Abstract. Web pages change frequently and thus crawlers have to download them often. Various policies have been proposed for refreshing local copies of web pages. In this paper, we introduce a new sampling method that excels over other change detection methods in experiments. Change Frequency (CF

constraints: re-crawling too frequently leads to wasted bandwidth, re-crawling too infrequently brings down the quality of the search engine. In this paper a hybrid approach is build on the basis of which a web crawler maintains the retrieved pages “fresh” in the local collection. Towards this goal

Hiermit versichere ich, die vorliegende Diplomarbeit selbstständig und unter ausschliesslicher Verwendung der angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel angefertigt zu haben. Diese Arbeit hat in gleicher oder ähnlicher Form noch keiner Prüfungsbehörde vorgelegen. Darmstadt, 14. Februar 2006

Abstract not found

First, I would like to thank to Dimka Karastoyanova and Mariano Cilia for all the fruitful discussions, their guidance and support through the course of this project. Thanks also to Prof. Alejandro Buchmann who sponsored my stay at Technische Universität Darmstadt during the spring of 2004. The special thanks go to my advisor, Mariano Cilia, who has made all this possible. Finally, I’d like to thank to my family for all these years of support.

Abstract: Online learning initia-tives over the past decade have become increasingly comprehen-sive in their selection of courses and sophisticated in their presen-tation, culminating in the recent announcement of a number of consortium and startup activities that promise to make a university

digests or fingerprints for attack signatures during its programming phase. In its querying phase, the framework quickly identifies attack-free connections by transforming input traffic into its fingerprint space and matching its digest against those of attack signatures. If the legitimacy of a stream

Abstract. Semantic sensor networks use declarative descriptions of sen-sors promote reuse and integration, and to help solve the difficulties of installing, querying and maintaining complex, heterogeneous sensor net-works. This paper reviews the state of the art for the semantic specifi-cation of sensors, one of the fundamental technologies in the semantic sensor network vision. Twelve sensor ontologies are reviewed and anal-ysed for the range and expressive power of their concepts. The reasoning and search technology developed in conjunction with these ontologies is also reviewed, as is technology for annotating OGC standards with links to ontologies. Sensor concepts that cannot be expressed accurately by current sensor ontologies are also discussed. 1

ii iv vTo my parents vi vii Acknowledgements I would first and foremost extend my whole-hearted gratitude to my advisors, An-drea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. Andrea and Remzi are the reason that I had the opportunity for this exceptional Ph.D. journey. To this day, I still re-member the moment when they took me as their student and the joy and hope in my heart. Andrea and Remzi have showed me what systems research is like and how much fun and challenging it can be. Before this journey with them, I had always liked and believed in the beauty of mathematics and theory. My initial interest in systems research happened when I took Remzi’s Advanced Operating Systems

In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree