Hypermedia Information Systems in Industry

The requirements for industrial strength hypermedia are well known. If hypermedia applications are to be used successfully in the industrial environment, then considerable effort is required to integrate them into with the organisation’s current business practices. This implies that any proposed model must be simple to maintain and implement, as well as bringing real benefits to the organisation as a whole. This article discusses the development of such a system, its implementation and evaluation to support manufacturing operations at Pirelli Cables, Eastleigh

Evaluation of a manufacturing task support system using the Task Technology Fit Model

This paper presents an exploratory study of a Task Support System (TSS) supporting manufacturing task operations. The study investigated the degree to which a TSS, in use in a company, actually supports the task of the shop floor personnel. The approach has been to adopt the Task-Technology Fit (TTF) instrument to measure the degree of fitness between the TSS and the associated task. The analysis gives an indication of the state of the TSS and the potential improvements that can be made. The study also shows that the instrument can be used as a foundation for the development of a hypermedia TSS and a benchmarking tool for a TSS

Integrating case-based reasoning and hypermedia documentation: an application for the diagnosis of a welding robot at Odense steel shipyard

Reliable and effective maintenance support is a vital consideration for the management within today's manufacturing environment. This paper discusses the development of a maintenance system for the world's largest robot welding facility. The development system combines a case-based reasoning approach for diagnosis with context information, as electronic on-line manuals, linked using open hypermedia technology. The work discussed in this paper delivers not only a maintenance system for the robot stations under consideration, but also a design framework for developing maintenance systems for other similar applications

Design of the CAM model and authoring tool

Students benefit from personalised attention; however, often teachers are unable to provide this. An Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) system can offer a richer learning experience in an educational environment, by giving personalised attention to students. On-line courses are becoming increasingly popular by means of Learning Management Systems (LSM). The aim of the GRAPPLE project is to integrate an AH with major LMS, to provide an environment that delivers personalised courses in a LMS interface. However, designing an AH is a much more complex and time-consuming task, than creating a course in a LMS. Several models and systems were developed previously, but the (re)-usability by educational authors of the adaptation remains limited. To simplify adaptive behaviour authoring for an educational author, a visual environment was selected as being most intuitive. This paper describes a reference model for authoring in a visual way and introduces an authoring tool based upon this model

Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

A model for hypermedia learning environments based on electronic books

Designers of hypermedia learning environments could take advantage of a theoretical scheme which takes into account various kinds of learning activities and solves some of the problems associated with them. In this paper, we present a model which inherits a number of characteristics from hypermedia and electronic books. It can provide designers with the tools for creating hypermedia learning systems, by allowing the elements and functions involved in the definition of a specific application to be formally represented A practical example, CESAR, a hypermedia learning environment for hearing‐impaired children, is presented, and some conclusions derived from the use of the model are also shown

Reviews

Brian Clegg, Mining The Internet — Information Gathering and Research on the Net, Kogan Page: London, 1999. ISBN: 0–7494–3025–7. Paperback, 147 pages, £9.99

Applying digital content management to support localisation

The retrieval and presentation of digital content such as that on the World Wide Web (WWW) is a substantial area of research. While recent years have seen huge expansion in the size of web-based archives that can be searched efficiently by commercial search engines, the presentation of potentially relevant content is still limited to ranked document lists represented by simple text snippets or image keyframe surrogates. There is expanding interest in techniques to personalise the presentation of content to improve the richness and effectiveness of the user experience. One of the most significant challenges to achieving this is the increasingly multilingual nature of this data, and the need to provide suitably localised responses to users based on this content. The Digital Content Management (DCM) track of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is seeking to develop technologies to support advanced personalised access and presentation of information by combining elements from the existing research areas of Adaptive Hypermedia and Information Retrieval. The combination of these technologies is intended to produce significant improvements in the way users access information. We review key features of these technologies and introduce early ideas for how these technologies can support localisation and localised content before concluding with some impressions of future directions in DCM

A Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives