Journal of Digital Information (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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Personalising Electronic Books
No full textThe paper addresses how hyperdocuments, accessible via electronic books (e-books) which are read using the World Wide Web, can be endowed with features that personalise the interaction process that takes place between the reader and the e-book. A novel, abstract approach to modelling the personalisation of hyperdocuments is introduced. This approach aims to make available features that allow readers to interact with these documents in a manner much closer to that with paper-based documents. The research is based on a formal characterisation of personalisable hyperlink-based interaction. This characterisation is unique in formally modelling a rich set of user-initiated personalisation actions that allow users to come closer to satisfying their specific, often dynamic, information retrieval goals
Reengineering Thesauri for New Applications: the AGROVOC Example
No full textExisting classification schemes and thesauri are lacking in well-defined semantics and structural consistency. Empowering end users in searching collections of ever increasing magnitudes with performance far exceeding plain free-text searching (as used in many Web search engines), and developing systems that not only find but also process information for action, requires far more powerful and complex knowledge organization systems (KOSs). The paper presents a conceptual structure and transition procedure to support the shift from a traditional KOS towards a full-fledged and semantically rich KOS. The proposed structure also complies with other interoperability approaches like RDFS and XML in the Web environment. AGROVOC, a traditional thesaurus developed and maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, serves as a case study for exploring the reengineering of a traditional thesaurus into a fully-fledged ontology. We start the process of developing an inventory of specific relationship types with well-defined semantics for the agricultural domain and explore the rules-as-you-go approach to streamlining the reengineering process
How IT Mediates Organizations: Enron and the California Energy Crisis
No full textMarket activity, understood as the outcome of arms-length interactions among calculative agents, often involves asymmetries due to the capability of some agents to impose events, actions, and relations that others have to take into account. Information and communication technologies are playing an increasingly significant role in amplifying such capability, and to explain this role we need frameworks that take agents as entangled within the web of relations and connections that make it possible for them to mobilize technologies along with other allies such as people and organizations. Actor-network theory (ANT) is such a framework. The paper applies ANT to the study of Enron\u27s involvement in California\u27s energy market. It will show, from a social-informatics perspective, how technology was variously used, both as an intra- and extra-organizational device, to proliferate links, to enroll allies, to make image, and to amplify Enron\u27s role in the energy market. In short, the paper will argue that IT mediated Enron in more than one way
Ambient Intelligence: Changing Forms of Human-Computer Interaction and their Social Implications
No full textAmbient intelligence appears poised to cause remarkable changes in the way people live. With digital information, the ease of interaction between humans and computers can be greatly increased by broadening the interface media available and allowing for mobile and portable communication free of inhibiting wires and stationary units. Additionally, some forms of ambient intelligence allow computers to adapt to their user\u27s preferences. The result of ambient intelligence is ultimately a more empowered computer with the benefits of added convenience, time and cost savings, and possibilities for increased safety, security, and entertainment. This technology has the potential to significantly impact business and government processes, as well as private life. The paper describes developments to date in ambient intelligence and its closely related counterpart, ubiquitous computing and communication. It discusses the driving forces behind this digital information technology, describes the equipment and devices involved, the obstacles to implementing ambient intelligence on a large scale in real-world scenarios, and considers the future outlook. The authors believe that the introduction of this digital information technology will have wide-ranging implications, which will for the most part be beneficial and valuable
How Oke-Ogun Crosses the Digital Divide: Study of a Nigerian Rural Development Project
No full textThe dominant paradigm of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as an enabling force for socioeconomic progress informs most worldwide development projects and frames much of the literature that surrounds them. What is often missing in these accounts is the human factor; the people that make the technology work. This account of the history of the Oke-Ogun Community Development Network in rural Nigeria demonstrates how ICTs do not just "come" to a rural population, but are introduced and, with a great deal of work, are adapted in specific situations. The barriers and the work-arounds that are adopted to overcome infrastructural and cultural barriers to ICT and digital information use are recounted, and the full articulation of just what it takes to get - and keep - information flowing is revealed
A Vision for Open Hypermedia Systems
No full textCurrently, the Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) Working Group claims three main areas of interest: scenarios, reference architectures, and protocols. The discussions over scenarios of OHS use are supposed to inform the work on OHS reference architectures, which in turn is supposed to enable the development of an Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP) that will allow clients of one OHP-compliant OHS to use services of other OHP-compliant OHS\u27s. In this paper, we start from existing proposals for an OHS reference architecture and an OHP. We then present a number of scenarios that motivate modifications to these existing proposals. These modifications primarily include adding the notion of an open structure processing layer to the reference architecture and adding a fixed minimal set of guaranteed services to the protocol. We then present our resultant reference architecture and protocol proposals. Our proposals are based on current working group proposals, but incorporate the modifications suggested by our scenarios. Finally, we conclude with some comments on the process we used to derive our proposals, an evaluation of current progress of the OHS Working Group, and suggestions for future directions
Wreader\u27s Digest - How To Appreciate Hyperfiction
No full textCompared to its age - or youth - hyperfiction is a rather well-theorized genre. Hyperfiction-criticism either praises its subject as evolved print-text and better realization of contemporary literary theory - or deplore its - allegedly - low literary quality. What is missing, however, are in-depth readings of digital fiction that deemphasize theory and try to appreciate this new genre for what it has to offer.
In this "paper", I will read two hyperfictions that are not among the two or three canonized texts that are relatively well-known and often-quoted. Both John McDaid\u27s Uncle Buddy\u27s Phantom Funhouse and Sarah Smith\u27s King of Space deal with central issues of hypertext-theory - in content as well as formally. They are about agency and sense-making, ironically deconstructing mainstream theory\u27s claims that digital, hyperlinked texts activate readers into a de-facto author-position. They are also representations of contemporary life that may be difficult to read at first but also make strangely adequate and enjoyable texts for today\u27s readers
Semantic Problems of Thesaurus Mapping
No full textWith networked information access to heterogeneous data sources, the problem of terminology provision and interoperability of controlled vocabulary schemes such as thesauri becomes increasingly urgent. Solutions are needed to improve the performance of full-text retrieval systems and to guide the design of controlled terminology schemes for use in structured data, including metadata. Thesauri are created in different languages, with different scope and points of view and at different levels of abstraction and detail, to accommodate access to a specific group of collections. In any wider search accessing distributed collections, the user would like to start with familiar terminology and let the system find out the correspondences to other terminologies in order to retrieve equivalent results from all addressed collections. This paper investigates possible semantic differences that may hinder the unambiguous mapping and transition from one thesaurus to another. It focusses on the differences of meaning of terms and their relations as intended by their creators for indexing and querying a specific collection, in contrast to methods investigating the statistical relevance of terms for objects in a collection. It develops a notion of optimal mapping, paying particular attention to the intellectual quality of mappings between terms from different vocabularies and to problems of polysemy. Proposals are made to limit the vagueness introduced by the transition from one vocabulary to another. The paper shows ways in which thesaurus creators can improve their methodology to meet the challenges of networked access of distributed collections created under varying conditions. For system implementers, the discussion will lead to a better understanding of the complexity of the problem