Group Asynchronous Browsing on the World Wide Web

Abstract

The goal of our Group Asynchronous Browsing (GAB) research is to provide tools for people to leverage the information hunting and gathering activities of other people or groups of people on the World Wide Web. To date we have focused on taking advantage of the personal subject indices that are being constructed today with bookmarks or hotlists of widely available browsers. We have also concentrated on monitoring URLs that may themselves serve as living resources on particular subject areas. In support of the former, we have created a server that collects and merges bookmark/hotlist files of participating users. The server can serve subsets of these merged bookmark files to either standard HTML client browsers or to a client built with the multiscale visualization tool Pad++. For the latter, we have built a tool called WebWatch that can monitor URLs of interest and alert users when significant updates appear.