Orchestrate: A System Demonstrating Easy Substitution of Browsing Semantics Engines

The Orchestrate project explored the separation of a browsing semantics engine from the other user-visible components of a hypertext or other linking system. This allows more flexibility in the semantics of the links themselves, enabling more variety with regards to conditionals behind links, and ultimately will greatly help the implementation of new and different linking semantics. The project builds upon much previous work in hypertext and linking semantics. The Orchestrate platform was designed and implemented to model several new and novel linking semantics and behaviors. It was built with the goal of enabling further work and development to take place from within or without the program, and will very probably be used in future studies and enable future academic papers for submission to scholarly venues. Once initial review, improvements and testing of the initial build of the Orchestrate platform was completed, additional features and tests using various browsing semantics methods were undertaken

Graph Based Representation of Walden’s Paths in Drupal 7

The Walden’s Paths Project is used by different communities in order to create and use linear paths that link to documents available on the web. Walden’s Paths has been implemented as a web application using Drupal where a web service handles the core functionality of storage and representation of a Path data structure and a user interface uses this service for authoring and browsing of the paths. I have implemented an interactive user interface for representation of information for educational purpose in the form of a graph instead of a linear representation. This representation helps the users of the path to better understand the subject by understanding the conceptual structure of subject. The authoring interface is simple and easy to use and enables the authors of Walden’s Paths to represent the conceptual structure of a subject domain in the form of a graph. It allows for graphical representation of different types of relationships between various topic included in the Walden’s Paths. Such graphical representation of educational resources is similar to the concept of Topic Maps. The authoring tool for the Walden’s Paths has been implemented in Drupal 7. This Drupal 7 version of Walden’s Paths extends its implementation from a hypertextual system to a hypermedia system by supporting different document types like images, PDF, etc

A Data-Driven Approach to Measure Web Site Navigability

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New challenges for scholarly communication in the digital era - changing roles and expectations in the academic community: a scholarly report

Journal ArticleThis conference, co-sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, the American Association of University Professors, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Association of American University Presses, and the Coalition for Networked Information, was held March 26-27, 1999, in Washington, D.C. It was organized, in part, as a follow-up to a similar conference held in September 1997, titled The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis

Moving Forward : A Feminist Analysis of Mobile Music Streaming

The importance of understanding gender, space and mobility as co-constructed in public space has been emphasized by feminist researchers (Massey 2005, Hanson 2010). And within feminist theory materiality, affect and emotions has been described as central for experienced subjectivity (Ahmed 2012). Music listening while moving through public space has previously been studied as a way of creating a private auditory bubble for the individual (Bull 2000, Cahir & Werner 2013) and in this article feminist theory on emotion (Ahmed 2010) and space (Massey 2005) is employed in order to understand mobile music streaming. More specifically it discusses what can happen when mobile media technology is used to listen to music in public space and investigates interconnectedness of bodies, music, technology and space. The article is based on autoethnographic material of mobile music streaming in public and concludes that a forward movement shaped by happiness is a desired result of mobile music streaming. The valuing of ‘forward’ is critically examined from the point of feminist theory and the failed music listening moments are also discussed in terms of emotion and space

Moving Forward : A Feminist Analysis of Mobile Music Streaming

The importance of understanding gender, space and mobility as co-constructed in public space has been emphasized by feminist researchers (Massey 2005, Hanson 2010). And within feminist theory materiality, affect and emotions has been described as central for experienced subjectivity (Ahmed 2012). Music listening while moving through public space has previously been studied as a way of creating a private auditory bubble for the individual (Bull 2000, Cahir & Werner 2013) and in this article feminist theory on emotion (Ahmed 2010) and space (Massey 2005) is employed in order to understand mobile music streaming. More specifically it discusses what can happen when mobile media technology is used to listen to music in public space and investigates interconnectedness of bodies, music, technology and space. The article is based on autoethnographic material of mobile music streaming in public and concludes that a forward movement shaped by happiness is a desired result of mobile music streaming. The valuing of ‘forward’ is critically examined from the point of feminist theory and the failed music listening moments are also discussed in terms of emotion and space

Recall of Landmarks in Information Space

Research on navigation and landmarks in physical space, information space and virtual reality environments indicates that landmarks play an important role in all types of navigation. This dissertation tackles the problem of defining and evaluating the characteristics of landmarks in information space. This work validates a recent theory that three types of characteristics, structural, visual and semantic, are important for effective landmarks.This dissertation applies concepts and techniques from the extensive body of research on physical space navigation to the investigation of landmarks on a web site in the World Wide Web. Data was collected in two experiments to examine characteristics of web pages on the University of Pittsburgh web site. In addition, objective measurements were made to examine the characteristics of web pages with relation to the experimental data. The two experiments examined subjects' knowledge, use and evaluation of web pages. This research is unique in research on web navigation in its use of experimental techniques that ask subjects to recall from memory possible navigation paths and URLs.Two measures of landmark quality were used to examine the characteristics of landmarks; one, an algorithm that incorporated objective measures of the structural, visual and semantic characteristics of each web page, and the second, a measure based on the experimental data regarding subjects' knowledge and evaluation of the page.Analysis of this data from a web space confirms the tri-partite theory of characteristics of landmarks. Significant positive correlations were found between the objective and subjective landmark measures, indicating that this work is an important step toward the ability to objectively evaluate web pages and web site design in terms of landmarks. This dissertation further suggests that researchers can utilize the characteristics to analyze and improve the design of information spaces, leading to more effective navigation

Solving the broken link problem in Walden's Paths

With the extent of the web expanding at an increasing rate, the problems caused by broken links are reaching epidemic proportions. Studies have indicated that a substantial number of links on the Internet are broken. User surveys indicate broken links are considered the third biggest problem faced on the Internet. Currently Walden's Paths Path Manager tool is capable of detecting the degree and type of change within a page in a path. Although it also has the ability to highlight missing pages or broken links, it has no method of correcting them thus leaving the broken link problem unsolved. This thesis proposes a solution to this problem in Walden's Paths. The solution centers on the idea that "significant" keyphrases extracted from the original page can be used to accurately locate the document using a search engine. This thesis proposes an algorithm to extract representative keyphrases to locate exact copies of the original page. In the absence of an exact copy, a similar but separate algorithm is used to extract keyphrases that will help locating similar pages that can be substituted in place of the missing page. Both sets of keyphrases are stored as additions to the page signature in the Path Manager tool and can be used when the original page is removed from its current location on the Web