Towards an Intelligent Publishing Environment

Abstract This paper presents an environment for publishing information on the World-Wide Web (WWW). Previous work has pointed out that the explosive growth of the WWW is in part due to the ease with which information can be made available to Web users [23]. Yet this property can have negative impacts on the ability to find appropriate information as well as on the integrity of the information published. We present a prototype environment that facilitates the publishing of documents on the Web by automatically generating meta-information about the document, communicating this to a local scalable architecture, e.g. WHOIS + +, verifying the document's HTML compliance, maintaining referential integrity within the local database, and placing the document in a Web accessible area. Additionally, maintenance and versioning facilities are provided. This paper first discusses an idealized publishing environment, then describes our implementation, followed by a discussion of salient issues and future research areas.