Stigmergic hyperlink's contributes to web search

Stigmergic hyperlinks are hyperlinks with a "heart beat": if used they stay healthy and online; if neglected, they fade, eventually getting replaced. Their life attribute is a relative usage measure that regular hyperlinks do not provide, hence PageRank-like measures have historically been well informed about the structure of webs of documents, but unaware of what users effectively do with the links. This paper elaborates on how to input the users’ perspective into Google’s original, structure centric, PageRank metric. The discussion then bridges to the Deep Web, some search challenges, and how stigmergic hyperlinks could help decentralize the search experience, facilitating user generated search solutions and supporting new related business models.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Virtual Institutes: Between Immersion and Communication

In the two expressions "virtual reality" and "virtual community", the term "virtual" has different meanings. A virtual reality is a depiction or, more generally speaking, a sensuous representation of reality that allows - mainly by means of interactivity - to experience various features of reality without actually being in contact with the reality depicted. Therefore, any interactive depiction that is able to imitate reality to such an extent that a high degree of sensory-motor immersion becomes possible is called a virtual reality (Heim 1998, 6f). Since reality is always much more complex than its depiction and full of unpredictable surprises, hardly ever a user has doubts about the difference between the depiction and the thing depicted. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for preferring the imitation to the reality: at least, the imitation is usually not as dangerous as reality sometimes turns out to be. Accordingly, quite different platforms for virtual institutes may be used emphasizing either the immersion aspect or the communication aspect. The decision for a platform depends on the goals pursued with the institute: text-based chat systems allow virtual communities to flourish, single-user VRML scenes convey a highly immersive 3D impression to its users. This is particularly true for virtual institutes realized as a 3D environment, as well as for corresponding virtual communities since 3D environments are adequate for certain tasks only. As an overall framework for the evaluation it is helpful to distinguish three major application areas: research, presentation, and communicative work. The Virtual Institute for Image Science (VIB), which we would like to describe in the following (3) as a case study, is almost exclusively designed for the third task: communicative working. It intends to provide a working space persons can share for joint projects despite being physically separated. Before describing the VIB in more detail we would like to give an overview of virtual institutes between the poles of realistic immersion and of communication in a community (2). The discussion of the case study leads to some more general considerations about the balance virtual institutes must find along that bi-polar dimension (4). In the concluding remarks we focus on the technical tools for virtual communities in 3D presently available

mFish Alpha Pilot: Building a Roadmap for Effective Mobile Technology to Sustain Fisheries and Improve Fisher Livelihoods.

In June 2014 at the Our Ocean Conference in Washington, DC, United States Secretary of State John Kerry announced the ambitious goal of ending overfishing by 2020. To support that goal, the Secretary's Office of Global Partnerships launched mFish, a public-private partnership to harness the power of mobile technology to improve fisher livelihoods and increase the sustainability of fisheries around the world. The US Department of State provided a grant to 50in10 to create a pilot of mFish that would allow for the identification of behaviors and incentives that might drive more fishers to adopt novel technology. In May 2015 50in10 and Future of Fish designed a pilot to evaluate how to improve adoption of a new mobile technology platform aimed at improving fisheries data capture and fisher livelihoods. Full report

Process Support for Cooperative Work on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is becoming a dominating factor in information technology. Consequently, computer supported cooperative work on the Web has recently drawn a lot of attention. “Process Support for Cooperative Work” (PSCW) is a Web based system supporting both structured and unstructured forms of cooperation. It is a combination of the “Basic Support for Cooperative Work” (BSCW) shared workspace system and the Merlin Process Support Environment. The current PSCW prototype offers a loose connection, in effect extending BSCW with a gateway to Merlin. With this prototype we have successfully addressed the technical issues involved; further integration of functionality should not pose any real problems. We focus on the technical side of the PSCW system, which gives a good insight into the issues that have to be addressed generally in the construction of Web based groupware

Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features

Supporting knowledge exchange isn't easy: lessons learnt from a case study

A knowledge management system is introduced in a large insurance company. It is meant to become a virtual knowledge network for a group of insurance professionals. Despite the fact that the introduction was met with enthusiasm and user participation in the design was ensured, the system did not live up to the expectations. In this paper we investigate this failure by uncovering and analyzing the requirements engineering processes underlying the system's\ud conception, design and introduction. The demise of the system can be attributed to a lack of attention for the use context of the end users and a tendency in the development process to focus mostly on the technical solution instead of problem analysis

TopExNet: Entity-Centric Network Topic Exploration in News Streams

The recent introduction of entity-centric implicit network representations of unstructured text offers novel ways for exploring entity relations in document collections and streams efficiently and interactively. Here, we present TopExNet as a tool for exploring entity-centric network topics in streams of news articles. The application is available as a web service at https://topexnet.ifi.uni-heidelberg.de/ .Comment: Published in Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2019, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, February 11-15, 201

Towards a Cloud-Based Service for Maintaining and Analyzing Data About Scientific Events

We propose the new cloud-based service OpenResearch for managing and analyzing data about scientific events such as conferences and workshops in a persistent and reliable way. This includes data about scientific articles, participants, acceptance rates, submission numbers, impact values as well as organizational details such as program committees, chairs, fees and sponsors. OpenResearch is a centralized repository for scientific events and supports researchers in collecting, organizing, sharing and disseminating information about scientific events in a structured way. An additional feature currently under development is the possibility to archive web pages along with the extracted semantic data in order to lift the burden of maintaining new and old conference web sites from public research institutions. However, the main advantage is that this cloud-based repository enables a comprehensive analysis of conference data. Based on extracted semantic data, it is possible to determine quality estimations, scientific communities, research trends as well the development of acceptance rates, fees, and number of participants in a continuous way complemented by projections into the future. Furthermore, data about research articles can be systematically explored using a content-based analysis as well as citation linkage. All data maintained in this crowd-sourcing platform is made freely available through an open SPARQL endpoint, which allows for analytical queries in a flexible and user-defined way.Comment: A completed version of this paper had been accepted in SAVE-SD workshop 2017 at WWW conferenc

Uniform: The Form Validation Language

Digital forms are becoming increasingly more prevalent but the ease of creation is not. Web Forms are difficult to produce and validate. This design project seeks to simplify this process. This project is comprised of two parts: a logical programming language (Uniform) and a web application. Uniform is a language that allows its users to define logical relationships between web elements and apply simple rules to individual inputs to both validate the form and manipulate its components depending on user input. Uniform provides an extra layer of abstraction to complex coding. The web app implements Uniform to provide business-level programmers with an interface to build and manage forms. Users will create form templates, manage form instances, and cooperatively complete forms through the web app. Uniform’s development is ongoing, it will receive continued support and is available as open-source. The web application is software owned and maintained by HP Inc. which will be developed further before going to market