SOPHIE desktop tools supporting framework development

I declare that the work described in this dissertation is, except where otherwise stated, entirely my own work and has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university. I agree that Trinity College Library may lend or copy this dissertation upon request. iii Acknowledgement I would like to thank my parents for funding my studies and supporting me during all these years. I would also like to thank my supervisor Stephen Barrett, for guiding me through this project; for his knowledge that makes the project different; for his personality that changes me. Also I would like to thank They've given me a lot of help and support all through my dissertation. I would like to thank everyone in Ubicomp, I can never do this alone. In general I would like to thank all the people I love. Without them any of this would make sense. SOPHIE is a developing novel peer to peer based search system, employing a non-invasive Trust based approach to information analysis and gathering to the problem of delivering more useful web search ranking. The architecture of the system consists of: a peer client, a shared decentralized database and a trust engine DANTE. This project focuses on the functionality and scalability development of the peer clients. One of the key challenges for SOPHIE is to collect user actions implicitly on the peer client. The current solution to date provides support for the interrogation of user activity only for web browsing, and specifically for later variants of the Firefox Web browser. This project presents a framework solution for the support of arbitrary browser technology that would be specialized within the content of the project for key browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer variants, and Apple's Safari amongst others. Additionally, in the area of enterprise search, it is apparent that other desktop tools (such as word processors, e-mail tools, postscript viewers and etc) are relevant in the access of corporate information. Therefore integration with those desktop tolls is also supported within the same framework.