Broadway-Web  : "Web Service" for personalized navigation assistance  
INRIA-Sophia Antipolis

Duration of the contract: 12 months renewable

 

Mission

The contractual activities of the AxIS team have been based for five years on two software developed by the team in Java (Broadway*Tools and CBR*Tools) relating to the design of recommender systems for assistance in the search of information on the Web or in a Web site.  Our original approach, called Broadway, is based, also on a similarity of user profiles (if available) and on a similarity of last behaviors of a user group.  Moreover these systems have learning and on-line personalization capacities.

              Our first application based on this approach goes back to 1997 via the design and the development of a system of assistance to navigation on Internet called Broadway-Web (ex-Broadway-V1, cf. transparents , user's manual).  This system, based on the re-use of past navigations, aims at a user group which have decided to share their evaluation on the documents found on the Web, such as for example a team within a company or a scientific community etc.

              Broadway-Web was the object of many publications and also on several occasions of demonstrations, in particular at two INRIA-Industry meetings (1998, 2001). This application was at the origin of two contracts around the Broadway approach (France Telecom and XRCE).  Broadway-Web developed at INRIA is written entirely in Java and uses the platform object CBR*Tools (INRIA) and finally Jigsaw as proxy (W3C INRIA-MIT).

The objective of the proposed mission consists of:

•   to take part, if needed in the team at the time of recruitment, also at the preparation of the distribution in the form of "freeware" of the object oriented platform for "Case-based Reasoning" called CBR*Tools;

•   to reconcept Broadway-Web starting from the new versions of CBR*Tools and Jigsaw. In particular the principal task will be the use of a new toolbox Broadway*Tools which is the result of a capitalization of software components trade resulting from our various applications (4 on the whole) based on the Broadway approach including Broadway-Web.  This will make it possible to test the new version of Broadway*Tools under development within the team.  Beside a work of reconception starting from new versions of platforms, it should finalize the addition of new functions relating to the profiles-server as:
  • the expression on behalf of each user of preferences on what it wishes to share.
  • on the profile model and the user environment.
  For that, one will rest on work of the W3C, in particular on P3P , CC/PP , RDF ;

•   to study and specify (even to realize according to the initial competence of the candidate) the installation of a "web service" corresponding to Broadway-Web integrated in an existing site either for assistance to navigation on all the Web or in the selected site.  This work concerns certain servers relating to the integration of the toolbox Broadway*Tools.

The awaited result of this mission is primarily to help the team with the distribution of CBR*Tools, a new validation of Broadway*Tools via the reconception of the Broadway*Web application and finally to specify the implementation of Broadway-Web in the form of a  "web service"   i.e. with the integration of Broadway-Web in an unspecified existing site.

This mission will make it possible to the candidate to deepen further into his knowledge on Web technologies (servlet, proxy, Web service, P3P, etc.) and especially on the object oriented design (re-use aspect, design patterns, UML) and especially to discover Data Mining techniques applied to Web data (cf   "Web Usage Mining") and of re-use of past experiences (cf.  "knowledge management"), two very active topics as well at academic as industrial level.

 

Profile

• Level engineer (or BAC + 5) or Phd thesis.
• Requirements :  good level in object orientated design, knowledge of design patterns, good level in programming in Java, experience in Web technologies.

 

More informations

Brigitte Trousse

Brigitte.Trousse@inria.fr

Tel.: 04 92 38 77 45

 

To postulate

Reference of the offer: SO01

Send a letter of motivation and your CV in enclosure by email .