16,579 research outputs found
English language in rural Malaysia: situating global literacies in local practices
This paper claims that underlying the naturalisation of teaching and learning of English in the Malaysian education system are ideological pressures and political dogmas, often emerging from colonial, urban/rural and even local ethnic conflicts and hierarchies. It suggests therein lie the inherent difficulties of teaching and learning English in rural communities in Malaysia. Three paradigms frame this view in the paper: the overarching view of literacy as a situated and variable social process; the use of an ethnographic perspective in investigating English language
and literacy education in Malaysia; the stance on the need for Malaysians to acquire English as an additive rather than as a deficit philosophy
Providing Multilingual Access to Health-Oriented Content
Finding health-related content is not an easy task. People have to know what to search for, which medical terms to use, and where to find accurate information. This task becomes even harder when people such as immigrants wish to find information in their country of residence and do not speak the national language very well. In this paper, we present a new health information system that allows users to search for health information using natural language queries composed of multiple languages. We present the technical details of the system and outline the results of a preliminary user study to demonstrate the usability of the system
Stabilizing knowledge through standards - A perspective for the humanities
It is usual to consider that standards generate mixed feelings among
scientists. They are often seen as not really reflecting the state of the art
in a given domain and a hindrance to scientific creativity. Still, scientists
should theoretically be at the best place to bring their expertise into
standard developments, being even more neutral on issues that may typically be
related to competing industrial interests. Even if it could be thought of as
even more complex to think about developping standards in the humanities, we
will show how this can be made feasible through the experience gained both
within the Text Encoding Initiative consortium and the International
Organisation for Standardisation. By taking the specific case of lexical
resources, we will try to show how this brings about new ideas for designing
future research infrastructures in the human and social sciences
CHORUS Deliverable 4.3: Report from CHORUS workshops on national initiatives and metadata
Minutes of the following Workshops:
• National Initiatives on Multimedia Content Description and Retrieval, Geneva, October 10th, 2007.
• Metadata in Audio-Visual/Multimedia production and archiving, Munich, IRT, 21st – 22nd November 2007
Workshop in Geneva 10/10/2007
This highly successful workshop was organised in cooperation with the European Commission. The event brought together
the technical, administrative and financial representatives of the various national initiatives, which have been established
recently in some European countries to support research and technical development in the area of audio-visual content
processing, indexing and searching for the next generation Internet using semantic technologies, and which may lead to an
internet-based knowledge infrastructure. The objective of this workshop was to provide a platform for mutual information
and exchange between these initiatives, the European Commission and the participants. Top speakers were present from
each of the national initiatives. There was time for discussions with the audience and amongst the European National
Initiatives. The challenges, communalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impact, success criteria, etc. were tackled. This
workshop addressed how these national initiatives could work together and benefit from each other.
Workshop in Munich 11/21-22/2007
Numerous EU and national research projects are working on the automatic or semi-automatic generation of descriptive and
functional metadata derived from analysing audio-visual content. The owners of AV archives and production facilities are
eagerly awaiting such methods which would help them to better exploit their assets.Hand in hand with the digitization of
analogue archives and the archiving of digital AV material, metadatashould be generated on an as high semantic level as
possible, preferably fully automatically. All users of metadata rely on a certain metadata model. All AV/multimedia search
engines, developed or under current development, would have to respect some compatibility or compliance with the
metadata models in use. The purpose of this workshop is to draw attention to the specific problem of metadata models in the
context of (semi)-automatic multimedia search
Using open source tools to support collaboration within CALIBRE
Abstract – This paper describes the deployment of Plone, an
Open-Source content management system, to support the
activities of CALIBRE, an EU-funded coordination action
integrating research into Libre software. The criteria by
which Plone was selected are described, and the goodness of
fit to these criteria is analysed.
As a coordination action, CALIBRE involves 12 partners
with different requirements and characteristics. The
CALIBRE Working Environment (CWE) must therefore
support a variety of users with different levels of technical expertise and expectations.
Implementation of the support infrastructure for CALIBRE
is ongoing, and has provided some interesting insights into the benefits of the use of libre software. Although Plone has not been explicitly developed as a collaboration infrastructure, with its wealth of plugins, it has proven highly adaptable for this purpose
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