A Framework for Generic Internet-Based Information Notification

This paper introduces a framework to monitor information available dynamically on the Internet through Web services, RSS feeds or dynamic HTML documents based on user defined criteria. The paper also discusses some of the open issues associated with the design and application of the framework. This framework is designed to deal with public information available on the Internet on a single or multiple Websites and from a single or multiple Web services as the information source of which the user can build his/her notification criteria. The Internet provides a huge amount of dynamic information such as news, stock information, current and expected weather status, currency exchange rates, etc. In the framework, all this public information is viewed as a set of Internet variables. These variables can be used to define the user monitoring and notification criteria. Based on the defined criteria, SMS and/or email notification messages can be generated and sent to the user notifying him/her whenever the criteria are met. A number of applications can benefit form this framework to provide real-time useful information to the user.