Designing a digital ecosystem for the new museum environment: the Virtual Museum of the Pacific

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a social media platform for a digital ecosystem, which enables a variety of user communities to engage with the Pacific Collection of the Australian Museum. The success of the system depends on facilitating the development of culturally relevant folksonomies and encouraging a conversation between online communities. In this paper we explore the relationships between stakeholders, folksonomy and taxonomy, to reveal the design strategies which inform this digital ecosystem. Our analysis defines the scope for the social tagging component of our information model and discusses how users might interact with objects (in terms of their knowledge base) and also contribute to ongoing taxonomic definitions. Given its capacity to span both collection management and community access issues, we contend that the Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a significant model for online community interaction in the contemporary museum environment

Contextual Authority Tagging: Expertise Location via Social Labeling

This study investigates the possibility of a group of people making explicit their tacit knowledge about one another's areas of expertise. Through a design consisting of a modified Delphi Study, group members are asked to label both their own and each others' areas of expertise over the course of five rounds. Statistical analysis and qualitative evaluation of 10 participating organizations suggest they were successful and that, with simple keywords, group members can convey the salient areas of expertise of their colleagues to a degree that is deemed similar'' and of high quality by both third parties and those being evaluated. More work needs to be done to make this information directly actionable, but the foundational aspects have been identified. In a world with a democratization of voices from all around and increasing demands on our time and attention, this study suggests that simple, aggregated third-party expertise evaluations can augment our ongoing struggle for quality information source selection. These evaluations can serve as loose credentials when more expensive or heavyweight reputation cues may not be viable

Estudio de la utilización de etiquetas en aplicaciones para buscar y compartir información

En los últimos años, estamos asistiendo a un gran cambio en el modo en que Internet se relaciona con el mundo. Cada vez más popular, Internet ha dejado de limitarse a mostrar contenidos fijos para convertirse en un medio para la comunicación de los individuos. Una enorme cantidad de contenido web ha comenzado a ser generado a través de tecnologías sociales como weblogs, wikis o foros, tecnologías que permiten acceder a la comunicación y publicación de contenidos en web muy fácilmente, limitando cada vez más los conocimientos necesarios para su uso. Estos nuevos patrones en el modo en que la información se genera y multiplica hacen necesarios métodos de clasificación de información, capaces de manejar y organizar estas cantidades. Los métodos de clasificación tradicionales usados hasta ahora (p.e. sistemas jerárquicos) muestran limitaciones al enfrentarse a este conjunto creciente de contenidos, debido entre otros motivos a estar controlados por una autoridad central. Frente a ellos, un nuevo sistema de clasificación ha surgido al amparo precisamente de Internet, a raíz de su introducción en sitios web como del.icio.us o Flickr: las folksonomías. En ellas, es una comunidad de usuarios la encargada de aumentar los contenidos del sistema, añadiendo cada usuario recursos, y describiéndolos con una serie de etiquetas, esto es, palabras sueltas elegidas libremente, sin limitaciones de vocabularios controlados o de otro tipo. Este proyecto dará una panorámica pormenorizada sobre variados aspectos relacionados con esta nueva tecnología, y de entre ellos, se hará especial énfasis en el estudio de las ideas de mejora aplicadas hasta el momento; después de todo, las folksonomías son aún en este momento una idea en desarrollo, alimentada y por muy diversos estudios académicos y sistemas web reales. En este proyecto, hemos querido estudiar estas posibilidades de mejora, centrándonos en una: la recomendación automática de etiquetas. Se ha buscado comprobar hasta qué punto estos sistemas resultan de utilidad a los usuarios, si son utilizados, y qué provecho obtienen de ellos. Para ello, se ha desarrollado una aplicación web publicada para su libre uso, en que diversas herramientas de recomendación son ofrecidas a los usuarios, encargados de ejecutar diversas tareas relacionadas con el etiquetado y búsqueda de imágenes. Los datos de su interacción son recogidos y estudiados, obteniendo diversas conclusiones acerca de su comportamiento general en el manejo de estos sistemas con ayuda de herramientas de recomendación. ____________________________________In the last years, a great change has occurred in the way in which Internet is used. More and more popular, Internet has stopped limiting itself to show fixed contents, to truly become a mean for human communication. An enormous amount of Web content has begun being generated through social technologies like weblogs, wikis or forums, technologies that allow an easy communication and publication of contents in Web, limiting more and more the knowledge needed for its use. These new patrons in the way in which the information is generated make necessary new methods for the classification of information, able to handle and to organize these large amounts. The traditional methods of classification used until now (v.g. hierarchic systems) show limitations when facing this increasing set of contents, for the reason (among others) of being controlled by a central authority. In front of them, a new classification system has arisen, as a result of its introduction in Web sites like del.icio.us or Flickr: the folksonomies. In them, a community of users is in charge of increasing the contents of the system, each user adding resources, and describing them with a series of tags, a set of words chosen freely, without limitations of controlled vocabularies. This project will give a general view on varied aspects related to this new technology, and among them, special emphasis on the different ideas for folksonomy improvement applied until the moment; after all, the folksonomies are still a developing idea, fed by very diverse academic studies and real Web systems. In this project, we have tried to study these possibilities of improvement, focusing on one: the automatic recommendation of tags. We have tried to check to what extent these systems are useful to the users, whether they are used, and what benefit do they obtain from them. For this reason, it has been developed a web application, which is published for its public use, in which diverse tools of recommendation are offered to the users, who are asked to execute diverse tasks related to the labelling and search of images. The data of their interaction are picked up and studied, obtaining diverse conclusions about the general behavior of users in the interaction with these systems with the help of recommendation tools.Ingeniería en Informátic

Understanding people through the aggregation of their digital footprints

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 160-172).Every day, millions of people encounter strangers online. We read their medical advice, buy their products, and ask them out on dates. Yet our views of them are very limited; we see individual communication acts rather than the person(s) as a whole. This thesis contends that socially-focused machine learning and visualization of archived digital footprints can improve the capacity of social media to help form impressions of online strangers. Four original designs are presented that each examine the social fabric of a different existing online world. The designs address unique perspectives on the problem of and opportunities offered by online impression formation. The first work, Is Britney Spears Span?, examines a way of prototyping strangers on first contact by modeling their past behaviors across a social network. Landscape of Words identifies cultural and topical trends in large online publics. Personas is a data portrait that characterizes individuals by collating heterogenous textual artifacts. The final design, Defuse, navigates and visualizes virtual crowds using metrics grounded in sociology. A reflection on these experimental endeavors is also presented, including a formalization of the problem and considerations for future research. A meta-critique by a panel of domain experts completes the discussion.by Aaron Robert Zinman.Ph.D

Aspects of Broad Folksonomies

Folksonomies, collaboratively created sets of metadata, are becoming more and more important for organising information and knowledge of communites in the Web. While for a single user the difference to keyword assignment is marginal, the power of folksonomies emerges from the collaborative aspects. Folksonomies are already issue of research. Within this publication we analyse underlying statistical properties of broad folksonomies aiming to identify laws and characteristics, which allow inferring properties for folksonomy based retrieval. The actual benefit of folksonomies for retrieval and the derived methods are concluded from experiments with aggregated data from del.icio.us 1.