Improving the fairness of timely refresh of web views

The popularity of WWW has made it a prime vehicle for disseminating information. Compared to pure static and dynamic Web pages which are dynamically created by a CGI script at run-time, we focus on semi-dynamic Web pages whose contents are extracted from source databases and they change in response to updates to the source databases. An example of such a page can be found at http://www.fish.com.sg where a list of stock information is refreshed frequently with respect to updates to base data. A crucial problem arises when base data change frequently and there is a need to keep a large set of semi-dynamic pages up-to-date in response to source changes since no one is interested in stale data on the Web; an investor may suffer great losses relying on obsolete stock price on the Web. To differentiate between the contents derived from base data and the trivial contents of a Web page, we refer to that portion of a page derived from base data as a Web view.