309,400 research outputs found
Towards an Ergonomics of Knowledge Systems: Improving the Design of Technology Enhanced Learning
No full textAs Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) systems become more essential to education there is an increasing need for their creators to reduce risk and to design for success. We argue that by taking an ergonomic perspective it is possible to better understand why TEL systems succeed or fail, as it becomes possible to analyze how well they are aligned with their users and environment. We present three TEL case studies that demonstrate these ideas, and show how an ergonomic analysis can help frame the problems faced in a useful way. In particular we propose using a variant of ergonomics that emphasizes the expression, communication and use of knowledge within the system; we call this approach Knowledge System Ergonomics
Hypermedia Interoperability: Navigating the Information Continuum
No full textOpen Hypermedia Systems are designed to allow links to be authored and followed on top of any media format. The link structures are held separately from the documents in a software component called a Link Server. As hypermedia has matured as a research topic attention has turned to standardising the way in which components talk to Link Servers in order to provide interoperability. The Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group took up this challenge and proposed an Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP). However, the scope of this proposal proved to be too large and the protocol was divided into domain specific parts (Navigational, Spatial and Taxonomic Hypermedia), tackling each domain differently, but consistently. It is questionable whether this step was the correct one, as the domains share many similar features. In this thesis I present a detailed examination of the information spaces that the OHP was attempting to model (from all these considered hypertext domains), which incorporates notions of both behaviour and context. This examination looks at what it means to navigate around the many dimensions of information, across these domains, and reveals a cohesive and continuous structure that I call the Information Continuum. The Fundamental Open Hypermedia Model (FOHM) is presented, which is capable of representing the structures of this continuum in a consistent and meaningful way. FOHM is coupled with an agent infrastructure to produce an implementation that demonstrates the model being used for cross-domain interoperability
Millard E. Tydings papers
No full textMillard E. Tydings (1890-1961), a graduate of the Maryland Agricultural College and the University of Maryland Law School, and subsequently a member of the University's Board of Regents, rose through the ranks of Maryland politics to serve with distinction in both the U.S. House and Senate. The majority of documents in the collection are contemporaneous with Tydings' 24 years in the U.S. Senate (1927-1951) and, although there are some personal and business papers, political campaigns and issues are the primary focus of the collection. Significant issues documented include the Philippine Islands; the Committee on Un-American Activities; disarmament; and the need for a balanced budget. Correspondence, committee reports, memoranda, and publications, by Tydings and others, represent the majority of document types
Web 2.0: Hypertext by Any Other Name?
No full textWeb 2.0 is the popular name of a new generation of Web applications, sites and companies that emphasis openness, community and interaction. Examples include technologies such as Blogs and Wikis, and sites such as Flickr. In this paper we compare these next generation tools to the aspirations of the early Hypertext pioneers to see if their aims have finally been realized
URI Disambiguation in the Context of Linked Data
No full textThe Linked Data initiative has given rise to an increasing number of RDF datasets, many of which are freely accessible online. These resources often arise as a result of database exports; however sufficient consideration may not be given to the unseen implications caused when they are used in the wider context of the Semantic Web. This paper investigates two popular resources, DBLP and DBpedia, and discusses whether the issues regarding identity management and co-reference resolution have been suitably addressed. We find that a large percentage of authors in DBLP have been conflated, and that disambiguation pages have been incorrectly linked using owl:sameAs within DBpedia. Systems for dealing with these issues are presented, and directions are given for future research
Reconciling Versioning and Context in Hypermedia Structure Servers
No full textContextual structure servers and versioning servers share a similar goal in allowing different views on a stored structure according to the viewer’s perspective. In this paper we argue that a generic contextual model can be used to facilitate versioning. In order to prove our hypothesis we have drawn on our experiences with OHP-Version to extend FOHM’s contextual model
Teasing apart and piecing together: towards understanding Web-based interactions
No full textIt is difficult to deeply understand Web-based interactions and people’s use of information online. This makes it difficult to capture existing web experiences so they can be recreated in other systems (for example, to help with accessibility) and to move real-world situations to the web while maintaining the essential elements of the original situation (for example, creating digital equivalents of existing social environments). We describe TAPT, a tool for achieving this understanding, and we present a comparative evaluation of TAPT against using Scenarios or Group Discussion to capture user experience. We discuss the results of this evaluation, which suggests that while Scenarios can help capture specific experiences from certain types of user, and Group Discussion requires less effort, TAPT is superior at teasing out in a structured way the key elements that make an experience what it is. Our results show that TAPT could be a valuable tool for analysing and redesigning online experiences, and that the best approach to design may be to apply multiple methods in a complementary fashion
Supporting Transitions with Creative Software Engineering
No full textIn this paper we explore the use of creative software engineering design methods, particularly for rebuilding experiences in new contexts. We present results from a comparative evaluation of three approaches (scenarios with personas, TAPT, and no formal method): these suggest that techniques such as brainstorming are helpful, while structure and formality can distract from the creative process. Scenarios’ user-focus was noted as positive, as were TAPT’s analytical output and abstraction of experiences away from their original contexts. The best approach to design may be to apply multiple methods in a complementary fashion
A semiotic approach for the generation of themed photo narratives
No full textA wide variety of systems could be considered 'narrative systems', either directly working towards generating rich narratives or, more frequently, because they present or handle information in a narrative context. These narratives, generated or otherwise handled, may contain themes; an essential part of the subtext of narrative communicating important concepts outside the capabilities of the literal meaning of the content and forming the thematic cohesion that aids the flow of the presented narrative. However despite this very little work has been undertaken to understand or take advantage of these themes, particularly in narrative generation where the presence of well defined themes may improve the richness of those generated narratives. In this paper we evaluate the performance of a system utilising a thematic model in order to generate simple narratives in the form of photo montages compared to a keyword based system that does not. The experiment demonstrates that the system utilising the thematic model is capable of successfully connoting themes within these narratives. It also shows that the relevance of the resulting narratives to the titles used to generate them is higher in the thematic system than those generated by the other system
Citizen participation in news
No full textThe process of producing news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including participatory journalism, produsage, and crowd-sourced journalism, but these terms are ambiguous and have been applied inconsistently, making comparison of news systems difficult. In particular, it is problematic to distinguish the levels of citizen involvement, and therefore the extent to which news production has genuinely been opened up. In this paper we perform an analysis of 32 online news systems, comparing them in terms of how much power they give to citizens at each stage of the news production process. Our analysis reveals a diverse landscape of news systems and shows that they defy simplistic categorisation, but it also provides the means to compare different approaches in a systematic and meaningful way. We combine this with four case studies of individual stories to explore the ways that news stories can move and evolve across this landscape. Our conclusions are that online news systems are complex and interdependent, and that most do not involve citizens to the extent that the terms used to describe them imply
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