Browser Interface
In the early days of web browsing, the "Bookmarks" feature of web
browsers looked very useful. Over time, however, an active users
accumulated thousands of bookmarks and the feature had limited utility
at best. A number of services exist [1] that can store bookmarks on a
web site and even facilitate sharing with other people, but none of
them solve the fundamental user interface problem.
We propose to address this problem by developing a browsing interface
that provides multiple views of a bookmark file: some could be
relatively simple such as ordering by date, server, or topic (as stored
in document metadata) but will also include unsupervised clustering
based on document contents [2], insertion time [3-4] as well as
hyperlinks and individual and collective usage information.
I imagine two possible scenarios for this project: one is a "My arXiv"
feature for the arXiv e-print library which will let patrons store a
list of their favorite papers in a convenient location. (This will
entice users to store information about their reading preferences which
will make it possible to make further developments towards collaborative
filtering.) Another possibility is the development of a Mozilla
extension that works with a server application for automatically
categorizing web bookmarks.
Contact: Paul Houle ()
Credit Hours: 3-6 (negotiable)