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

Towards a Framework for Developing Mobile Agents for Managing Distributed Information Resources

Distributed information management tools allow users to author, disseminate, discover and manage information within large-scale networked environments, such as the Internet. Agent technology provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to develop such distributed information management applications. We present a layered organisation that is shared by the specific applications that we build. Within this organisation we describe an architecture where mobile agents can move across distributed environments, integrate with local resources and other mobile agents, and communicate their results back to the user

Reviews

Teaching and Learning Materials and the Internet by Ian Forsyth, London: Kogan Page, 1996. ISBN: 0–7494‐ 20596. 181 pages, paperback. £18.99

Democratic Replay: Enhancing TV Election Debates with Interactive Visualisations

This paper presents an online platform for enhancing televised election debates with interactive visualisations. Election debates are one of the highlights of election campaigns worldwide. They are also often criticised as appearing scripted, rehearsed, detached from much of the electorate, and at times too complex. Democratic Replay enhances videos of election debates with a collection of interactive tools aimed at providing a replay experience centred around citizens' needs. We present the system requirements, design and implementation, and report on an evaluation based on the ITV Leaders' Debate from the 2015 UK General Election campaign

Ontological Approaches to Modelling Narrative

We outline a simple taxonomy of approaches to modelling narrative, explain how these might be realised ontologically, and describe our continuing work to apply these techniques to the problem of Memories for Life

Distributed Information Management with Mobile Agents

With more users taking advantage of publicly accessible networks, such as corporate intranets and the Internet, larger amounts of information is becoming electronically distributed and disseminated. Distributed information management is an emerging technology for dealing with the problems of managing information that is spread across networks, users and applications. We present four categories that we consider being necessary to developing tools to undertake distributed information management tasks. To help model the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of a user's distributed information, we advocate the use of agents and agent technologies when building distributed information management applications. We present an agent-oriented architecture which is based around a concept of mobile agents, since they provide a convenient abstraction for modelling distributed applications

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

Encapsulation and information hiding as the keys to maintainable and reusable hypermedia applications.

This paper presents a solution to the maintenance problem in hypermedia by applying object-oriented techniques to both the hypermedia data model and the hypermedia system's actual implementation. First, the primary concepts of the 'MESH' (Maintainable, End user friendly, Structured Hypermedia) approach are discussed briefly. These consist of a conceptual data model, a navigation paradigm and an implementation framework. Thereafter, it is shown how the object-oriented concepts of encapsulation and information hiding result in a hypermedia system consisting of self-contained, independently coded nodes. Intra node maintenance is separated entirely from inter node maintenance: the hyperbase's link structure can be updated without affecting node content, whereas an individual node's multimedia content can be reorganized without necessitating updates to links or link anchors.Applications; Information; Data; Model; Structure;

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

Digital libraries and minority languages

Digital libraries have a pivotal role to play in the preservation and maintenance of international cultures in general and minority languages in particular. This paper outlines a software tool for building digital libraries that is well adapted for creating and distributing local information collections in minority languages, and describes some contexts in which it is used. The system can make multilingual documents available in structured collections and allows them to be accessed via multilingual interfaces. It is issued under a free open-source licence, which encourages participatory design of the software, and an end-user interface allows community-based localization of the various language interfaces - of which there are many