78,120 research outputs found
Facilitating access to health web pages with different language complexity levels
The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is constantly growing. When searching for health information, different types of users, such as patients, clinicians or medical researchers, have different needs and should easily find the information they are looking for based on their specific requirements. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and, often, overload them with the provided amount of information. On the other hand, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and specialized web sites are often not free and contain focused information built by hand. This paper presents a method to facilitate the search of health information on the web so that users can easily and quickly find information based on their specific requirements. In particular, it allows different types of users to find health web pages with required language complexity levels. To this end, we first use the structured data contained in the web to classify health web pages based on different audience types such as, patients, clinicians and medical researchers. Next, we evaluate the language complexity levels of the different web pages. Finally, we propose a mapping between the language complexity levels and the different audience types that allows us to provide different types of users, e.g., experts and non-experts with tailored web pages in terms of language complexity
Tailored retrieval of health information from the web for facilitating communication and empowerment of elderly people
A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a “human-to-machine”
communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her
empowerment level and the “human-to-human” communication process that occurs between a patient and a
healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering
its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious
communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health
information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at the syntactic-technical level,
the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly
people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels
and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her
information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the “right” amount of Web content in a
language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and
positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals
NaviCell: a web-based environment for navigation, curation and maintenance of large molecular interaction maps
Molecular biology knowledge can be systematically represented in a
computer-readable form as a comprehensive map of molecular interactions. There
exist a number of maps of molecular interactions containing detailed
description of various cell mechanisms. It is difficult to explore these large
maps, to comment their content and to maintain them. Though there exist several
tools addressing these problems individually, the scientific community still
lacks an environment that combines these three capabilities together. NaviCell
is a web-based environment for exploiting large maps of molecular interactions,
created in CellDesigner, allowing their easy exploration, curation and
maintenance. NaviCell combines three features: (1) efficient map browsing based
on Google Maps engine; (2) semantic zooming for viewing different levels of
details or of abstraction of the map and (3) integrated web-based blog for
collecting the community feedback. NaviCell can be easily used by experts in
the field of molecular biology for studying molecular entities of their
interest in the context of signaling pathways and cross-talks between pathways
within a global signaling network. NaviCell allows both exploration of detailed
molecular mechanisms represented on the map and a more abstract view of the map
up to a top-level modular representation. NaviCell facilitates curation,
maintenance and updating the comprehensive maps of molecular interactions in an
interactive fashion due to an imbedded blogging system. NaviCell provides an
easy way to explore large-scale maps of molecular interactions, thanks to the
Google Maps and WordPress interfaces, already familiar to many users. Semantic
zooming used for navigating geographical maps is adopted for molecular maps in
NaviCell, making any level of visualization meaningful to the user. In
addition, NaviCell provides a framework for community-based map curation.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, submitte
An evaluation of the workbook for health trainers in prisons and the wider community: based on the Royal Institute of Public Health Level 2 award: understanding health improvement
Health trainers form part of a public policy initiative designed to tackle health inequalities. Health Trainers were first proposed in the White Paper ‘Choosing Health’ (2004) and initially some 1200 NHS accredited Health Trainers were placed in post, providing support in key Primary Care Trust areas with the most challenging health and deprivation indicators.
The North West and East Midlands Health Trainer Hubs have developed initiative further within the Prison and National Probation Services with the production of a workbook to support prisoners in their attainment of the award. A team from Sheffield Hallam University were commissioned to conduct a brief consultation exercise to ensure that prison staff delivering the initiative, and prisoners who have completed the training in custody were given the opportunity to contribute to the design and content of the workbook
From Questions to Effective Answers: On the Utility of Knowledge-Driven Querying Systems for Life Sciences Data
We compare two distinct approaches for querying data in the context of the
life sciences. The first approach utilizes conventional databases to store the
data and intuitive form-based interfaces to facilitate easy querying of the
data. These interfaces could be seen as implementing a set of "pre-canned"
queries commonly used by the life science researchers that we study. The second
approach is based on semantic Web technologies and is knowledge (model) driven.
It utilizes a large OWL ontology and same datasets as before but associated as
RDF instances of the ontology concepts. An intuitive interface is provided that
allows the formulation of RDF triples-based queries. Both these approaches are
being used in parallel by a team of cell biologists in their daily research
activities, with the objective of gradually replacing the conventional approach
with the knowledge-driven one. This provides us with a valuable opportunity to
compare and qualitatively evaluate the two approaches. We describe several
benefits of the knowledge-driven approach in comparison to the traditional way
of accessing data, and highlight a few limitations as well. We believe that our
analysis not only explicitly highlights the specific benefits and limitations
of semantic Web technologies in our context but also contributes toward
effective ways of translating a question in a researcher's mind into precise
computational queries with the intent of obtaining effective answers from the
data. While researchers often assume the benefits of semantic Web technologies,
we explicitly illustrate these in practice
InfoInternet for Education in the Global South: A Study of Applications Enabled by Free Information-only Internet Access in Technologically Disadvantaged Areas (authors' version)
This paper summarises our work on studying educational applications enabled
by the introduction of a new information layer called InfoInternet. This is an
initiative to facilitate affordable access to internet based information in
communities with network scarcity or economic problems from the Global South.
InfoInternet develops both networking solutions as well as business and social
models, together with actors like mobile operators and government
organisations. In this paper we identify and describe characteristics of
educational applications, their specific users, and learning environment. We
are interested in applications that make the adoption of Internet faster,
cheaper, and wider in such communities. When developing new applications (or
adopting existing ones) for such constrained environments, this work acts as
initial guidelines prior to field studies.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure, under review for a journal since March 201
Growing the use of Virtual Worlds in education : an OpenSim perspective
The growth in the range of disciplines that Virtual Worlds support for educational purposes is evidenced by recent applications in the fields of cultural heritage, humanitarian aid, space exploration, virtual laboratories in the physical sciences, archaeology, computer science and coastal geography. This growth is due in part to the flexibility of OpenSim, the open source virtual world platform which by adopting Second Life protocols and norms has created a de facto standard for open virtual worlds that is supported by a growing number of third party open source viewers. Yet while this diversity of use-cases is impressive and Virtual Worlds for open learning are highly popular with lecturers and learners alike immersive education remains an essentially niche activity. This paper identifies functional challenges in terms of Management, Network Infrastructure, the Immersive 3D Web and Programmability that must be addressed to enable the wider adoption of Open Virtual Worlds as a routine learning technology platform. We refer to specific use-cases based on OpenSim and abstract generic requirements which should be met to enable the growth in use of Open Virtual Worlds as a mainstream educational facility. A case study of a deployment to support a formal education curriculum and associated informal learning is used to illustrate key points.Postprin
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