User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

Mining cross-document relationships from text

The paper argues that automatic link generation and typing methods are needed to find and maintain cross document links in large and growing textual collections. Such links are important to organise information and to support search and navigation. We present an experimental study on mining cross document links from a collection of 5000 documents. We identify a set of link types and show that the value of semantic similarity is a good distinguishing indicator

Linked Data - the story so far

The term “Linked Data” refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions— the Web of Data. In this article, the authors present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. They describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward

Structured representation for requirements and specifications

This document was generated in support of NASA contract NAS1-18586, Design and Validation of Digital Flight Control Systems suitable for Fly-By-Wire Applications, Task Assignment 2. Task 2 is associated with a formal representation of requirements and specifications. In particular, this document contains results associated with the development of a Wide-Spectrum Requirements Specification Language (WSRSL) that can be used to express system requirements and specifications in both stylized and formal forms. Included with this development are prototype tools to support the specification language. In addition a preliminary requirements specification methodology based on the WSRSL has been developed. Lastly, the methodology has been applied to an Advanced Subsonic Civil Transport Flight Control System

Information Seek and Retrieval Mechanisms Based on Interactive Dynamics Linking Technology

The paper discusses the approach to dynamic hypertext technology used for query expansion and development. Two schemes of links creation on the fly are presented. The first one, System controlled scheme, generates (computes) hypertext links on retrieved documents output phase. In the second one, User controlled scheme, terms in viewed document are highlighted (and can be further used as a query in selected resource by one click) in accordance with user profile. The link creation mechanism is specified parametrically through the specification of the resource and selected (i.e. controlled) by the user. Linking mechanism is considered as a component of IR&S process, well controlled by user thought graphic interface.     Keywords: Information Retrieval Interface; Dynamic Linking; Hypertext Technology; System-Human Information Processing; Dynamic Query Reformulation