The other side of the social web: A taxonomy for social information access

The power of the modern Web, which is frequently called the Social Web or Web 2.0, is frequently traced to the power of users as contributors of various kinds of contents through Wikis, blogs, and resource sharing sites. However, the community power impacts not only the production of Web content, but also the access to all kinds of Web content. A number of research groups worldwide explore what we call social information access techniques that help users get to the right information using "collective wisdom" distilled from actions of those who worked with this information earlier. This invited talk offers a brief introduction into this important research stream and reviews recent works on social information access performed at the University of Pittsburgh's PAWS Lab lead by the author. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM)

Semantic browsing of digital collections

Visiting museums is an increasingly popular pastime. Studies have shown that visitors can draw on their museum experience, long after their visit, to learn new things in practical situations. Rather than viewing a visit as a single learning event, we are interested in ways of extending the experience to allow visitors to access online resources tailored to their interests. Museums typically have extensive archives that can be made available online, the challenge is to match these resources to the visitor’s interests and present them in a manner that facilitates exploration and engages the visitor. We propose the use of knowledge level resource descriptions to identify relevant resources and create structured presentations. A system that embodies this approach, which is in use in a UK museum, is presented and the applicability of the approach to the broader semantic web is discussed

Creating structure from disorder: using folksonomies to create semantic metadata

This paper reports on an on-going research project to create educational semantic metadata out of folksonomies. The paper describes a simple scenario for the usage of the generated semantic metadata in teaching, and describes the ‘FolksAnnotation’ tool which applies an organization scheme to tags in a specific domain of interest. The contribution of this paper is to describe an evaluation framework which will allow us to validate our claim that folksonomies are potentially a rich source of metadata

Intelligent Support for Information Retrieval of Web Documents

The main goal of this research was to investigate the means of intelligent support for retrieval of web documents. We have proposed the architecture of the web tool system --- Trillian, which discovers the interests of users without their interaction and uses them for autonomous searching of related web content. Discovered pages are suggested to the user. The discovery of user interests is based on analysis of documents visited by the users previously. We have created a module for completely transparent tracking of the user's movement on the web, which logs both visited URLs and contents of web pages. The post analysis step is based on a variant of the suffix tree clustering algorithm. We primarily focus on overall Trillian architecture design and the process of discovering topics of interests. We have implemented an experimental prototype of Trillian and evaluated the quality, speed and usefulness of the proposed system. We have shown that clustering is a feasible technique for extraction of interests from web documents. We consider the proposed architecture to be quite promising and suitable for future extensions

Exploiting multimedia in creating and analysing multimedia Web archives

The data contained on the web and the social web are inherently multimedia and consist of a mixture of textual, visual and audio modalities. Community memories embodied on the web and social web contain a rich mixture of data from these modalities. In many ways, the web is the greatest resource ever created by human-kind. However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of the web, its content changes, appears and disappears on a daily basis. Web archiving provides a way of capturing snapshots of (parts of) the web for preservation and future analysis. This paper provides an overview of techniques we have developed within the context of the EU funded ARCOMEM (ARchiving COmmunity MEMories) project to allow multimedia web content to be leveraged during the archival process and for post-archival analysis. Through a set of use cases, we explore several practical applications of multimedia analytics within the realm of web archiving, web archive analysis and multimedia data on the web in general

Hytexpros : a hypermedia information retrieval system

The Hypermedia information retrieval system makes use of the specific capabilities of hypermedia systems with information retrieval operations and provides new kind of information management tools. It combines both hypermedia and information retrieval to offer end-users the possibility of navigating, browsing and searching a large collection of documents to satisfy an information need. TEXPROS is an intelligent document processing and retrieval system that supports storing, extracting, classifying, categorizing, retrieval and browsing enterprise information. TEXPROS is a perfect application to apply hypermedia information retrieval techniques. In this dissertation, we extend TEXPROS to a hypermedia information retrieval system called HyTEXPROS with hypertext functionalities, such as node, typed and weighted links, anchors, guided-tours, network overview, bookmarks, annotations and comments, and external linkbase. It describes the whole information base including the metadata and the original documents as network nodes connected by links. Through hypertext functionalities, a user can construct dynamically an information path by browsing through pieces of the information base. By adding hypertext functionalities to TEXPROS, HyTEXPROS is created. It changes its working domain from a personal document process domain to a personal library domain accompanied with citation techniques to process original documents. A four-level conceptual architecture is presented as the system architecture of HyTEXPROS. Such architecture is also referred to as the reference model of HyTEXPROS. Detailed description of HyTEXPROS, using the First Order Logic Calculus, is also proposed. An early version of a prototype is briefly described

Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails