A generic notification system for Internet information

The Internet provides a huge amount of online and dynamic information related to stock information, currency exchange rates, interest rates, expected weather status, oil prices, and many other topics. This information is publicly available on dynamic HTML documents or on web services. This paper discusses a flexible notification system that utilizes the available online information and allows users to define a set of notifications that they are interested in. Based on the defined notification conditions, users will be notified by email and/or SMS messages whenever one or more of the conditions are met. In this system, users use Java-based configurations to define the notification requirements. This system also solves some of the issues facing utilizing public information available on the Internet to build the needed notifications. This includes the problem of capturing highly dynamic Internet information as well as supporting advanced types of notifications.