The use of cloud technologies when studying geography by higher school students

The article is devoted to the topical issue of the cloud technologies implementation in educational process in general and when studying geography, in particular. The authors offer a selection of online services which can contribute to the effective acquisition of geographical knowledge in higher school. The publication describes such cloud technologies as Gapminder, DESA,Datawrapper.de, Time.Graphics, HP Reveal, MOZAIK education, Settera Online, Click-that-hood, Canva, Paint Instant. It is also made some theoretical generalization of their economic, technical, technological, didactic advantages and disadvantages. Visual examples of application are provided in the article. The authors make notice that in the long run the technologies under study should become a valuable educational tool of creation virtual information and education environments connected into common national, and then global, educational space

Trust in Collaborative Web Applications

Collaborative functionality is increasingly prevalent in web applications. Such functionality permits individuals to add - and sometimes modify - web content, often with minimal barriers to entry. Ideally, large bodies of knowledge can be amassed and shared in this manner. However, such software also provide a medium for nefarious persons to operate. By determining the extent to which participating content/agents can be trusted, one can identify useful contributions. In this work, we define the notion of trust for Collaborative Web Applications and survey the state-of-the-art for calculating, interpreting, and presenting trust values. Though techniques can be applied broadly, Wikipedia\u27s archetypal nature makes it a focal point for discussion

How is encyclopaedia authority established?

I embarked on this research because I wanted to explore the basis of textual authority. Such an understanding is particularly important in a world where there is such an overload of information that it is a challenge for the public to identify which publications to choose when looking for specific information. I decided to look at the case of encyclopaedias because of the widespread belief that encyclopaedias are the ultimate authorities. I also made the choice based on the observation that, besides the research on Wikipedia, the scientific community seems to overlook encyclopaedias, despite of the role these latter play as key sources of information for the general public. Two theories are combined to serve as a framework for the thesis. On the one hand, there is the theory of cognitive authority as defined by Józef Maria Bocheński, Richard De George, and Patrick Wilson. On the other hand, there is the theory of quality as defined from the various frameworks recommended by librarians and information scientists on how to assess the quality of reference works. These two theoretical frameworks are used to deconstruct the concept of authority and to highlight aspects of authority which may be particularly worthy of investigation. In this thesis, studies were conducted on the following: (1) a literature review on the origin and evolution of encyclopaedia authority throughout the history of encyclopaedia, (2) a review of previous research pertaining to the quality and the authority of Wikipedia, (3) an analysis of the publishing and dissemination of science and technology encyclopaedias published in the 21st century throughout worldwide libraries, (4) a survey of perspective of encyclopaedia authors on the role of encyclopaedias in society and on the communication of scientific uncertainties and controversies, and (5) an analysis of book reviews towards a general assessment of encyclopaedia quality. The thesis illustrates how a concept such as authority which is typically taken for granted can actually be more complex and more problematic than it appears, thereby challenging widespread beliefs in society. In particular, the thesis pinpoints potential contradictions regarding the importance of the author and the publishers in ensuring encyclopaedia authority. On a theoretical level, the thesis revisits the concept of cognitive authority and initiates a discussion on the complex interaction between authority and quality. On a more pragmatic level, the thesis contributes towards the creation of guidelines for encyclopaedia development. As an exploratory study, the thesis also identifies a range of areas which should be of priority for future research

Calculating and Presenting Trust in Collaborative Content

Collaborative functionality is increasingly prevalent in Internet applications. Such functionality permits individuals to add -- and sometimes modify -- web content, often with minimal barriers to entry. Ideally, large bodies of knowledge can be amassed and shared in this manner. However, such software also provides a medium for biased individuals, spammers, and nefarious persons to operate. By computing trust/reputation for participating agents and/or the content they generate, one can identify quality contributions. In this work, we survey the state-of-the-art for calculating trust in collaborative content. In particular, we examine four proposals from literature based on: (1) content persistence, (2) natural-language processing, (3) metadata properties, and (4) incoming link quantity. Though each technique can be applied broadly, Wikipedia provides a focal point for discussion. Finally, having critiqued how trust values are calculated, we analyze how the presentation of these values can benefit end-users and application security

TV in the Age of the Internet: Information Quality of Science Fiction TV Fansites

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Information Science, 2011Communally created Web 2.0 content on the Internet has begun to compete with information provided by traditional gatekeeper institutions, such as academic journals, medical professionals, and large corporations. On the one hand, such gatekeepers need to understand the nature of this competition, as well as to try to ensure that the general public are not endangered by poor quality information. On the other hand, advocates of free and universal access to basic social services have argued that communal efforts can provide as good or better-quality versions of commonly needed resources. This dissertation arises from these needs to understand the nature and quality of information being produced on such websites. Website-oriented information quality (IQ) literature spans at least 15 different academic fields, a survey of which identified two types of IQ: perceptual and artifactual fitness-related, and representational accuracy and completeness-related. The current project studied websites in terms of all of these, except perceptual fitness. This study may be the only of its kind to have targeted fansites: websites made by fans of a mass media franchise. Despite the Internet's becoming a primary means by which millions of people consume and co-produce their entertainment, little academic attention has been paid to the IQ of sites about the mass media. For this study, the four central non-studio-affiliated sites about a highly popular and fan-engaging science fiction television franchise, Stargate, were chosen, and their IQ examined across sites having different sizes as well as editorial and business models. As exhaustive of samples as possible were collected from each site. Based on 21 relevant variables from the IQ literature, four qualitative and 17 exploratory statistical analyses were conducted. Key findings include: five possibly new IQ criteria; smaller sites concerned more with pleasing connoisseuring fans than the general public; larger sites being targeted towards older users; professional editors serving their own interests more than users'; wikis' greater user freedom attracting more invested and balanced writers; for-profit sites being more imposing upon, and less protecting of, users than non-profit sites; and the emergence of common writing styles, themes, data fields, advertisement types, linking strategies, and page types

Використання хмарних технологій при вивченні географії учнями старших класів

The article is devoted to the topical issue of the cloud technologies implementation in educational process in general and when studying geography, in particular. The authors offer a selection of online services which can contribute to the effective acquisition of geographical knowledge in higher school. The publication describes such cloud technologies as Gapminder, DESA, Datawrapper.de, Time.Graphics, HP Reveal, MOZAIK education, Settera Online, Click-that-hood, Canva, Paint Instant. It is also made some theoretical generalization of their economic, technical, technological, didactic advantages and disadvantages. Visual examples of application are provided in the article. The authors make notice that in the long run the technologies under study should become a valuable educational tool of creation virtual information and education environments connected into common national, and then global, educational space.Стаття присвячена актуальній проблемі впровадження хмарних технологій в навчальний процес в цілому і при вивченні географії, зокрема. Автори пропонують добірку онлайн-сервісів, які можуть сприяти ефективному придбання географічних знань у старшій школі. У публікації описуються такі хмарні технології, як Gapminder, DESA, Datawrapper.de, Time.Graphics, HP Reveal, навчання MOZAIK, Settera Online, Click-that-hood, Canva, Paint Instant. Також зроблено деякий теоретичне узагальнення їх економічних, технічних, технологічних, дидактичних достоїнств і недоліків. Візуальні приклади застосування наведені в статті. Автори відзначають, що в кінцевому підсумку вивчаються технології повинні стати цінним освітнім інструментом створення віртуальної інформаційної та освітньої середовища, пов'язаної із загальним національним та глобальним освітнім простором

Linked Data Entity Summarization

On the Web, the amount of structured and Linked Data about entities is constantly growing. Descriptions of single entities often include thousands of statements and it becomes difficult to comprehend the data, unless a selection of the most relevant facts is provided. This doctoral thesis addresses the problem of Linked Data entity summarization. The contributions involve two entity summarization approaches, a common API for entity summarization, and an approach for entity data fusion

Linked knowledge sources for topic classification of microposts: a semantic graph-based approach

Short text messages, a.k.a microposts (e.g., tweets), have proven to be an effective channel for revealing information about trends and events, ranging from those related to disaster (e.g., Hurricane Sandy) to those related to violence (e.g., Egyptian revolution). Being informed about such events as they occur could be extremely important to authorities and emergency professionals by allowing such parties to immediately respond. In this work we study the problem of topic classification (TC) of microposts, which aims to automatically classify short messages based on the subject(s) discussed in them. The accurate TC of microposts however is a challenging task since the limited number of tokens in a post often implies a lack of sufficient contextual information. In order to provide contextual information to microposts, we present and evaluate several graph structures surrounding concepts present in linked knowledge sources (KSs). Traditional TC techniques enrich the content of microposts with features extracted only from the microposts content. In contrast our approach relies on the generation of different weighted semantic meta-graphs extracted from linked KSs. We introduce a new semantic graph, called category meta-graph. This novel meta-graph provides a more fine grained categorisation of concepts providing a set of novel semantic features. Our findings show that such category meta-graph features effectively improve the performance of a topic classifier of microposts. Furthermore our goal is also to understand which semantic feature contributes to the performance of a topic classifier. For this reason we propose an approach for automatic estimation of accuracy loss of a topic classifier on new, unseen microposts. We introduce and evaluate novel topic similarity measures, which capture the similarity between the KS documents and microposts at a conceptual level, considering the enriched representation of these documents. Extensive evaluation in the context of Emergency Response (ER) and Violence Detection (VD) revealed that our approach outperforms previous approaches using single KS without linked data and Twitter data only up to 31.4% in terms of F1 measure. Our main findings indicate that the new category graph contains useful information for TC and achieves comparable results to previously used semantic graphs. Furthermore our results also indicate that the accuracy of a topic classifier can be accurately predicted using the enhanced text representation, outperforming previous approaches considering content-based similarity measures

Image-based information: paintings in Wikipedia

__Purpose__ – This study aimed at understanding the use of paintings outside of an art-related context, in the English version of Wikipedia. __Method__ – For this investigation, we identified 8,104 paintings used in 10,008 articles of the English Wikipedia edition. We manually coded the topic of the article in question, documented the number of monthly average views, and identified the originating museum. We analysed the use of images based on frequency of use, frequency of view, associated topics, and location. Early in the analysis three distinct perspectives emerged: the readers of the online encyclopaedia, the editors of the articles, and the museum organisations providing the painting images (directly or indirectly). __Findings__ – Wikipedia is a widely used online information resource where images of paintings serve as visual reference to illustrate articles, notably also beyond an art-related topic and where no alternative image is available – as in the case of historic portraits. Editors used paintings as illustration of the work itself or art-related movement, but also as illustration of past events, as alternative to photographs, as well as to represent a concept or technique. Images have been used to illustrate up to 76 articles, evidencing the polysemic nature of paintings. We conclude that images of paintings are highly valuable information sources, also beyond an art related context. We also find that Wikipedia is an important dissemination channel for museum collections. While art related articles contain greater number of paintings, these receive less views than non-art related articles containing fewer paintings. Readers of all topics, predominantly history, science and geographic articles, viewed art pieces outside of an art context. Painting images in Wikipedia receive a much larger online audience than the physical painting does when compared to the number of museum onsite visitors. Our results confirm the presence of a strong long-tail pattern in the frequency of image use (only 3% of painting images are used in a Wikipedia article), image view, and museums represented, characteristic of network dynamics of the Internet. __Research limitations/Implications__ – While this is the first analysis of the complete collection of paintings in the English Wikipedia, our results are conservative as many paintings are not identified as such in Wikidata, used for automatic harvesting. Tools to analyse image view specifically are not yet available and user privacy is highly protected, limiting the disaggregation of user data. This study serves to document a lack of diversity in image availability for global online consumpti