8 research outputs found

    AN ARCHITECTURE FOR END-USER DEVELOPMENT SUPPORTING GLOBAL COMMUNITIES

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    Increasingly organizations require their members to act not only as end users but also as developers of their tools, i.e. to create, shape and adapt the software artifacts they use without becoming computer experts. In this way, they move from being mere consumers to active producers of knowledge and developers of software artifacts. This leads to an evolution of the work environment and the organization and force the designers to adapt the software artifacts to meet the needs of the end users and to manage this co-evolution of users and software. Moreover, the achievements of social media, Web 2.0 and the advanced information technologies lead to an upward diffusion of global communities, geographically distributed, that collaborate asynchronously on the same design projects. The members of global communities belong to different cultures, therefore cultural boundaries need to be transcended. The mantra "making all voices heard" has to be evolved into "making all voices heard and understood" to allow the proper participation of end users to knowledge and software artifacts creation, sharing and evolution. To respond to these challenges, the thesis presents a semiotic model for end-user development and a Web architecture that supports 1) an interaction localized to end user\u2019s culture, domain of activity and digital platform in use, and 2) the collaborative creation and evolution of knowledge and software artifacts. The architecture is Ajax-like, component-based, Web service-based, and underpins re-use and evolution of software

    Annotation threads in MADCOW 2.0.

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    madcow is a system for annotation of Web content, sup- porting the production and exploration of private and public annotations on text, images and videos in a Web page. Its design starts from the main requirement that the annotation activity must not disrupt the normal browsing of Web pages by a user. madcow allows interaction with the annotated portions of the page to provide access to the relative anno- tations. Conversely, the representation of the existing notes supports different forms of exploration of the Web page, and can become the starting point for further navigation over the Web. A uniform style of interaction has been adopted for creating and accessing annotations on text, images and videos, and some novel solutions have been introduced to cope with overlaps between the annotated portions. The annotation user experience is facilitated by enabling forms of in-place annotation and manipulation of both the anno- tated portion and the annotation content

    Annotation Threads in MADCOW 2.0

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    madcow is a system for annotation of Web content, sup- porting the production and exploration of private and public annotations on text, images and videos in a Web page. Its design starts from the main requirement that the annotation activity must not disrupt the normal browsing of Web pages by a user. madcow allows interaction with the annotated portions of the page to provide access to the relative anno- tations. Conversely, the representation of the existing notes supports dierent forms of exploration of the Web page, and can become the starting point for further navigation over the Web. A uniform style of interaction has been adopted for creating and accessing annotations on text, images and videos, and some novel solutions have been introduced to cope with overlaps between the annotated portions. The annotation user experience is facilitated by enabling forms of in-place annotation and manipulation of both the anno- tated portion and the annotation content

    Social impact retrieval: measuring author inïŹ‚uence on information retrieval

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    The increased presence of technologies collectively referred to as Web 2.0 mean the entire process of new media production and dissemination has moved away from an authorcentric approach. Casual web users and browsers are increasingly able to play a more active role in the information creation process. This means that the traditional ways in which information sources may be validated and scored must adapt accordingly. In this thesis we propose a new way in which to look at a user's contributions to the network in which they are present, using these interactions to provide a measure of authority and centrality to the user. This measure is then used to attribute an query-independent interest score to each of the contributions the author makes, enabling us to provide other users with relevant information which has been of greatest interest to a community of like-minded users. This is done through the development of two algorithms; AuthorRank and MessageRank. We present two real-world user experiments which focussed around multimedia annotation and browsing systems that we built; these systems were novel in themselves, bringing together video and text browsing, as well as free-text annotation. Using these systems as examples of real-world applications for our approaches, we then look at a larger-scale experiment based on the author and citation networks of a ten year period of the ACM SIGIR conference on information retrieval between 1997-2007. We use the citation context of SIGIR publications as a proxy for annotations, constructing large social networks between authors. Against these networks we show the eïŹ€ectiveness of incorporating user generated content, or annotations, to improve information retrieval

    Fédération et amélioration des activités documentaires par la pratique d'annotation collective

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    Daily activities carried out with paper documents are nowadays transposed onto their digital counterparts. A plethora of software enable people to achieve document-related activities. In particular, these comprise information retrieval used while drafting new documents. Documents may later be disseminated, exploited and organized in readers' document repositories. Our study on current systems showed two main limitations. On the one hand, any system meets only one or at most two activities. The underlying activity compartmentalization is detrimental to users—who have to master and juggle several systems—as well as to systems—having partial knowledge of users' needs. On the other hand, systems do not harness the organizational members' document-related activities. The proposed contribution is twofold. Firstly, we designed a model for federating the document-related activities through collective annotation practice. Associated with this model are collective processes intending to give each activity the benefit of the other ones. This also fosters inter-user benefit as people take advantage of the group and vice versa. Actually, the purpose of the proposed approach is twofold: simplifying document access and appropriation while anticipating individuals' needs to offer them unintrusive assistance. Secondly, our approach exploits the organizational members' document repositories. Although they do contain highly valuable information being collected with a lot of efforts, they paradoxically remain dormant. With the aim of harnessing these information sources, we designed a multi-faceted interface for accessing any organization's document resources. This interface allows the exploration of documents as well as users of these documents, according to various dimensions and granularity levels. Our proposals were validated through several experiments and the TafAnnote prototype development. They demonstrate the feasibility of our approach which federates document-related activities with collective annotation practice.Les activitĂ©s documentaires couramment rĂ©alisĂ©es sur les documents papier sont aujourd'hui transposĂ©es sur leurs homologues Ă©lectroniques. Ainsi, une kyrielle de systĂšmes permet de mener Ă  bien les activitĂ©s liĂ©es aux documents. Ils permettent notamment de rechercher de l'information utilisĂ©e pour rĂ©diger un document qui peut ĂȘtre ensuite diffusĂ©, exploitĂ© et organisĂ© par ses lecteurs dans leur espace documentaire. Notre Ă©tude des systĂšmes existants a permis de rĂ©vĂ©ler deux limites principales. PremiĂšrement, un systĂšme ne rĂ©pond gĂ©nĂ©ralement qu'Ă  une seule, voire Ă  deux activitĂ©s. Ce cloisonnement des activitĂ©s est prĂ©judiciable Ă  la fois pour les usagers (qui doivent maĂźtriser et jongler entre de nombreux outils) et pour les systĂšmes (qui ne possĂšdent qu'une reprĂ©sentation parcellaire des besoins des usagers). DeuxiĂšmement, les systĂšmes n'exploitent pas les rĂ©sultats des activitĂ©s documentaires des membres organisationnels.Notre contribution comprend deux volets. PremiĂšrement, nous proposons un modĂšle fĂ©dĂ©rant les activitĂ©s documentaires autour de la pratique d'annotation collective. Des processus collectifs y sont associĂ©s afin d'exploiter chaque activitĂ© documentaire pour enrichir les autres, apportant ainsi une assistance Ă  chaque individu en tirant parti du groupe, et vice versa. Le but de cette approche originale est double : simplifier l'accĂšs et l'appropriation des documents tout en anticipant les besoins de l'usager pour lui offrir une assistance non intrusive. DeuxiĂšmement, nous proposons d'exploiter les espaces documentaires des membres organisationnels. Bien qu'ils contiennent des informations Ă  haute valeur pour l'organisation, collectĂ©es au prix de coĂ»teux efforts, ces espaces demeurent paradoxalement en sommeil. Afin de tirer parti de ces espaces documentaires, nous proposons une interface multi-facettes d'accĂšs au capital documentaire d'une organisation. Cette interface permet l'exploration des documents et individus de l'organisation selon diffĂ©rents axes et niveaux de granularitĂ©. Nos propositions ont Ă©tĂ© validĂ©es par diffĂ©rentes expĂ©rimentations ainsi que par le dĂ©veloppement du prototype TafAnnote qui souligne la faisabilitĂ© de notre approche fĂ©dĂ©rant les activitĂ©s documentaires autour de l'annotation collective

    A Probabilistic Framework for Information Modelling and Retrieval Based on User Annotations on Digital Objects

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    Annotations are a means to make critical remarks, to explain and comment things, to add notes and give opinions, and to relate objects. Nowadays, they can be found in digital libraries and collaboratories, for example as a building block for scientific discussion on the one hand or as private notes on the other. We further find them in product reviews, scientific databases and many "Web 2.0" applications; even well-established concepts like emails can be regarded as annotations in a certain sense. Digital annotations can be (textual) comments, markings (i.e. highlighted parts) and references to other documents or document parts. Since annotations convey information which is potentially important to satisfy a user's information need, this thesis tries to answer the question of how to exploit annotations for information retrieval. It gives a first answer to the question if retrieval effectiveness can be improved with annotations. A survey of the "annotation universe" reveals some facets of annotations; for example, they can be content level annotations (extending the content of the annotation object) or meta level ones (saying something about the annotated object). Besides the annotations themselves, other objects created during the process of annotation can be interesting for retrieval, these being the annotated fragments. These objects are integrated into an object-oriented model comprising digital objects such as structured documents and annotations as well as fragments. In this model, the different relationships among the various objects are reflected. From this model, the basic data structure for annotation-based retrieval, the structured annotation hypertext, is derived. In order to thoroughly exploit the information contained in structured annotation hypertexts, a probabilistic, object-oriented logical framework called POLAR is introduced. In POLAR, structured annotation hypertexts can be modelled by means of probabilistic propositions and four-valued logics. POLAR allows for specifying several relationships among annotations and annotated (sub)parts or fragments. Queries can be posed to extract the knowledge contained in structured annotation hypertexts. POLAR supports annotation-based retrieval, i.e. document and discussion search, by applying an augmentation strategy (knowledge augmentation, propagating propositions from subcontexts like annotations, or relevance augmentation, where retrieval status values are propagated) in conjunction with probabilistic inference, where P(d -> q), the probability that a document d implies a query q, is estimated. POLAR's semantics is based on possible worlds and accessibility relations. It is implemented on top of four-valued probabilistic Datalog. POLAR's core retrieval functionality, knowledge augmentation with probabilistic inference, is evaluated for discussion and document search. The experiments show that all relevant POLAR objects, merged annotation targets, fragments and content annotations, are able to increase retrieval effectiveness when used as a context for discussion or document search. Additional experiments reveal that we can determine the polarity of annotations with an accuracy of around 80%

    SportsAnno: what do you think?

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    The automatic summarisation of sports video is of growing importance with the increased availability of on-demand content. Consumers who are unable to view events live often have a desire to watch a summary which allows then to quickly come to terms with all that has happened during a sporting event. Sports forums show that it is not only summaries that are desirable but also the opportunity to share one’s own point of view and discuss the opinions with a community of similar users. In this paper we give an overview of the ways in which annotations have been used to augment existing visual media. We present SportsAnno, a system developed to summarise World Cup 2006 matches and provide a means for open discussion of events within these matches
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