Web authoring environments enable end-users to create applications that integrate information from other web sources. Users can create web sites that include built-in components to dynamically incorporate, for example, weather information, stock-quotes, or the latest news from different web sources. Recent surveys conducted among end-users have indicated an increasing interest in creating such applications. Unfortunately, web authoring environments do not provide support beyond a limited set of built-in components. This work addresses this limitation by providing end-user support for “clipping ” information from a target web site to incorporate it into the end-user site. The support consists of a mechanism to identify the target clipping with multiple markers to increase robustness, and a dynamic assessment of the retrieved information to quantify its reliability. The clipping approach has been integrated as a feature into a popular web authoring tool on which we present the results of two preliminary studies.

We present contextual facets, a novel user interface technique for navigating websites that publish large collections of semi-structured data. Contextual facets extend traditional faceted navigation techniques by transforming webpage elements into user interface components for filtering and retrieving related webpages. To investigate users ’ reactions to contextual facets, we built FacetPatch, a web browser that automatically generates contextual facet interfaces. As the user browses the web, FacetPatch automatically extracts semi-structured data from collections of webpages and overlays contextual facets on top of the current page. Participants in an exploratory user evaluation of FacetPatch were enthusiastic about contextual facets and often preferred them to an existing, familiar faceted navigation interface. We discuss how we improved the design of contextual facets and FacetPatch based on the results of this study.

We demonstrate myPortal – an application for web content block extraction and aggregation. The research issues behind the tool are also explained, with an emphasis on robustness of web content extraction. 1.