Informatics 141/ Computer Science 121: Information Retrieval

Assignment 08

Winter 2008

Department of Informatics

Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

University of California, Irvine

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Due 03/17/2008

  1. Put all your assignments together
    1. Take your Firefox extension, your posting list, your rapid cosine query algorithm and put it all together into an application that shows you relevant wikipedia content as you are browsing the web.
  2. Evaluation
    1. Write a summary description of how you accomplished this assignment, focussing on what the pieces you used were.
      1. This is your chance to show off your design decisions and tell us what extra things you did to make it work.
      2. For example:
        1. How much crawl data did you use?
        2. Was it your crawl data or someone elses?
        3. DId you implement any special data structures to make this work with lots of data?
        4. How did you convert the currently browsed web page into a query?
        5. What did you decide to show in the sidebar?
        6. etc...
    2. Demo your program working
  3. Due Date: Demos will be held after the final on Monday 3/17/2008
  4. You may work in groups of 2 for this project.
  1. You don't have to do it this way, but here is what I would do:
    1. Make sure your firefox extension works
      1. Load it into firefox and browse the web in the main page and display the current page in the sidebar.
    2. Download a java web server.
      1. Perhaps this one, from the LUCI lab.
      2. Run it on your local machine and make sure it works by using the instructions on the download page.
    3. Connect your firefox extension to the java webserver.
      1. Change the webserver so that rather than outputting Hello World it outputs the current time.
      2. Rather than having the firefox extension show the currently browsed page, have it show the output of the java webserver when ever the user browses to a new page.
      3. This will form the complete data path from the user, through the main page of the browser, to the sidebar, to the java webserver and then back to the sidebar output.
    4. Send the java web server the page that the user is currently browsing
      1. Send as a URL parameter to the java webserver from the firefox sidebar.
      2. Confirm that the java web server is receiving the URL.
    5. Change the java web server so that when it gets a URL it downloads the content from the URL.
      1. This means that the java webserver will be downloading the same thing that the user is currently browsing.
    6. Take the content of the URL that you just downloaded and decide how to make that into a query.
    7. Add your rapid cosine query code to the java webserver.
    8. When you have converted the fetched URL to a query, run it through your rapid cosine query algorithm to get a bunch of related wikipedia pages (and maybe more! [extra])
    9. Send the relevant wikipedia links back to the firefox sidebar.
    10. Once it works. Take to another level in your own way.