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Dept. of Computer Science
University of Cyprus
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eRACE Project
The extensible Retrieval Annotation Caching Engine (eRACE) is a middleware system designed to support the development and provision of intermediary services on Internet. eRACE is a modular, programmable and distributed proxy infrastructure that collects information from heterogeneous Internet sources and protocols according to end-user requests and eRACE profiles registered within the infrastructure.
Collected information is stored in a software cache for further processing, personalized dissemination to subscribed users, and wide-area dissemination on the wireline or wireless Internet. eRACE supports personalization by enabling the registration, maintenance and management of personal profiles that represent the interests of individual users. Furthermore, the structure of eRACE allows the customization of its service provision according to information-access modes (pull or push), client-proxy communication (wireline or wireless; email, HTTP, WAP), and client-device capabilities (PC, PDA, mobile phone, thin clients).Finally, eRACE supports the ubiquitous provision of services by decoupling information retrieval, storage and filtering from content publishing and distribution.
eRACE can easily incorporate mechanisms for providing subscribed users with differentiated service-levels at the middleware level. This is achieved by the translation of user requests and eRACE profiles into ``eRACE requests'' tagged with QoS information. These requests are scheduled for execution by an eRACE scheduler, which can make scheduling decisions based on the QoS tags.
Performance scalability is an important consideration for eRACE given the expanding numbers of WWW users, the huge increase of information sources available on the Web, and the need to provide robust service. To this end, the performance-critical components of eRACE are designed to support multithreading and distributed operation, so that they can be easily deployed on a cluster of workstations.
The eRACE system consists of protocol-specific proxies, like WebRACE, mailRACE, newsRACE and dbRACE, that gather information from the World-Wide Web, POP3 email-accounts, USENET NNTP-news, and Web-database queries, respectively. At the core of eRACE lies a user-driven, high-performance and distributed crawler, filtering processor and object cache, written entirely in Java. Moreover, the system employs Java-based mobile agents to enhance the distribution of loads and its adaptability to changing network-traffic conditions.
eRACE is developed in the context of a project funded by the Research Promotion Foundation of Cyprus (HERMES project, PENEK 23/2000).- Diploma Thesis Topics (for senior undergraduate and MSc students)