We can easily access a remote database as well as a local database with HTML forms. Although implementing a database application with HTML forms is much simpler than implementing it with a proprietary graphical user-interface system, HTML forms and CGI programs still must be coded. We implemented a software tool that automatically generates the SQL statements that create a database for an application, the forms that are used as a user interface, and the Java servlets that retrieve the data requested through the forms. The database tables to be created and the forms to be generated are determined by the class diagram for the application. Our software tool, which we call WebSiteGen, thus simplifies the implementation of a Web-based database application.

We propose a web community chart that is a tool for navigating the Web and for observing its evolution through web communities. A web community is a set of web pages created by individuals or associations with a common interest in a topic. Recent research shows that such communities can be extracted by link analysis. Our web community chart is a graph of whole communities, in which relevant communities are connected by edges. Using this chart, we can navigate through related communities. Moreover we can answer historical queries about topics on the Web and understand sociology of web community creation, by observing when and how communities emerged and evolved. We observe the evolution of communities by comparing three charts built from Japanese web archives crawled in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Several metrics are introduced for measuring the degree of community evolution, such as growth rate, novelty. Finally, we develop a web community evolution viewer that allows us to extract evolving communities using the relevance and metrics. Several evolution examples are shown using this viewer.

Asymmetric networks, which provide asymmetric bandwidth or delay for upstream and downstream transfer, have recently gained much attention since they support popular applications such as the World Wide Web (WWW). HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the basis of most WWW services so, evaluating the performance of HTTP on asymmetric networks is increasingly important, particularly real-world networks. However, the performance of HTTP on the asymmetric networks composed of satellite and terrestrial links has not sufficiently evaluated. This paper proposes new formulas to evaluate the performance of both HTTP1.0 and HTTP1.1 on asymmetric networks. Using these formulas, we calculate the time taken to transfer web data by HTTP1.0/1.1. The calculation results are compared to the results of an existing theoretical formula and experimental results gained from a system that combines a VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) satellite communication system for satellite links (downstream) and the Internet for terrestrial links (upstream). The comparison shows that the proposed formulas yield more accurate results (compared to the measured values) than the existing formula. Furthermore, this paper proposes an evaluation formula for pipelined HTTP1.1, and shows that the values output by the proposed formula agree with those obtained by experiments (on the VSAT system) and simulations.

In conventional Web Geographic Information System (GIS), there are serious drawbacks of high waiting time and low accessibility because the subsequent query has to wait until all the spatial data has been completely transmitted. In addressing these problems, this paper proposes a progressive transmission method which can reduce waiting time and increase accessibility. The proposed method has the following steps. First, significant vertices of geographic objects are selected into based on an algorithm, Priority_Order_Estimation (POE). Second, the selected vertices are inserted the data structure, Priority_Order_Queue (POQ). This allows a client to view, to request and occasionally to reject spatial data, rather than waiting for the whole map to arrive. Third, the transmission steps are processed progressively, where significant vertices of POQ are sent from server to client one by one. In the final step, if necessary, the entire spatial data set of SENDOBJSP, which is a transmission structure, is transmitted so that the original map is accurately displayed. The performance of the system proposed here has been evaluated according to the factors such as system response time and client storage space. For the comparisons, the total transmission method, layer transmission method and the proposed four-step transmission method were used. Compared with the conventional Web-based GIS, the system response time is twenty-two percent shorter and client storage space is reduced by about twenty-one percent. As a result, performance improvement, fast response time and less client storage usage, is achieved. Therefore, the proposed method can make a significant contribution in support of Web-based Vector GIS applications such as Environmental Management, Map On Demand Service and Assessment and Planning System.

Server performance is a major issue in improving the overall performance of the World Wide Web (WWW). This article introduces a dynamic mirroring-based approach to improve WWW servers' performance. In contrast to static mirroring, where mirror servers are allocated statically, our mirror servers' setup is driven by network traffic measurement. Performance in terms of latency is inferred from a queuing model. According to this model we show that latency of an overloaded server can be tuned by delegating a portion of the load to a cooperative mirror server. Cost is evaluated by the amount of load hosted by the mirror servers. The goal is then to keep the latency within a tolerable threshold, while minimizing the delegated load. This problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem where the task is to assign a portion of load corresponding to each document to each mirror server. As the result of this work, we will have a balanced load among the servers, and a smoother traffic along the Internet, as well. Empirical results show that this approach can guarantee to maintain the performance while showing a significant decrease in the amount of load transferred to the mirror servers.

Nowadays, the World Wide Web is continuing to expand at an amazing rate as a medium for conducting business in addition to disseminating information, and Web users are remarkably increasing. Human activities in virtual space as the Web are producing large volumes of data, and Web data mining to extract information from Web data has become an important research area. In this paper, we examine the features of Web log data and propose a method for transaction identification. We also introduce a new problem of user segmentation and present a method for solving this problem.

This paper proposes an adaptive transmission scheme for web prefetching in wireless communication systems. The proposed adaptive transmission scheme controls the modulation format and the error control scheme according to the access probability of the web document being transmitted. In the proposed system, the actually requested documents and the documents which have high access probability are transmitted with a reliable transmission format, while the pages whose access probabilities are lower than a certain threshold are transmitted with a bandwidth efficient transmission format. The computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme drastically improves the latency performance.

Web caching has become an important problem when addressing the performance issues in Web applications. The expiration time of the Web data item is useful a piece of information for performance enhancement in Web caching. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the effective reference probability that incorporates the effect of expiration time for Web caching. For a formal approach, we propose the continuous independent reference model extending the existing independent reference model. Based on this model, we define formally the effective reference probability and derive it theoretically. By simply replacing the reference probability in the existing cache replacement algorithms with the effective reference probability, we can take the effect of expiration time into account. The results of performance experiments show that the replacement algorithms using the effective reference probability always outperform existing ones. In particular, when the cache fraction is 0.05 and data update is comparatively frequent (i.e., the update frequency is more than 1/10 of the reference frequency), the performance is enhanced by more than 30% in LRU-2 and 13% in Aggarwal's method. The results show that the effective reference probability significantly enhances the performance of Web caching when the expiration time is given.

A new Web cache sharing scheme is presented. Our method reduces the duplicated copies of the same objects in global shared Web caches, even though the hot working set of each local cache can be duplicated. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing sharing schemes.

In server load balancing where replicated servers are dispersed geographically and accesses from clients are distributed to replicated servers, a way of distributing the accesses from clients to an adequate server plays an important role from the viewpoint of load balancing. In the paper, we propose a new network paradigm for server load balancing using active anycast. In active anycast, an end user only sends its request to group of servers using an anycast address. When this request arrives at an active router, it selects an adequate server from the viewpoint of load balancing and changes the anycast address of a packet to the unicast address of the selected server. The decision which server is the best one from the viewpoint of server load balancing is made by an active router rather than an end user, so active anycast is a network-initiated method. Simulation results show that active anycast can accomplish efficient server load balancing, even when a small part of routers are equipped with active network technology.

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a generic name for services, systems and technology for telephony over an IP network. It is also referred to as Internet telephony and IP (Internet Protocol) telephony. Internet telephone client software attracted attention when it first appeared in 1995. Since that, VoIP has rapidly matured into a practical technology, propelled by the popularization and rapid development of the Internet. IP network traffic already exceeds telephone network traffic and is expected to further increase several-fold in the next few years. In future, the telephone network will be integrated into the IP network and telephony will become entirely VoIP. There are three expectations for VoIP. The first is inexpensive telephone service. The second expectation is for integrated telephony and IP network services such as a CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) system in which there is interworking with various Internet applications, such as e-mail and Web call-back for communication services of greater convenience rather than simple replacement of the telephone. The third expectation is for a platform for providing high-quality voice communication, multicast communication, and other such enhanced voice services that have a high degree of freedom. However, many problems remain to be overcome before the VoIP System is realized. The main problems are real-time transmission of voice that allows a smooth conversation, session control for providing a variety of services, and the proposal of new services. In this paper, we give an overview of VoIP and the problems that must be solved in order to realize it and propose some solutions regarding stream control and applications. We also describe session control and other topics that are being discussed in standardization forums.

Caching at the Web proxy server plays an important role in reducing the response time, the network traffic, and the load of Web servers. Many recent studies have proposed and examined the replacement and consistency policies for the proxy cache, which plays a central role in the performance of caching components. For better performance, they exploit various metadata of Web objects, such as the reference count, reference time, and modification time information of past behaviors, to estimate the re-reference likelihood and freshness of the objects. However, all of these known to the authors use the metadata only when the actual object is in the cache. We observed from various proxy traces that about 20-30% of clients' requests incurred only the validity checks of cached objects without transferring actual objects from the proxy server. In this case, only the metadata are necessary at the proxy server. This paper proposes a proxy cache consistency policy that uses the metadata even for absent objects. These include the time information of evicted objects from the cache and those out of the header-only replies from Web servers. Trace-driven simulations with public proxy cache traces show that our policy reduces the response time and the number of connections to Web servers significantly.

This letter presents a new transformation technique of series solution to asymptotic solution for a perfectly conducting wedge illuminated by E-polarized plane wave. This transformation gives an analytic manipulation example of the Weber-Schafheitlin integral for diffraction problem.

In this paper, we propose a realtime concatenation technique between basic skeletal motions obtained by the motion capture technique and etc. to generate a lifelike behavior for a humanoid character (avatar). We execute several experiments to show the advantage and the property of our technique and also report the results. Finally, we describe our applied system called WonderSpace which leads participants to the exciting and attractive virtual worlds with humanoid characters in cyberspace. Our concatenation technique has the following features: (1) based on a blending method between a preceding motion and a succeeding motion by a transition function, (2) realizing "smooth transition," "monotone transition," and "equivalent transition" by the transition function called paste function, (3) generating a connecting interval by making the backward and forward predictions for the preceding and succeeding motions, (4) executing the prediction under the hypothesis of "the smooth stopping state" or "the state of connecting motion", (5) controlling the prediction intervals by the parameter indicating the importance of the motion, and (6) realizing realtime calculation.

We describe an index for estimating the level of interest in Web pages. This "time-based interest" (TBI) index combinates an equation reflecting page accesses and an equation reflecting the decrease in interest over time. These equations work simultaneously by using a parameter that is based on the time since the last access. We experimentally estimated the decrease ratio of the TBI index and evaluated the characteristics of the TBI equation. We found that the index follows Zipf's distribution, indicating that reflects the change in popularity. We also introduce an access-log analysis system called CyberRanking that includes TBI analysis. CyberRanking analyzes the access logs of Web servers and presents the results in 2-D or 3-D graph on a Web browser.

Today's complicated and heterogeneous telecommunication network environments need fully-integrated, cost-effective, user-friendly management systems. When developing such management systems in distributed environments, many telecommunication companies are carefully adopting CORBA and Java technologies. CORBA technology enables developers to create and manipulate distributed management system components easily while Java technology liberates human users from complicated and proprietary management system interfaces. In this paper, we propose a TMN-based integration framework for distributed network management by combining both CORBA and Java technologies. The framework generalizes a logically-layered architecture from the management agents layer to the user interface layer. It also provides generalized TMN management interfaces using inter-domain gateway systems for coordinating heterogeneous management protocols. By using these interfaces, TMN management function components can be easily constructed as CORBA objects to provide powerful TMN management services to administrators via user-friendly Web browsers. On the basis of this framework, we have designed and implemented a TMN alarm surveillance system which realizes our framework.

In this paper, we design and implement a Web-based Internet/Intranet service management system which can support Quality of Service (QoS) contracted by users and service providers, using Service Level Agreement (SLA) concept. We have analyzed the requirements and management information for Internet/Intranet service management. Based on this analysis, we have defined the suitable QoS parameters for the management of Internet/Intranet services, and developed new WWW service Management Information Bases (MIBs) for QoS management by extending the existing IETF's MIBs. The support of QoS management is done by incorporating the SLA concept, which is measured, monitored and controlled systematically in a multi-domain environment. Finally, we have built a prototype system, and evaluated its performance. The prototype system utilizes Java and CORBA technologies, so that various benefits of these technologies such as platform independence and scalability can be obtained.

Distributed Web caching allows multiple clients to quickly access a pool of popular Web pages. Conventional distributed Web caching schemes, e. g. , the Internet cache protocol and hash routing, require the sending of many query messages among cache servers and/or impose a large load on the cache servers when they are widely dispersed. To overcome these problems, we propose a hash-based query caching method using both a hash function and a query caching method. This method can find cached objects among several cache servers by using only one query message, enabling the construction of an efficient large-scale distributed Web cache server. Compared to conventional methods, this method reduces cache server overhead and object retrieval latency.

Although there are many multimedia presentation systems on the market, they have some shortcomings and most of them only can work on one single computer, and few of them can work on Web. Thus, in the thesis we develop a network multimedia presentation system to let users easily design the multimedia presentation without restriction on technology or presentation time and place. Our system includes 3 main components: User Interface that includes temporal specification editor, spatial specification editor and multimedia object interface, Presentation Interface and Knowledge Base. There is a dynamic homepage generator in our system and we propose a displaying algorithm based on the Allen's theory, that there exist 13 temporal relationships between two intervals, for synchronizing the media objects.

Electromagnetic plane wave scattering by a loaded trough on a ground plane has been analyzed by Kobayashi and Nomura's method. The field in each region is expressed first in terms of appropriate eigen functions, whose excitation coefficients are determined by the continuity condition across the aperture of the trough. Simple far field expression which is suitable for numerical calculation for small aperture cases has been derived. Scattering far field patterns and radar cross section are calculated and compared with those obtained by other methods. Good agreements have been observed for all incident angles.