Automatic Web Table Transcoding for Mobile Devices Based on Table Classification

[[abstract]]Many techniques have been proposed to improve web browsing experiences on the mobile devices by transcoding the original web content. However, the original semantics of web tables tend to be broken in the transcoded results. We capture basic features of web tables from their DOM-tree (Document Object Model Tree) semantic information. We propose a new table feature called Cell Extension Direction (CED) to capture the extension direction of cell content as one-directional or bi-directional. CED is computed by checking the difference between the average composite object type (ACOT) of rows and that of columns. These features are used to classify web tables into data tables and layout tables. The classification results, along with CC/PP configurations of the mobile device, are then utilized to guide the applications of the following three transcoding strategies for tables: zooming, transposition, and one-column-view. We demonstrate that the table semantics could be preserved in the transcoding results.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20110722~2011072

Strategies for Mobile Web Design

This paper presents a literature review on the topic of web design, specifically with regard to mobile web design. The aim of the review is to identify and analyze major strategies and approaches to design for small-screen-size devices. Three strategies consistently appeared across the reviewed literature, namely, responsive web design, adaptive web design, and separate site. The analysis of these strategies intends to provide a clear understanding of their advantages and disadvantages, in terms of cost and user experience

User Interface Migration of Web Applications with Task continuity and Platform Adaptation Support

This thesis shows the work undertaken for supporting user interface migration of web applications. Interface migration occurs when a user interacting with an application switches to a different device and the application interface is transferred onto the new device. Migration must be supported by a platform aware system able to perform interface adaptation that keeps into account the different features of the devices involved, in order to keep the interface usability. Beside adaptation, continuity is the main matter. Once the interface migrates onto a new device, the interaction can be continued without having to restart the application from the beginning. Different types of migration can occur and supporting them poses different level of difficulty. This thesis analyses the various types of migration and describes the client-server architecture implemented for supporting all of them. The thesis shows how the migration service evolved starting from a first core of basic functionalities supporting the easiest situation to the most challenging one

Responsive web design workflow

Responsive Web Design Workflow is a literature review about Responsive Web Design, a web standards based modern web design paradigm. The goals of this research were to define what responsive web design is, determine its importance in building modern websites and describe a workflow for responsive web design projects. Responsive web design is a paradigm to create adaptive websites, which respond to the properties of the media that is used to render them. The three key elements of responsive web design are fluid layout, flexible media and media queries. As the numbers of mobile device users are constantly increasing, responsive web design has become an important method to improve mobile device user experience and accessibility in browsing the web. The workflow to build responsive websites consists of eight cumulative and iterative steps, which are discovery, planning, content design, sketching, prototyping, visual design, testing and discussion. As each web design project is unique and has different content, audience and goals, it is difficult to create a perfect workflow model. The responsive web design workflow described in this thesis is a recommendation and a collection of best practices for building responsive websites

MIDAS: Multi-device Integrated Dynamic Activity Spaces

Mobile phones, tablet computers, laptops, desktops, and large screen displays are increasingly available to individuals for information access, often simultaneously. Dominant content access protocols, such as HTTP/1.1, do not take advantage of this device multiplicity and support information access from single devices only. Changing devices means restarting an information session. Using devices in conjunction with each other poses several challenges, which include the presentation of content on devices with diverse form factors and propagation of the content changes across these devices. In this dissertation, I report on the design and implementation of MIDAS - architecture and a prototype system for multi-device presentations. I propose a framework, called 12C, for characterizing multi-device systems and evaluate MIDAS within this framework. MIDAS is designed as a middleware that can work with multiple client-server architectures, such as the Web and context-aware Trellis, a non-Web hypertext system. It presents information content simultaneously on devices with diverse characteristics without requiring sensor-enhanced environments. The system adapts content elements for optimal presentation on the target device while also striving to retain fidelity with the original form from a human perceptual perspective. MIDAS reconfigures its presentation in response to user actions, availability of devices, and environmental context, such as a user's location or the time of day. I conducted a pilot study that explored human perception of similarity when image attributes such as size and color depth are modified in the process of presenting images on different devices. The results indicated that users tend to prefer scaling of images to color-depth reduction but gray scaling of images is preferable to either modification. Not all images scale equally gracefully; those dominated by natural elements or manmade structures scale exceptionally well. Images that depict recognizable human faces or textual elements should be scaled only to an extent that these features retain their integrity. Attributes of the 12C framework describe aspects of multi-device systems that include infrastructure, presentation, interaction, interface, and security. Based on these criteria, MIDAS is a flexible infrastructure, which lends itself to several content distribution and interaction strategies by separating client- and server-side configuration

Semantically-enhanced recommendations in cultural heritage

In the Web 2.0 environment, institutes and organizations are starting to open up their previously isolated and heterogeneous collections in order to provide visitors with maximal access. Semantic Web technologies act as instrumental in integrating these rich collections of metadata by defining ontologies which accommodate different representation schemata and inconsistent naming conventions over the various vocabularies. Facing the large amount of metadata with complex semantic structures, it is becoming more and more important to support visitors with a proper selection and presentation of information. In this context, the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) funded the Cultural Heritage Information Personalization (CHIP) project in early 2005, as part of the Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage (CATCH) program in the Netherlands. It is a collaborative project between the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Telematica Instituut. The problem statement that guides the research of this thesis is as follows: Can we support visitors with personalized access to semantically-enriched collections? To study this question, we chose cultural heritage (museums) as an application domain, and the semantically rich background knowledge about the museum collection provides a basis to our research. On top of it, we deployed user modeling and recommendation technologies in order to provide personalized services for museum visitors. Our main contributions are: (i) we developed an interactive rating dialog of artworks and art concepts for a quick instantiation of the CHIP user model, which is built as a specialization of FOAF and mapped to an existing event model ontology SEM; (ii) we proposed a hybrid recommendation algorithm, combining both explicit and implicit relations from the semantic structure of the collection. On the presentation level, we developed three tools for end-users: Art Recommender, Tour Wizard and Mobile Tour Guide. Following a user-centered design cycle, we performed a series of evaluations with museum visitors to test the effectiveness of recommendations using the rating dialog, different ways to build an optimal user model and the prediction accuracy of the hybrid algorithm. Chapter 1 introduces the research questions, our approaches and the outline of this thesis. Chapter 2 gives an overview of our work at the first stage. It includes (i) the semantic enrichment of the Rijksmuseum collection, which is mapped to three Getty vocabularies (ULAN, AAT, TGN) and the Iconclass thesaurus; (ii) the minimal user model ontology defined as a specialization of FOAF, which only stores user ratings at that time, (iii) the first implementation of the content-based recommendation algorithm in our first tool, the CHIP Art Recommender. Chapter 3 presents two other tools: Tour Wizard and Mobile Tour Guide. Based on the user's ratings, the Web-based Tour Wizard recommends museum tours consisting of recommended artworks that are currently available for museum exhibitions. The Mobile Tour Guide converts recommended tours to mobile devices (e.g. PDA) that can be used in the physical museum space. To connect users' various interactions with these tools, we made a conversion of the online user model stored in RDF into XML format which the mobile guide can parse, and in this way we keep the online and on-site user models dynamically synchronized. Chapter 4 presents the second generation of the Mobile Tour Guide with a real time routing system on different mobile devices (e.g. iPod). Compared with the first generation, it can adapt museum tours based on the user's ratings artworks and concepts, her/his current location in the physical museum and the coordinates of the artworks and rooms in the museum. In addition, we mapped the CHIP user model to an existing event model ontology SEM. Besides ratings, it can store additional user activities, such as following a tour and viewing artworks. Chapter 5 identifies a number of semantic relations within one vocabulary (e.g. a concept has a broader/narrower concept) and across multiple vocabularies (e.g. an artist is associated to an art style). We applied all these relations as well as the basic artwork features in content-based recommendations and compared all of them in terms of usefulness. This investigation also enables us to look at the combined use of artwork features and semantic relations in sequence and derive user navigation patterns. Chapter 6 defines the task of personalized recommendations and decomposes the task into a number of inference steps for ontology-based recommender systems, from a perspective of knowledge engineering. We proposed a hybrid approach combining both explicit and implicit recommendations. The explicit relations include artworks features and semantic relations with preliminary weights which are derived from the evaluation in Chapter 5. The implicit relations are built between art concepts based on instance-based ontology matching. Chapter 7 gives an example of reusing user interaction data generated by one application into another one for providing cross-application recommendations. In this example, user tagging about cultural events, gathered by iCITY, is used to enrich the user model for generating content-based recommendations in the CHIP Art Recommender. To realize full tagging interoperability, we investigated the problems that arise in mapping user tags to domain ontologies, and proposed additional mechanisms, such as the use of SKOS matching operators to deal with the possible mis-alignment of tags and domain-specific ontologies. We summarized to what extent the problem statement and each of the research questions are answered in Chapter 8. We also discussed a number of limitations in our research and looked ahead at what may follow as future work

Proceedings of the International Workshop “Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: towards a new understanding of people’s experience in museums"

Proceedings of the International Workshop “Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: towards a new understanding of people’s experience in museums

Potential efficiency gains in the construction industry from the proper use of information technology

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 36).For many years, technological advances and new software have altered the face of the engineering design sector. Design companies have realized incredible efficiency gains and cost savings due to these improvements, but the construction sector has not been able to do the same. Unlike design firms, contractor businesses as a whole have not embraced IT advancements and taken steps to implement them across all types of construction projects in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Because of this half-hearted attitude towards technological improvements, the same efficiency gains and cost savings found in the design sector have not been attained in the construction sector. The thesis examines different types of IT advancements that have the potential to seriously benefit the construction sector, including electronic document management, 3D modeling, construction sequencing, and laser scanning. Several surveys performed by other engineers and academics interested in the field of information technology in the engineering and construction sector will be examined, and the results of these will provide the basis for discussion regarding the current state of IT saturation in the construction sector as well as its overall effectiveness in providing tangible benefits to users. In addition, this thesis also examines possible reasons for why these benefits are not being attained and offers some ideas and strategies that may improve the implementation of IT advancements in the construction industry.by Roberta L. Hsu.M.Eng

In form

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-116).Spatial computing is human interaction with a machine in which the machine retains and manipulates referents to real objects and spaces. It is an essential component for making our machines fuller partners in our work and play. This thesis presents a series of experiments in the discipline and analysis of its fundamental properties.Simon Greenwold.S.M

Evolutionary dynamics of new media forms: the case of the open mobile web

This thesis is designed to improve our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of media forms, with a special historical focus on the recent processes of Web and mobile convergence and the early development of the cross-platform Web. It aims to investigate the dynamics that have underpinned the creation, evolution and conventionalisation of new media forms in the open mobile Web following the launch of 3G mobile networks. In theoretical terms the thesis explores the possibilities for the analytical integration of evolutionary approaches that traditionally have shed light on the discrete components of the evolutionary ‘ensemble’ that comprises media’s textual forms, their technologies and organisational systems. Among the theoretical pillars the study builds on is, first, the cultural semiotic approach (Lotman) that is utilised for interpreting the textual dynamics constituting the form evolution. Second, evolutionary economics (Schumpeter, Freeman and others) is included for interpreting the market dynamics that condition the formation of the media industries. Third, systems theoretical sociology (Luhmann) is deployed in order to understand the broader dynamics of social organisation in late modernism. The integration of these approaches provides the conceptual framework that focuses on the following phenomena: dialogic interchange among industry sub-systems as enabling innovations and the emergence of new sub-systems; the self-organisation of the sub-systems in the contingent environment; the role of memory and systemic ‘path-dependencies’ in guiding the processes of self-organisation; and the nature of the power relations that shape the dialogic processes. The empirical study focuses on textual as well as organisational developments. The semiotic analysis of mobile websites reveals the intertextual relations of the new forms with other media domains, especially the desktop Web. The interviews with representatives of industry stakeholders provide insights into the dialogic practices between the parties engaged in designing the mobile Web, and how, via these practices, the new platform, its media forms and institutional structures were shaped. The findings point to the historical formation of two main industry sub-systems – ‘infrastructure enablers’ and content providers – with different preferred alternatives for the design of the cross-platform Web. The thesis demonstrates how the formation of these groups was conditioned by their systemic path-dependencies, but also by the mesh of dialogic relationships among them and by the resulting changes in the discursive constellations framing the organisation of the industry and the norms for its media forms. The study points to the first signs of the historically momentous emancipation of the mobile Webmedia forms, their shaking free of path-dependency on the desktop Web