefore, an integrated query interface is needed. A user can enter his/her query at the central interface. The interface then dispatches the query to individual data sources, retrieves the results, and displays them to the user after some sorting or fusion.
I think the work proposed is very interesting because it provides a central interface for online users to query information in a domain. It is a novel idea for Internet application development.

[1] Eduard C. Dragut, Clement T. Yu, Weiyi Meng. Meaningful Labeling of Integrated Query Interfaces. VLDB 2006: 679-690.

My Personal Website

It can be a pleasure to own a Website on the World Wide Web where one can introduce himself/herself, write diaries and whatever he/she likes. In the Internet application development course, each student is required to build a personal Website. The Website should be written by hand and validated by the W3C validators [1, 2]. Furthermore, tables are not allowed to be used for the page layout.
My homepage is located at http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~wchen2/cs5281/. Everyone in the world is welcome to visit my site. I hope you enjoy it.

[1] http://validator.w3.org/
[2] http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

The History of the Web

The World Wide Web is now popular and is widely used all over the world. However, the history of the Web is not long. Tim Berners-Lee invented WWW in March 1989 at CERN [1]. It was first developed as a common presentation method for physicists from around the world to share data [2]. He introduced the HTTP protocol and also the HTML file format for hyper-text transferring and presentation [3, 4]. The first Website on the Web was http://info.cern.ch/. At first there were only several Websites, but now there are a lot of them. Nowadays people around the world surf on the Internet to visit those Websites every day.
Why did the Web develop so quickly? I think it is mainly because of people’s high information demand. The Web provides a method using which people can share information on a global scale. As the invention and development of Web 2.0, I think the information sharing could be more convenient and the Web will be hotter than ever before.

[1] http://www.zeltser.com/web-history/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

The Internet Application Development Course

This blog will be used in this semester for a course that I am learning. The name of the course is Internet application development. The course covers technologies for developing Internet applications, including XHTML, CSS, CGI, Python, etc. Some Web-based architectures/platforms are also covered. More information about the course can be found at the course Website, which requires a student account to access.
I plan in this semester to read some books and articles about the Internet application development and try to do more exercises. I will post my learning experience on my blog. I hope I can learn the course well in the semester.

My First Post

Now I have my blog space on blogger.com. I will write articles on my blog about my studies and my life. I hope you enjoy it and have fun with it.