Journal of Digital Information (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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252 research outputs found
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The Connectivity Sonar: Detecting Site Functionality by Structural Patterns
No full textWeb sites today serve many different functions, such as corporate sites, search engines, e-stores, and so forth. As sites are created for different purposes, their structure and connectivity characteristics vary. However, this research argues that sites of similar role exhibit similar structural patterns, as the functionality of a site naturally induces a typical hyperlinked structure and typical connectivity patterns to and from the rest of the Web. Thus, the functionality of Web sites is reflected in a set of structural and connectivity-based features that form a typical signature. In this paper, we automatically categorize sites into eight distinct functional classes, and highlight several search-engine related applications that could make immediate use of such technology. We purposely limit our categorization algorithms by tapping connectivity and structural data alone, making no use of any content analysis whatsoever. When applying two classification algorithms to a set of 202 sites of the eight defined functional categories, the algorithms correctly classified between 54.5% and 59% of the sites. On some categories, the precision of the classification exceeded 85%. An additional result of this work indicates that the structural signature can be used to detect spam rings and mirror sites, by clustering sites with almost identical signatures
Building Semantic Tools for Concept-based Learning Spaces: Knowledge Bases of Strongly-Structured Models for Scientific Concepts in Advanced Digital Libraries
No full textApplying conventional principles of knowledge organization, representation, and other semantic tools, we have constructed a model for scientific concepts and employed knowledge bases and visualization tools to represent knowledge concerning scientific concepts. Strongly-structured models, such as the integration of a taxonomy (or thesaurus) with metadata (or attribute-value pairs) and domain-specific markup languages, as well as specialized models for learning scientific concepts, focus on such attributes as objective representations, operational semantics, use, and interrelationships of concepts. All of these play important roles in constructing representations of knowledge in most domains of science. Instructional activities for undergraduate teaching and learning are greatly facilitated with the use of such integrated semantic tools
Employee Resistance to Digital Information and Information Technology Change in a Social Service Agency: A Membership Category Approach
No full textResponding to new government regulations about reporting data, a social service agency decided to require caseworkers to use laptop computers extensively, taking these devices with them on calls to clients. The resistance of caseworkers to this mandate and this change provided an opportunity to examine the phenomena of technology resistance. Initially rooting the study in known models for examining technology resistance, researchers found the need to expand upon these models to acknowledge other social aspects, as well as individual aspects to alterations in work behavior. Perceiving that professional identity was at issue, the study employed concepts from Kling\u27s social aspects of computing and Schein\u27s career anchor theory, and used qualitative methods including an adaptation of Sacks\u27s membership category analysis method from the field of ethnomethodology that led to insights about the underlying causes of IT resistance among social service workers. The originality of this micro-level approach lies in its ability to explore moral aspects of professional and personal identity. The approach revealed, in this situation, that workers\u27 resistance was based particularly on a local history of organizational dysfunction in addition to elements such as performance and effort expectancy, attitudes, and anxiety that is typically discussed in the information technology acceptance literature
Multimodal Content Adaptations for Heterogeneous Devices
No full textWe present Multiface, a multimodal dialog system that allows users to interact using different devices such as desktop computers, PDAs, and mobile phones. Users can request information and will receive multimodal responses, where the presented content and its modality are customized to individual and the device they are using. In addition, the system will attempt to assess the user\u27s understanding and adapt its future responses accordingly. Multiface uses a plan-based approach to produce adaptive content and modalities from an annotated document and models of the user
and device
Lab Report: Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, Texas A&M University
No full textoai:jodi-ojs-tdl.tdl.org:article/1The Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL) was established in 1995 by The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents and builds upon research developed in the Hypermedia Research Laboratory established in 1987. A member of the global digital library research community, the Center provides a focal point for digital libraries research and technology for the State of Texas. Its mission is to foster pioneering research on the theory and application of digital libraries and to create flexible and efficient new technologies for their use
A Critique of the Open Hypermedia Protocol
No full textThe Open Hypermedia Protocol is a proposed standard for enabling the interoperability of client applications with open hypermedia systems. This paper presents the protocol at a high-level of detail, performs an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, and makes specific recommendations for improvements to the protocol. In addition, the paper records how a new version of the protocol is evolving. The arguments and recommendations of this paper are based on the information presented in [1] and [29] as well as the results of the discussions held on the protocol at the following events: the Second International Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS 2.0), the December 1996 Open Hypermedia Working Group Meeting (OHS 2.5), the Third International Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS 3.0), and the September 1997 Open Hypermedia Working Group Meeting (OHS 3.5)
Designing Computational Hypermedia Applications
No full textThis position paper analyses the problem of extending computational applications with hypermedia, from a design point of view. It focusses on the design of evolvable and easy-to-maintain applications combining hypermedia features with more conventional application behavior. The object-oriented hypermedia design method (OOHDM) is the conceptual basis of our approach. Using the visual tools provided by OO-Navigator, an object-oriented support environment for OOHDM, it is possible to construct computational hypermedia applications applying the concepts of the OOHDM. Also, the problem is analysed from a higher abstraction level. Design patterns are introduced and it is shown that they are a powerful tool to record and reuse designers\u27 experience. A set of patterns for hypermedia applications that address problems both at the architectural, navigational and interface levels are presented. A reference architecture for computational hypermedia applications is outlined and further work in this area is discussed
METAXPath
No full textThis paper presents the METAXPath data model and query language. METAXPath extends XPath with support for XML metadata. XPath is a specification language for locations in an XML document. It serves as the basis for XML query languages like XSLT and the XML Query Algebra.
The METAXPath data model is a nested XPath tree. Each level of metadata induces a new level of nesting. The data model separates metadata and data into different dataspaces, supports meta-metadata, and enables sharing of metadata common to a group of nodes without duplication. The METAXPath query language has a level shift operator to shift a query from a data level to a metadata level. METAXPath maximally reuses XPath hence the changes needed to support metadata are few. METAXPath is fully compatible with XPath
Enabling Dissemination of Meta Information in the Usenet Framework
No full textThe paper discusses a transparent and flexible way to disseminate meta information within the global conferencing system, Usenet news. Examples of such information are ratings for Usenet articles or information about the behavior of other users. In particular, the paper describes how the Usenet "overview\u27\u27 mechanism was modified to disseminate meta information to off-the-shelf Usenet clients. Experiences with the modified overview mechanism are discussed by example of two fully working prototype implementations disseminating social navigation information and collaborative filtering ratings to Usenet clients