Web-course search engine : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University

The World Wide Web is an amazing place that people's lives more and more rely on. Especially, for the young generation, they spend a significant amount of their play and study time using the Internet. Many tools have been developed to help the educational users in finding educational resources. These tools include various search engines. Web directories and educational domain gateways. Nevertheless, these systems have many weaknesses that made them unsuitable for the specific search needs of the learners. The research presented in this thesis describes the development of the Web-course search engine, which is a friendly, efficient and accurate helper for the learners to get what they want in the vast Internet ocean. The most attractive feature of this system is that the system uses one universal language, which lets the searchers and the resources "communicate" with each other. Then the learner searchers can find the Web-based educational resources that are most fit to their needs and course providers can provide all necessary information about their courseware. This universal language is one widely acceptable Metadata standard. Following the Metadata standard, the system collects exact information about educational resources, provides adequate search parameters for search and returns evaluative results. By using the Web-course search engine, the learners and the other educational users are able to find useful, valuable and related educational resources more effectively and efficiently. Some improvement suggestions of the search mechanism in the World Wide Web have been brought forward for the future research as a result of this project

Weighted Heuristic Ensemble of Filters

Feature selection has become increasingly important in data mining in recent years due to the rapid increase in the dimensionality of big data. However, the reliability and consistency of feature selection methods (filters) vary considerably on different data and no single filter performs consistently well under various conditions. Therefore, feature selection ensemble has been investigated recently to provide more reliable and effective results than any individual one but all the existing feature selection ensemble treat the feature selection methods equally regardless of their performance. In this paper, we present a novel framework which applies weighted feature selection ensemble through proposing a systemic way of adding different weights to the feature selection methods-filters. Also, we investigate how to determine the appropriate weight for each filter in an ensemble. Experiments based on ten benchmark datasets show that theoretically and intuitively adding more weight to ‘good filters’ should lead to better results but in reality it is very uncertain. This assumption was found to be correct for some examples in our experiment. However, for other situations, filters which had been assumed to perform well showed bad performance leading to even worse results. Therefore adding weight to filters might not achieve much in accuracy terms, in addition to increasing complexity, time consumption and clearly decreasing the stability

A market-oriented agent-based model for information retrieval

International audienceInformation Retrieval in the World Wide Web (Web IR) is essential for a number of activities and it is an active domain of research and development. The main challenges concern the relevance of the results provided to users' queries and the performance regarding respond-time. On the other hand, agent-based market systems prove to be efficient for implementing e-commerce or B2B applications on the internet, thanks to inherent properties such as prominency of interactions, scalability, flexibility, interoperability, etc. Although the use of agents in other application domains is not yet widespread, the integration of mobile agents into market mechanisms bring clear and efficient solutions to Quality of Service issues encountered in most distributed applications and notably in Web IR systems. Mobility allows defining the seller – buyer model of interaction, where agents act on behalf of final users or devices providing re-sources, while the generic Market Place architecture provides an organizational setting for the matching of demands and offers. The paper shows how this framework applies to Web IR and provides experimental validation results from a Jade implementation

Advanced web searching for the information professional

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A Webometric Analysis of Medical Tourism Websites in Kerala

Medical Tourism is any kind of travel to make a person or a member of his family healthier (Raj,2006). The word Medical Tourism was coined when people started looking outside west for cheaper medical treatment with international quality. It can be broadly defined as provision of \u27cost effective\u27 private medical care in collaboration with the tourism industry for patients needing surgical care and other forms. Kerala has become one of the leading Medical Tourism destinations of India and gained international attention for health tourism and is becoming a popular health tourism hub. There are a number of speciality hospitals in Kerala that offer specialized care for complex medical conditions. Patients from all over the world are becoming medical tourist in Kerala for low cost and health restorative alternative treatments. Speciality hospitals in Kerala are at the forefront of Medical Tourism. Many of the hospitals offer a complete package that includes consultancy with a medical specialist, diagnosis, appropriative medical treatment, pre and post operative care etc. The quality of health care offered by the doctors, nurses and support staff, makes Medical Tourism in Kerala the preferred choice of patients seeking healthcare solutions in World. Kerala has an excellent track record in the fields of tourism and health care. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has declared 2006-2007 as Medical Tourism Year in Kerala and they organized an International conference and exhibition on Health tourism in 2013 at Kochi, Kerala. According to the CII-Mc Kinsy report Medical Tourism industry in Kerala is expected to be worth $4 billion by 2017. Confederation of Indian Industry along with Kerala Government is organizing an International Conference on Health Tourism 2015 at Le Meridian, Kochi, Ernakulam on 30-31of October 2015. The event aims to promote Kerala as the hub for Medical Tourism in the country by 2020. The competitiveness of Kerala in health tourism is enhanced by the attractiveness of the alternative systems of medicine, especially ayurveda, for the foreign tourists. Kerala is also known as land of Ayurveda for its traditional medicines which aim at providing rejuvenation, longevity and relaxation to stressed and strained. More over Kerala has a potential to attract tourists around the world due to its cultural diversity, perfect beaches and fabulous cuisine mixed with a pinch of oriental mysticism. Kerala and Ayurveda have virtually become synonymous with each other. World-class facilities are also available in the other traditional forms of medicine as well as modern medical treatment

A Webometric Analysis of Medical Tourism Websites in Kerala

Medical Tourism is any kind of travel to make a person or a member of his family healthier (Raj,2006). The word Medical Tourism was coined when people started looking outside west for cheaper medical treatment with international quality. It can be broadly defined as provision of \u27cost effective\u27 private medical care in collaboration with the tourism industry for patients needing surgical care and other forms. Kerala has become one of the leading Medical Tourism destinations of India and gained international attention for health tourism and is becoming a popular health tourism hub. There are a number of speciality hospitals in Kerala that offer specialized care for complex medical conditions. Patients from all over the world are becoming medical tourist in Kerala for low cost and health restorative alternative treatments. Speciality hospitals in Kerala are at the forefront of Medical Tourism. Many of the hospitals offer a complete package that includes consultancy with a medical specialist, diagnosis, appropriative medical treatment, pre and post operative care etc. The quality of health care offered by the doctors, nurses and support staff, makes Medical Tourism in Kerala the preferred choice of patients seeking healthcare solutions in World. Kerala has an excellent track record in the fields of tourism and health care. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has declared 2006-2007 as Medical Tourism Year in Kerala and they organized an International conference and exhibition on Health tourism in 2013 at Kochi, Kerala. According to the CII-Mc Kinsy report Medical Tourism industry in Kerala is expected to be worth $4 billion by 2017. Confederation of Indian Industry along with Kerala Government is organizing an International Conference on Health Tourism 2015 at Le Meridian, Kochi, Ernakulam on 30-31of October 2015. The event aims to promote Kerala as the hub for Medical Tourism in the country by 2020. The competitiveness of Kerala in health tourism is enhanced by the attractiveness of the alternative systems of medicine, especially ayurveda, for the foreign tourists. Kerala is also known as land of Ayurveda for its traditional medicines which aim at providing rejuvenation, longevity and relaxation to stressed and strained. More over Kerala has a potential to attract tourists around the world due to its cultural diversity, perfect beaches and fabulous cuisine mixed with a pinch of oriental mysticism. Kerala and Ayurveda have virtually become synonymous with each other. World-class facilities are also available in the other traditional forms of medicine as well as modern medical treatment

Incidencia de estudiantes monitores, en el rendimiento académico de educandos de Matemática IV, de la carrera de Ingeniería Civil, en la UNI Sede Regional del Norte, II semestre 2009

La presente investigación permitió la descripción y análisis de la incidencia de los estudiantes monitores, como facilitadores de aprendizaje, en el rendimiento académico de 51 estudiantes, integrantes del grupo (2M1) del turno matutino, de segundo año de la carrera de Ingeniera Civil, que cursaron la asignatura de matemática IV en el segundo semestre académico 2009. El enfoque  metodológico de la investigación fue un estudio de caso descriptivo, que integró en su desarrollo el paradigma tradicional cuantitativo de investigación, y la investigación cualitativa. Es un estudio longitudinal, porque se analizó todo el proceso de incidencia, desde el inicio del semestre hasta el final del mismo. En la investigación, se seleccionaron 5 estudiantes monitores, tomando en cuenta, principalmente, los criterios del docente tutor. En el grupo de estudio se obtuvo una nota promedio de 85, como resultado de la investigación, al comparar este promedio con los tres últimos años, se pudo comprobar que este aumentó, dado que el año 2006 fue de 59, en el 2007 de 65 y en el 2008 de 66. También, la cantidad de estudiantes aprobados en el 2009, fue superior a los años anteriores. El logro más relevante fue que, la implementación de los estudiantes monitores incidió en la mejora del rendimiento académico en la asignatura de matemática IV. Esto permitió crear las condiciones para la aplicación de evaluaciones  sistemáticas, mejor disposición al aprendizaje, así como mayor comunicación entre los estudiantes y la docente

Has the digitalisation of the leisure air travel search industry been enabled by the characteristics of multi-sided platforms (MSPs)?

The air travel industry has been a front-runner in the development and adoption of new technologies in the past half century. The entry of metasearch companies into the leisure air travel search industry has changed the dynamic of consumer search completely. These metasearch companies operate a multi-sided platform in which they provide end users a free service where they can search, compare and analyse all of the flight options available them. This research studies whether the distinctive characteristics of multi-sided platforms (MSPs) have been the key enablers for the leisure air travel search industry to go through digitalisation. The main theoretical basis for this research was built from literature on platform technologies, with a focus on multi-sided platforms, and digitalisation. Based on past literature, a theoretical lens was developed, in order to identify the specific MSP characteristics that would used to analyse the upcoming data. A plan was created to conduct a qualitative study aimed at obtaining personal views and opinions on various themes regarding digitalisation in the leisure air travel search industry. The qualitative data was obtained utilizing both semi-structured interviews, as well as, written questionnaires, and the data received from the research was analysed in order to find similarities and themes regarding the research topics. The key themes that were formed from the qualitative study were all analysed regarding why they were viewed as important factors within the industry and how they had an effect on the way that the industry has gone through its digitalisation. The themes that emerged were technological milestones, seamless communication, customer loyalty programs, knowing your customers, and ownership of data. Each theme was also analysed in connection to the research question, in order to get overall conclusions for the study. Generally, the results from the study reflected well the existing literature on areas such as the benefits of using multi-sided platforms, the utilisation of customer loyalty programs, and the ability to successfully utilise customer data. In addition, the study provided great insight on the importance for a company to know ones customer and having the ability to recognize and adapt to changing customer demands. This study provides a good basis for further research on the topic, which could include a more extensive study from the consumer side, on what they value the most during the search phase of their leisure flights, and how they see the developments within the industry have changed their entire user experience