BlogForever: D2.5 Weblog Spam Filtering Report and Associated Methodology

This report is written as a first attempt to define the BlogForever spam detection strategy. It comprises a survey of weblog spam technology and approaches to their detection. While the report was written to help identify possible approaches to spam detection as a component within the BlogForver software, the discussion has been extended to include observations related to the historical, social and practical value of spam, and proposals of other ways of dealing with spam within the repository without necessarily removing them. It contains a general overview of spam types, ready-made anti-spam APIs available for weblogs, possible methods that have been suggested for preventing the introduction of spam into a blog, and research related to spam focusing on those that appear in the weblog context, concluding in a proposal for a spam detection workflow that might form the basis for the spam detection component of the BlogForever software

BlogForever D2.6: Data Extraction Methodology

This report outlines an inquiry into the area of web data extraction, conducted within the context of blog preservation. The report reviews theoretical advances and practical developments for implementing data extraction. The inquiry is extended through an experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing some of the suggested approaches. More specifically, the report discusses an approach based on unsupervised machine learning that employs the RSS feeds and HTML representations of blogs. It outlines the possibilities of extracting semantics available in blogs and demonstrates the benefits of exploiting available standards such as microformats and microdata. The report proceeds to propose a methodology for extracting and processing blog data to further inform the design and development of the BlogForever platform

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

Computing point-of-view : modeling and simulating judgments of taste

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-163).People have rich points-of-view that afford them the ability to judge the aesthetics of people, things, and everyday happenstance; yet viewpoint has an ineffable quality that is hard to articulate in words, let alone capture in computer models. Inspired by cultural theories of taste and identity, this thesis explores end-to-end computational modeling of people's tastes-from model acquisition, to generalization, to application- under various realms. Five aesthetical realms are considered-cultural taste, attitudes, ways of perceiving, taste for food, and sense-of-humor. A person's model is acquired by reading her personal texts, such as a weblog diary, a social network profile, or emails. To generalize a person model, methods such as spreading activation, analogy, and imprimer supplementation are applied to semantic resources and search spaces mined from cultural corpora. Once a generalized model is achieved, a person's tastes are brought to life through perspective-based applications, which afford the exploration of someone else's perspective through interactivity and play. The thesis describes model acquisition systems implemented for each of the five aesthetical realms.(cont.) The techniques of 'reading for affective themes' (RATE), and 'culture mining' are described, along with their enabling technologies, which are commonsense reasoning and textual affect analysis. Finally, six perspective-based applications were implemented to illuminate a range of real-world beneficiaries to person modeling-virtual mentoring, self-reflection, and deep customization.by Xinyu Hugo Liu.Ph.D

Personalised trails and learner profiling in an e-learning environment

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

Congenial Web Search : A Conceptual Framework for Personalized, Collaborative, and Social Peer-to-Peer Retrieval

Traditional information retrieval methods fail to address the fact that information consumption and production are social activities. Most Web search engines do not consider the social-cultural environment of users' information needs and the collaboration between users. This dissertation addresses a new search paradigm for Web information retrieval denoted as Congenial Web Search. It emphasizes personalization, collaboration, and socialization methods in order to improve effectiveness. The client-server architecture of Web search engines only allows the consumption of information. A peer-to-peer system architecture has been developed in this research to improve information seeking. Each user is involved in an interactive process to produce meta-information. Based on a personalization strategy on each peer, the user is supported to give explicit feedback for relevant documents. His information need is expressed by a query that is stored in a Peer Search Memory. On one hand, query-document associations are incorporated in a personalized ranking method for repeated information needs. The performance is shown in a known-item retrieval setting. On the other hand, explicit feedback of each user is useful to discover collaborative information needs. A new method for a controlled grouping of query terms, links, and users was developed to maintain Virtual Knowledge Communities. The quality of this grouping represents the effectiveness of grouped terms and links. Both strategies, personalization and collaboration, tackle the problem of a missing socialization among searchers. Finally, a concept for integrated information seeking was developed. This incorporates an integrated representation to improve effectiveness of information retrieval and information filtering. An integrated information retrieval process explores a virtual search network of Peer Search Memories in order to accomplish a reputation-based ranking. In addition, the community structure is considered by an integrated information filtering process. Both concepts have been evaluated and shown to have a better performance than traditional techniques. The methods presented in this dissertation offer the potential towards more transparency, and control of Web search

Mining Users’ Preference Similarities in E-commerce Systems Based on Webpage Navigation Logs

Mining users’ preference patterns in e-commerce systems is a fertile area for a great many application directions, such as shopping intention analysis, prediction and personalized recommendation. The web page navigation logs contain much potentially useful information, and provide opportunities for understanding the correlation between users’ browsing patterns and what they want to buy. In this article, we propose a web browsing history mining based user preference discovery method for e-commerce systems. First of all, a user-browsing-history-hierarchical-presentationgraph to established to model the web browsing histories of an individual in common e-commerce systems, and secondly an interested web page detection algorithm is designed to extract users’ preference. Finally, a new method called UPSAWBH (User Preference Similarity Calculation Algorithm Based on Web Browsing History), which measure the level of users’ preference similarity on the basis of their web page click patterns, is put forward. In the proposed UPSAWBH, we take two factors into account: 1) the number of shared web page click sequence, and 2) the property of the clicked web page that reflects users’ shopping preference in e-commerce systems. We conduct experiments on real dataset, which is extracted from the server of our self-developed e-commerce system. The results indicate a good effectiveness of the proposed approach

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

Visualisation of interaction footprints for enagement in online communities

Glahn, C., Specht, M., & Koper, R. (2009). Visualisation of interaction footprints for engagement in online communities [Special issue]. In M. Kalz, R. Koper & V. Hornung-Prähauser (Eds.), Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 12(3), 44-57.Contextualised and ubiquitous learning are relatively new research areas that combine the latest developments in ubiquitous and context aware computing with educational approaches in order to provide structure to more situated and context aware learning. The majority of recent activities in contextualised and ubiquitous learning focus on mobile scenarios, with location as the primary contextual dimension. However, the meaning of context aware learner support is not limited to location based solutions, as it is highlighted by the educational paradigms of situated learning and communities of practice. This paper analyses learner participation as a contextual dimension of adapting graphical indicators of interaction data for engaging and motivating learners in participating and contributing to an open community. The analysis is based on interaction data and interviews with participants in a nine week lasting design study, during which we compared the effect of two indicators on the engagement of the participants in the group activities. The trend of study results supports the presumption that the learners' perception of their activity visualisations is context dependent. We found that more engaging visualisation polarised the participants in this group: while contributing participants were attracted to contribute more to the community, non-contributing participants were distracted by the same visualisation.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org