Engaging end-user driven recommender systems: personalization through web augmentation

In the past decades recommender systems have become a powerful tool to improve personalization on the Web. Yet, many popular websites lack such functionality, its implementation usually requires certain technical skills, and, above all, its introduction is beyond the scope and control of end-users. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents a novel tool to empower end-users without programming skills, without any involvement of website providers, to embed personalized recommendations of items into arbitrary websites on client-side. For this we have developed a generic meta-model to capture recommender system configuration parameters in general as well as in a web augmentation context. Thereupon, we have implemented a wizard in the form of an easy-to-use browser plug-in, allowing the generation of so-called user scripts, which are executed in the browser to engage collaborative filtering functionality from a provided external rest service. We discuss functionality and limitations of the approach, and in a study with end-users we assess the usability and show its suitability for combining recommender systems with web augmentation techniques, aiming to empower end-users to implement controllable recommender applications for a more personalized browsing experience.Fil: Wischenbart, Martin. Johannes Kepler University Linz; AustriaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Bosetti, Gabriela Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Kapsammer, Elisabeth. Johannes Kepler University Linz; Austri

The elicitation of key performance indicators of e-government providers: A bottom-up approach

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.Delivering an adequate e-Government service (e-service) is becoming more of a necessity in today's digital world. In order to improve e-services and increase the engagement of both users' and providers' side, studies on the performance evaluation of such provided e-services are taking places. However a clear identification of the key performance indicators from the e-Government providers’ side is not well explored. This shortcoming hampers the conduct of a holistic evaluation of an e-service provision from the perspective of its stakeholders in order to improve e-services as well as to increase e-services take-ups. In this paper, a systematic process to identify indicators is implemented based on a bottom-up approach. The process used three focus-group meetings with providers, users, and academics in Qatar, Lebanon and UK to collect, identify and validate key indicators from the perspective of e-services’ providers. The approach resulted in the identification of five factors levels (service, technology, employees, policy and management and social responsibilities) with fifteen sub-categories of SMART variables. Hence, leading to the development of a new model, STEPS, that can fully explain and predict e-government success from the providers’ point of view. It will work as a strategic management tool to align various stakeholders on common goal and values based on evidence based evaluation of e-services using smart measurable indicators for the improvement of an e-service at the engagement level in the field of e-government. In addition, other fields can benefit from the outcome of this work, such as logistics service providers, who make their services available across new and existing relationships between the Internet commerce firms, their customers, and their vendors

A multilingual/multicultural semantic-based approach to improve Data Sharing in a SDI for Nature Conservation

The paper proposes an approach to transcend multicultural and multilingual barriers in the use and reuse of geographical data at the European level. The approach aims at sharing scientific terms in the field of nature conservation with the goal of assisting different user communities with metadata compilation and information discovery. A multi-thesauri solution is proposed, based on a Common Thesaurus Framework for Nature Conservation, where different well-known Knowledge Organization Systems are assembled and shared. It has been designed according to semantic web and W3C recommendations employing SKOS standard models and Linked Data to publish the thesauri as a whole in machine-understandable format. The outcome is a powerful framework satisfying the requirements of modularity and openness for further thesaurus extension and updating, interlinking among thesauri, and exploitability from other systems. The paper supports the employment of Linked Data to deal with terminologies in complex domains such as nature conservation and it proposes a hands-on recipe to publish thesauri in the framework