Abstract
A number of Web agents have been recently proposed. One type of Web agents is an agent assisting users with browsing the Web. In this paper, we present such an agent that supports users during browsing to help them discover new content and better understand and orienteer themselves in the changes occurring in the Web. First, the agent enables finding novel content on visited Web pages by detecting and highlighting the information that is fresh for a user or that recently appeared. This involves the comparative analysis of the previously seen page views and the current state of the visited pages as well as the search in page histories that are reconstructed using data from Web archives. Second, using the historical versions of pages, the agent can create visual, concise summaries of pages’ past content within specified time periods. These summaries can be used in order to provide a quick overview of main topics, for example, when the pages are accessed for the first time thus helping the user to better understand documents’ main themes and characteristics. In the last part of the chapter we describe the results of an online survey conducted on a group of 1000 Web users. This study was made in order to provide more insight into the needs and expectations of users regarding the evolution of the Web as well as the various kinds of temporal information resulting from Web changes.
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Jatowt, A., Kawai, Y., Tanaka, K. (2009). Browsing Assistant for Changing Pages. In: Nguyen, N.T., Jain, L.C. (eds) Intelligent Agents in the Evolution of Web and Applications. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 167. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88071-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88071-4_7
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