Shared Bookmarks for Web Browsers

Client: Thomas Kistler

Summary

One of the shortcomings of today's Web browsers is that findings on the web and opinions about Web pages cannot easily be shared between people that cooperate with each other. Usually, each Web-user maintains a separate bookmark file that contains the Web pages that are important to him/her. However, these bookmarks cannot be shared among other users even though they might be of interest to them. In research institutions it is often important to share "common knowledge", especially since a lot of importance is usually attached to the opinions of other group members. Therefore, an explicit mechanism to share common knowledge about Web pages would be very useful.

The goal of this project is to implement a client/server knowledge store that helps sharing information about Web pages among a group of people. Similarly to news groups, the knowledge store maintains a set of hierarchical categories (e.g., "conferences", "conferences.upcoming", "conferences.past", "people", "projects", "projects.zelda", "projects.oberon", ...) through which group members can browse. Each category stores individual bookmarks. In contrast to Web browsers, however, bookmarks can also be augmented with personal comments from group members. To keep users up-to-date, the server also provides a special "what's new" category that contains the most recently added bookmarks. In order to facilitate finding particular bookmarks, the knowledge store provides a simple search interface that allows querying the database by keywords.

Objective

Develop shared bookmarks that fulfill the requirements described above. In order to make both the server and clients platform-independent, implement them in Java or WebL, or with HTML forms.

Required Components

• A server component that maintains the knowledge store. The knowledge store consists of a set of hierarchical categories. Users can browser the knowledge store, add, remove, and modify categories.
• The server allows users adding, removing, and modifying bookmarks in each category. A bookmarks consists of a name, an URL, and one or severalcomments.
• The server allows users searching for keywords in the knowledge store and retrieving a list of all matching bookmarks.
• The server provides a special "what's new" category that contains the most recently added bookmarks.