Revisitation Patterns and Disorientation

The non-linear structure of web sites may cause users to become disorientated. In this paper we describe the results of a pilot study to find measures of user revisitation patterns that help in predicting disorientation

Linking with Meaning: Ontological Hypertext for Scholars

The links in ontological hypermedia are defined according to the relationships between real-world objects. An ontology that models the significant objects in a scholar’s world can be used toward producing a consistently interlinked research literature. Currently the papers that are available online are mainly divided between subject- and publisher-specific archives, with little or no interoperability. This paper addresses the issue of ontological interlinking, presenting two experimental systems whose hypertext links embody ontologies based on the activities of researchers and scholars

Preprocessing and Content/Navigational Pages Identification as Premises for an Extended Web Usage Mining Model Development

From its appearance until nowadays, the internet saw a spectacular growth not only in terms of websites number and information volume, but also in terms of the number of visitors. Therefore, the need of an overall analysis regarding both the web sites and the content provided by them was required. Thus, a new branch of research was developed, namely web mining, that aims to discover useful information and knowledge, based not only on the analysis of websites and content, but also on the way in which the users interact with them. The aim of the present paper is to design a database that captures only the relevant data from logs in a way that will allow to store and manage large sets of temporal data with common tools in real time. In our work, we rely on different web sites or website sections with known architecture and we test several hypotheses from the literature in order to extend the framework to sites with unknown or chaotic structure, which are non-transparent in determining the type of visited pages. In doing this, we will start from non-proprietary, preexisting raw server logs.Knowledge Management, Web Mining, Data Preprocessing, Decision Trees, Databases

Addictive links: The motivational value of adaptive link annotation

Adaptive link annotation is a popular adaptive navigation support technology. Empirical studies of adaptive annotation in the educational context have demonstrated that it can help students to acquire knowledge faster, improve learning outcomes, reduce navigational overhead, and encourage non-sequential navigation. In this paper, we present our exploration of a lesser known effect of adaptive annotation, its ability to significantly increase students' motivation to work with non-mandatory educational content. We explored this effect and confirmed its significance in the context of two different adaptive hypermedia systems. The paper presents and discusses the results of our work

Implicit Measures of Lostness and Success in Web Navigation

In two studies, we investigated the ability of a variety of structural and temporal measures computed from a web navigation path to predict lostness and task success. The user’s task was to find requested target information on specified websites. The web navigation measures were based on counts of visits to web pages and other statistical properties of the web usage graph (such as compactness, stratum, and similarity to the optimal path). Subjective lostness was best predicted by similarity to the optimal path and time on task. The best overall predictor of success on individual tasks was similarity to the optimal path, but other predictors were sometimes superior depending on the particular web navigation task. These measures can be used to diagnose user navigational problems and to help identify problems in website design

WormBase: a multi-species resource for nematode biology and genomics

WormBase (http://www.wormbase.org/) is the central data repository for information about Caenorhabditis elegans and related nematodes. As a model organism database, WormBase extends beyond the genomic sequence, integrating experimental results with extensively annotated views of the genome. The WormBase Consortium continues to expand the biological scope and utility of WormBase with the inclusion of large-scale genomic analyses, through active data and literature curation, through new analysis and visualization tools, and through refinement of the user interface. Over the past year, the nearly complete genomic sequence and comparative analyses of the closely related species Caenorhabditis briggsae have been integrated into WormBase, including gene predictions, ortholog assignments and a new synteny viewer to display the relationships between the two species. Extensive site-wide refinement of the user interface now provides quick access to the most frequently accessed resources and a consistent browsing experience across the site. Unified single-page views now provide complete summaries of commonly accessed entries like genes. These advances continue to increase the utility of WormBase for C.elegans researchers, as well as for those researchers exploring problems in functional and comparative genomics in the context of a powerful genetic system

Shared visiting in Equator city

In this paper we describe an infrastructure and prototype system for sharing of visiting experiences across multiple media. The prototype supports synchronous co-visiting by physical and digital visitors, with digital access via either the World Wide Web or 3-dimensional graphics

Exploring cognitive issues in visual information retrieval

A study was conducted that compared user performance across a range of search tasks supported by both a textual and a visual information retrieval interface (VIRI). Test scores representing seven distinct cognitive abilities were examined in relation to user performance. Results indicate that, when using VIRIs, visual-perceptual abilities account for significant amounts of within-subjects variance, particularly when the relevance criteria were highly specific. Visualisation ability also seemed to be a critical factor when users were required to change topical perspective within the visualisation. Suggestions are made for navigational cues that may help to reduce the effects of these individual differences