HyperScout
General Information
This project aims to provide new navigation tools for users to improve navigation on the Web.
One of our concepts is the HyperScout Linktool which displays additional link information in
popup windows. This information is generated on the fly from four sources: The referenced URL and other
anchor-tag attributes, the user's history, the response time of the referenced server and finally a
second component adds additional link information on server side and transfers it as new attributes in the
Link tags.
Like this users can see if the destination of a link is still available, they know about the
language of the referenced document and can see when the visited a page before.
Further development is made in supporting the browsing history of users to help them
regaining documents easier.
Documentation
Paper submitted to the WWW9 Conference:
Concepts for Improved Visualization of Web Link Attributes
Demos
This Page is a early demo. Try this 404-test.
We improved the architecture of HyperScout recently to improve its performance, so there is a little delay with the development of the LinkTool interface. More coming soon...
Download
For the HyperScout project we utilize the following tools:
- The WBI (Web Browser Intelligence) framework is a comfortable proxy framework written in Java.
More information is available from their developers at IBM Almaden. Currently we use WBI 4.3
- The Database Management System we are using is MySQL. It is fast, reliable and flexible.
- To parse the pages we are using the HtmlStreamTokenizer from Arthur Do. We needed this open source tools, to improve the architecture and the speed of WBI significiantly.
- Finally you need the JDK (Java Development Kit). We are actually using
JDK 1.2.2, which is available from numerous sites. You can always get it from Sun Microsystems.
Be warned that installing HyperScout is not really easy at the moment. You need experience with MySQL and Java.
To install HyperScout on your computer you need the following files:
- The database definition for HyperScout database (mysql): HyperScoutDB.txt
Create a new Database "HyperScout", create the user "test" with password "test" and set full access rights
to this database for the user. Now create the HyperScout tables using mysql HyperScout < HyperScoutDB.txt
- Download the HyperScout Java classes: hyperscout.zip and decompress them in your WBI43 directory, creating the new folder "hyperscout".
- The HyperScout icons and JavaScript code can be found in this file: HyperScoutRes.zip. Decompress it in your WBI43 directory. Now there should be a new folder "HyperScoutRes".
To start HyperScout do the following:
- set the CLASSPATH, considering the JDBC-Drivers and the HtmlStreamTokenizer,
- start WBI,
- register
hyperscout\HyperScout.reg,
- set your browser to use the proxy
localhost:8088.
Please let me know, if you experience any problems: Harald Weinreich.
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Last modified on January 04, 2000 - 14:07h