TEI and Microsoft: a marriage made in...

In several on-going projects we were faced with the dilemma of how to reconcile our goal of delivering standardly encoded historical documents, yet have the actual editing and annotation performed by researchers and students who had no knowledge of XML and TEI, and, for the most part, no interest in learning them. The solution we developed consists of allowing the annotators use familiar and flexible editors, such as Microsoft Word (for structural annotation of documents) and Excel (for word-level linguistic annotation) and automatically converting these into TEI. Given the unconstrained nature of such editors this sounds like a recipe for disaster. But the solution crucially depends on a dedicated Web service, to which the annotators can up-load their files; these are then immediately converted to XML/TEI and from it back to a visual format, either HTML or Excel XML, and presented to the annotators. These then get immediate feedback about the quality of their encoding in the source, and can thus correct errors before they accumulate; and the responsibility for the correct encoding rests with the annotators, rather than with the developers of the conversion procedure. The paper describes the web service and details its use in three projects. The main conclusions are that the proposed solution is appropriate for shallow encodings, and nevertheless does require producing detailed annotation guidelines

Type Theories and Lexical Networks: using Serious Games as the basis for Multi-Sorted Typed Systems

In this paper, we show how a rich lexico-semantic network which has been built using serious games, JeuxDeMots, can help us in grounding our semantic ontologies as well as different sorts of information in doing formal semantics using rich or modern type theories (type theories within the tradition of Martin Löf). We discuss the domain of base types, adjectival and verbal types, hyperonymy/hyponymy relations as well as more advanced issues like homophony and polysemy. We show how one can take advantage of this wealth in a formal compositional semantics framework. This is a way to sidestep the problem of deciding how your type ontology should look like once you have made a move to a many sorted type system. Furthermore, we show how this kind of information can be extracted  from JeuxdeMots and inserted into a proof-assistant like Coq in order to perform reasoning tasks using modern type theoretic semantics

A human factors perspective on volunteered geographic information

This thesis takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the unique abilities of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) to enhance the utility of online mashups in ways not achievable with Professional Geographic Information (PGI). The key issues currently limiting the use of successful of VGI are the concern for quality, accuracy and value of the information, as well as the polarisation and bias of views within the user community. This thesis reviews different theoretical approaches in Human Factors, Geography, Information Science and Computer Science to help understand the notion of user judgements relative to VGI within an online environment (Chapter 2). Research methods relevant to a human factors investigation are also discussed (Chapter 3). (Chapter 5) The scoping study established the fundamental insights into the terminology and nature of VGI and PGI, a range of users were engaged through a series of qualitative interviews. This led the development of a framework on VGI (Chapter 4), and comparative description of users in relation to one another through a value framework (Chapter 5). Study Two produced qualitative multi-methods investigation into how users perceive VGI and PGI in use (Chapter 6), demonstrating similarities and the unique ability for VGI to provide utility to consumers. Chapter Seven and Study Three brought insight into the specific abilities for VGI to enhance the user judgement of online information within an information relevance context (Chapter 7 and 8). In understanding the outcomes of these studies, this thesis discusses how users perceive VGI as different from PGI in terms of its benefit to consumers from a user centred design perspective (Chapter 9). In particular, the degree to which user concerns are valid, the limitation of VGI in application and its potential strengths in enriching the user experiences of consumers engaged within an information search. In conclusion, specific contributions and avenues for further work are highlighted (Chapter 10)