12 research outputs found
Ontology-Enhanced Educational Annotation Activities
Information and communications technology and technology-enhanced learning have unquestionably transformed traditional teaching–learning processes and are positioned as key factors to promote quality education, one of the basic sustainable development goals of the 2030 agenda. Document annotation, which was traditionally carried out with pencil and paper and currently benefits from digital document annotation tools, is a representative example of this transformation. Using document annotation tools, students can enrich the documents with annotations that highlight the most relevant aspects of these documents. As the conceptual complexity of the learning domain increases, the annotation of the documents may require comprehensive domain knowledge and an expert analysis capability that students usually lack. Consequently, a proliferation of irrelevant, incorrect, and/or poorly decontextualized annotations may appear, while other relevant aspects are completely ignored by the students. The main hypothesis proposed by this paper is that the use of a guiding annotation ontology in the annotation activities is a keystone aspect to alleviate these shortcomings. Consequently, comprehension is improved, exhaustive content analysis is promoted, and meta-reflective thinking is developed. To test this hypothesis, we describe our own annotation tool, @note, which fully implements this ontology-enhanced annotation paradigm, and we provide experimental evidence about how @note can improve academic performance via a pilot study concerning critical literary annotation
ACTIVE READING ON TABLET TEXTBOOKS
To study a text, learners often engage in active reading. Through active reading, learners build an analysis by annotating, outlining, summarizing, reorganizing and synthesizing information. These strategies serve a fundamental meta-cognitive function that allows content to leave strong memory traces and helps learners reflect, understand, and recall information. Textbooks, however, are becoming more complex as new technologies change how they are designed and delivered. Interactive, touch-screen tablets offer multi-touch interaction, annotation features, and multimedia content as a browse-able book. Yet, such tablet textbooks-in spite of their increasing availability in educational settings-have received little empirical scrutiny regarding how they support and engender active reading.
To address this issue, this dissertation reports on a series of studies designed to further our understanding of active reading with tablet textbooks. An exploratory study first examined strategies learners enact when reading and annotating in the tablet environment. Findings indicate learners are often distracted by touch screen mechanics, struggle to effectively annotate information delivered in audiovisuals, and labor to cognitively make connections between annotations and the content/media source from which they originated.
These results inspired SMART Note, a suite of novel multimedia annotation tools for tablet textbooks designed to support active reading by: minimizing interaction mechanics during active reading, providing robust annotation for multimedia, and improving built-in study tools. The system was iteratively developed through several rounds of usability and user experience evaluation. A comparative experiment found that SMART Note outperformed tablet annotation features on the market in terms of supporting learning experience, process, and outcomes.
Together these studies served to extend the active reading framework for tablet textbooks to: (a) recognize the tension between active reading and mechanical interaction; (b) provide designs that facilitate cognitive connections between annotations and media formats; and (c) offer opportunities for personalization and meaningful reorganization of learning material
Video interaction using pen-based technology
Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em
InformáticaVideo can be considered one of the most complete and complex media and its manipulating
is still a difficult and tedious task. This research applies pen-based technology to
video manipulation, with the goal to improve this interaction. Even though the human
familiarity with pen-based devices, how they can be used on video interaction, in order
to improve it, making it more natural and at the same time fostering the user’s creativity
is an open question.
Two types of interaction with video were considered in this work: video annotation
and video editing. Each interaction type allows the study of one of the interaction modes
of using pen-based technology: indirectly, through digital ink, or directly, trough pen
gestures or pressure. This research contributes with two approaches for pen-based video
interaction: pen-based video annotations and video as ink.
The first uses pen-based annotations combined with motion tracking algorithms, in
order to augment video content with sketches or handwritten notes. It aims to study how
pen-based technology can be used to annotate a moving objects and how to maintain the
association between a pen-based annotations and the annotated moving object
The second concept replaces digital ink by video content, studding how pen gestures
and pressure can be used on video editing and what kind of changes are needed in the
interface, in order to provide a more familiar and creative interaction in this usage context.This work was partially funded by the UTAustin-Portugal, Digital Media, Program
(Ph.D. grant: SFRH/BD/42662/2007 - FCT/MCTES); by the HP Technology for Teaching
Grant Initiative 2006; by the project "TKB - A Transmedia Knowledge Base for contemporary
dance" (PTDC/EAT/AVP/098220/2008 funded by FCT/MCTES); and by CITI/DI/FCT/UNL (PEst-OE/EEI/UI0527/2011
Sistema multimodal para captura e anotação de vídeo
Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em
Engenharia InformáticaActualmente, existe um grande crescimento de popularidade de dispositivos tácteis e multi-toque e, por isso, é necessário cada vez mais o desenvolvimento de aplicações e interfaces que sejam elaboradas especificamente para esse tipo de interacção. Através da caneta digital e do toque humano, esta interacção torna-se natural para o utilizador, pois assemelha-se à interacção humano-papel-caneta. Este tipo de interacção pode ser aplicado a documentos multimédia, em particular ao controlo e à anotação de vídeo digital. Assim como as anotações em publicações impressas promovem a leitura activa, as anotações de vídeo promovem a visualização activa, facilitando a reflexão e a aprendizagem com o enriquecimento do conteúdo do vídeo. As formas de arte performativas, como a dança, são domínios que envolvem várias iterações de ensaio, onde a anotação de vídeo pode melhorar significativamente o processo criativo dos autores.
Assim, a solução proposta tem como objectivo o desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta que suporte a captura e anotação multimodal de vídeo em tempo real, a ser executada num Tablet PC, explorando a interacção bimanual de toque humano com a caneta digital. A ferramenta permite ao utilizador capturar um vídeo através de uma fonte e, simultaneamente, anotá-lo, de forma a documentar segmentos desse vídeo para futura recuperação e pesquisa e aumentar o seu conteúdo, associando-lhe um significado próprio. No âmbito da dança contemporânea, um coreógrafo pode utilizar o sistema a fim de registar e anotar um ensaio ou uma performance ao vivo, actuando como um bloco de notas digital que pode ser revisto e partilhado com os artistas.
Esta proposta está enquadrada no projecto TKB, desenvolvido em colaboração com a Faculdade de Ciências Sociais Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa – FCSH/UNL, que inclui nos objectivos o desenvolvimento de um anotador de vídeo aplicado à dança contemporânea
AN ARCHITECTURE FOR END-USER DEVELOPMENT SUPPORTING GLOBAL COMMUNITIES
Increasingly organizations require their members to act not only as end users but also as developers of their tools, i.e. to create, shape and adapt the software artifacts they use without becoming computer experts. In this way, they move from being mere consumers to active producers of knowledge and developers of software artifacts. This leads to an evolution of the work environment and the organization and force the designers to adapt the software artifacts to meet the needs of the end users and to manage this co-evolution of users and software. Moreover, the achievements of social media, Web 2.0 and the advanced information technologies lead to an upward diffusion of global communities, geographically distributed, that collaborate asynchronously on the same design projects. The members of global communities belong to different cultures, therefore cultural boundaries need to be transcended. The mantra "making all voices heard" has to be evolved into "making all voices heard and understood" to allow the proper participation of end users to knowledge and software artifacts creation, sharing and evolution. To respond to these challenges, the thesis presents a semiotic model for end-user development and a Web architecture that supports 1) an interaction localized to end user\u2019s culture, domain of activity and digital platform in use, and 2) the collaborative creation and evolution of knowledge and software artifacts. The architecture is Ajax-like, component-based, Web service-based, and underpins re-use and evolution of software
DAS Writeback: A Collaborative Annotation System for Proteins
We designed and developed a Collaborative Annotation System for Proteins called DAS Writeback, which extends the Distributed Annotation System (DAS) to provide the functionalities of adding, editing and deleting annotations.
A great deal of effort has gone into gathering information about proteins over the last few years. By June 2009, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, a curated database, contained over four hundred thousand sequence entries and UniProtKB/TrEMBL, a database with automated annotation, contained over eight million sequence entries. Every protein is annotated with relevant information, which needs to be eciently captured and made available to other research groups. These include annotations about the structure, the function or the biochemical residues.
Several research groups have taken on the task of making this information accessible to the community, however, information flow in the opposite direction has not been extensively explored. Users are currently passive actors that behave as consumers of one or several sources of protein annotations and they have no immediate way to provide feedback to the source if, for example, a mistake is detected or they want to add information. Any change has to be done by the owner of the database. The current lack of being able to feed information back to a database is tackled in this project.
The solution consists of an extension of the DAS protocol that defines the communication rules between the client and the writeback server following the Uniform Interface of the RESTful architecture. A protocol extension was proposed to the DAS community and implementations of both server and client were created in order to have a fully functional system. For the development of the server, writing functionalities were added to MyDAS, which is a widely used DAS server. The writeback client is an extended version of the web-based protein client Dasty2.
The involvement of the DAS community and other potential users was a fundamental component of this project. The architecture was designed with the insight of the DAS specialized forum, a prototype was then created and subsequently presented in the DAS workshop 2009. The feedback from the forum and workshop was used to redefine the architecture and implement the system. A usability experiment was performed using potential users of the system emulating a real annotation task. It demonstrated that DAS writeback is effective, usable and will provide the appropriate environment for the creation and evolution of a protein annotation community.
Although the scope of this research is limited to protein annotations, the specification was defined in a general way. It can, therefore, be used for other types of information supported by DAS, implying that the server is versatile enough to be used in other scenarios without major modifications
Interacting Annotations in MADCOW 2.0
MADCOW 2.0 is a system for annotation of Web content, supporting the production and exploration of personal and public annotations on text, images and videos in aWeb page. Its design starts from the main requirement that the annotation activity does not have to disrupt the normal browsing of Web pages by a user. MADCOW 2.0 allows interaction with the annotated portions of the page to provide access to the annotation content. Conversely, the representation of the existing notes supports different forms of exploration of the Web page, and can become the starting point for further navigation over the Web. A uniform style of interaction has been adopted for creating and accessing annotations on text, images and videos, and some novel solutions have been introduced to cope with overlaps between the annotated portions. The annotation user experience is facilitated by enabling forms of in-place annotation and manipulation of both the annotated portion and the annotation content. Copyright © 2010 ACM.MADCOW 2.0 is a system for annotation of Web content, supporting the production and exploration of personal and public annotations on text, images and videos in aWeb page. Its design starts from the main requirement that the annotation activity does not have to disrupt the normal browsing of Web pages by a user. MADCOW 2.0 allows interaction with the annotated portions of the page to provide access to the annotation content. Conversely, the representation of the existing notes supports different forms of exploration of the Web page, and can become the starting point for further navigation over the Web. A uniform style of interaction has been adopted for creating and accessing annotations on text, images and videos, and some novel solutions have been introduced to cope with overlaps between the annotated portions. The annotation user experience is facilitated by enabling forms of in-place annotation and manipulation of both the annotated portion and the annotation content. Copyright © 2010 ACM
Reasoning about complex agent knowledge - Ontologies, Uncertainty, rules and beyond
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH
Social impact retrieval: measuring author influence on information retrieval
The increased presence of technologies collectively referred to as Web 2.0 mean the entire process of new media production and dissemination has moved away from an
authorcentric approach. Casual web users and browsers are increasingly able to play a more active role in the information creation process. This means that the traditional ways in which information sources may be validated and scored must adapt accordingly.
In this thesis we propose a new way in which to look at a user's contributions to the network in which they are present, using these interactions to provide a measure of
authority and centrality to the user. This measure is then used to attribute an query-independent interest score to each of the contributions the author makes, enabling us
to provide other users with relevant information which has been of greatest interest to a community of like-minded users. This is done through the development of two
algorithms; AuthorRank and MessageRank.
We present two real-world user experiments which focussed around multimedia annotation and browsing systems that we built; these systems were novel in themselves, bringing together video and text browsing, as well as free-text annotation. Using these systems as examples of real-world applications for our approaches, we then look at a
larger-scale experiment based on the author and citation networks of a ten year period of the ACM SIGIR conference on information retrieval between 1997-2007. We use the
citation context of SIGIR publications as a proxy for annotations, constructing large social networks between authors. Against these networks we show the effectiveness of
incorporating user generated content, or annotations, to improve information retrieval