667 research outputs found

    Public access to environmental information: Past, present and future

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    Since the late 1960s and the "environmental revolution", information and information systems have been an integral part of the environmental debate. In the decade that has passed since the Rio conference and the establishment of the "sustainable development" principle, there have been legislative and practical moves to open access to environmental information for all stakeholders that are involved in environmental decision making processes. In this paper, the origins of environmental information and public environmental information systems are explored and scrutinised. The paper questions the current state of the art in environmental information provision, and offers some directions for possible improvements. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd

    Designing websites with eXtensible web (xWeb) methodology

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    Today, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, representing and interchanging data among various enterprises systems and databases in the context of complex web enterprises information systems (EIS). Conversely, for web EIS (such as e-commerce and portals) to be successful, it is important to apply a high level, model driven solutions and meta-data vocabularies to design and implementation techniques that are capable of handling heterogonous schemas and documents. For this, we need a methodology that provides a higher level of abstraction of the domain in question with rigorously defined standards that are to be more widely understood by all stakeholders of the system. To-date, UML has proven itself as the language of choice for modeling EIS using OO techniques. With the introduction of XML Schema, which provides rich facilities for constraining and defining enterprise XML content, the combination of UML and XML technologies provide a good platform (and the flexibility) for modeling, designing and representing complex enterprise contents for building successful EIS. In this paper, we show how a layered view model coupled with a proven user interface analysis framework (WUiAM) is utilized in providing architectural construct and abstract website model (called eXtensible Web, xWeb), to model, design and implement simple, user-centred, collaborative websites at varying levels of abstraction. The uniqueness xWeb is that the model data (web user interface definitions, website data descriptions and constraints) and the web content are captured and represented at the conceptual level using views (one model) and can be deployed (multiple platform specific models) using one or more implementation models

    Enhanced Learning Using Mutimedia-Interactive Systems: An Experimental Study

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    The education field is in a process of change driven by new developments in multimedia technology, which is being used as a complementary alternative for teaching purposes. This paper describes a thesis project developed through an exploratory study comparing the effects of using three different teaching approaches: traditional teacher-led instruction, web page instruction and a multimedia-interactive system. The principal objective is to find out whether the use of a prototype multimedia-interactive delivers better outcomes in teaching complex subjects such as data structures, than web page and traditional teacher-led instruction approaches. Information Systems Design Theory was used to develop a multimediainteractive tool. Students were taught to use binary trees to compare the three teaching methods. Pilot test results show that there are significant differences in performance of students who used the multimedia-interactive tool. It is concluded that the multimedia-interactive system prototype can effectively be used to help students learn binary trees

    General architecture supporting component-based EIS interoperability

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    Abstract. Web-based Educational Information Systems (EIS) aim at providing the learner with immediate, on-line access to a broad range of structured information in order to support more efficient educational task performance. Currently, more and more efforts are concentrating on bringing all those systems to work together in order to provide better support within the context of web-based education. Our goal is to approach the problem from a rather practical and somewhat minimalist perspective: to better utilize resources and components of already existing EIS we show how through communication protocols, we can realize a general modular architecture comprising components that can be shared and interchanged
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