Adaptive Information Visualization for Personalized Access to Educational Digital Libraries

Personalization is one of the emerging ways to increase the power of modern Digital Libraries. The Knowledge Sea II system presented in this paper explores social navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance within the open corpus of educational resources. Following the concepts of social navigation we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners’ interaction with the system. The study indicates that Knowledge Sea II became the students' primary tool for accessing the open corpus documents used in a programming course. The social navigation support implemented in this system was considered useful by students participating in the study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigational support, such as the ability to rank the usefulness of a page

Slovenian Virtual Gallery on the Internet

The Slovenian Virtual Gallery (SVG) is a World Wide Web based multimedia collection of pictures, text, clickable-maps and video clips presenting Slovenian fine art from the gothic period up to the present days. Part of SVG is a virtual gallery space where pictures hang on the walls while another part is devoted to current exhibitions of selected Slovenian art galleries. The first version of this application was developed in the first half of 1995. It was based on a file system for storing all the data and custom developed software for search, automatic generation of HTML documents, scaling of pictures and remote management of the system. Due to the fast development of Web related tools a new version of SVG was developed in 1997 based on object-oriented relational database server technology. Both implementations are presented and compared in this article with issues related to the transion between the two versions. At the end, we will also discuss some extensions to SVG. We will present the GUI (Graphical User Interface) developed specially for presentation of current exhibitions over the Web which is based on GlobalView panoramic navigation extension to developed Internet Video Server (IVS). And since SVG operates with a lot of image data, we will confront with the problem of Image Content Retrieval

Evaluation of Progressive Web Application to develop an Offline-First Task Management App

Adding more features to web apps progressively to feel and work like native apps is a recent design philosophy. This research study was conducted on Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to develop an offline-first task management app. The main idea of Pmain goalancing web apps gradually by adding new features to existing or new web applicenable developersowser support. Hence, the main goal of this study was to explore PWAs features available in the browsers,thoroughly reviewe developers to implement an offline-first web applications. The study was carried out in two ways. The first part thoroughly reviewed theories about the web, native apps, and PWAs features that are available in browsers. An the thesisst task management app called Annual Clock was designed and implemented for Aalto universThe applicationd part of the thesis. To implement the app, React.js was used for the frontthe end and Node.js for the baa ckend. The application was fully impthe lemented using most PWA features to work offline, install on home screen, load fast, send push notification, etc. To conclude, the implemented app presents solutions to most offline-first web app problems and will be used as a valuable reference for the university and other researchers who would like to develop an offline-first PWAs. Nonetheless, there are many areas left untouched and need to be solved in the future like saving images, audios and videos in browser storage, increasing the size of browser storages for large data and background synchronization support by all browsers

The space physics environment data analysis system (SPEDAS)

With the advent of the Heliophysics/Geospace System Observatory (H/GSO), a complement of multi-spacecraft missions and ground-based observatories to study the space environment, data retrieval, analysis, and visualization of space physics data can be daunting. The Space Physics Environment Data Analysis System (SPEDAS), a grass-roots software development platform (www.spedas.org), is now officially supported by NASA Heliophysics as part of its data environment infrastructure. It serves more than a dozen space missions and ground observatories and can integrate the full complement of past and upcoming space physics missions with minimal resources, following clear, simple, and well-proven guidelines. Free, modular and configurable to the needs of individual missions, it works in both command-line (ideal for experienced users) and Graphical User Interface (GUI) mode (reducing the learning curve for first-time users). Both options have “crib-sheets,” user-command sequences in ASCII format that can facilitate record-and-repeat actions, especially for complex operations and plotting. Crib-sheets enhance scientific interactions, as users can move rapidly and accurately from exchanges of technical information on data processing to efficient discussions regarding data interpretation and science. SPEDAS can readily query and ingest all International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP)-compatible products from the Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF), enabling access to a vast collection of historic and current mission data. The planned incorporation of Heliophysics Application Programmer’s Interface (HAPI) standards will facilitate data ingestion from distributed datasets that adhere to these standards. Although SPEDAS is currently Interactive Data Language (IDL)-based (and interfaces to Java-based tools such as Autoplot), efforts are under-way to expand it further to work with python (first as an interface tool and potentially even receiving an under-the-hood replacement). We review the SPEDAS development history, goals, and current implementation. We explain its “modes of use” with examples geared for users and outline its technical implementation and requirements with software developers in mind. We also describe SPEDAS personnel and software management, interfaces with other organizations, resources and support structure available to the community, and future development plans.Published versio

Voice Driven Email Client

With the advancements of technology, today the needs and expectations of humans keep growing seeking for more convenience. People prefer to communicate with technology using natural interactive approaches rather than with a key-board or mouse. Voice recognition is one such mostly preferred natural interactive approach. Though voice recognition was originally introduced in applications for differently abled individuals, today we see with the complexity in work environments, a majority of people prefer to use more natural interactive approaches such as voice commands due to its’ convenience. The main objective of this project is to develop an Email client which allows users to perform tasks within the application by eliminating the use of the key-board or mouse. The system allows users to perform all the tasks within the application using voice commands. At present widely used web email service providers such as Gmail, yahoo etc do not support voice commands, the Voice Driven Email Client makes it possible to connect to a web based email client and carry out tasks using special voice commands. It will allow the users to dictate as well as navigate purely on voice commands. This voice enabled email client introduces a better approach to accessing web-based email clients instead of remaining at the traditional text-based, typing and clicking approach. Further it will reach a wider target audience including differently abled individuals such as people without hands, people with difficulties in hand movements, dyslexic people who find it difficult to write and spell etc. This document outlines the motivation, background, problem description, scope, research and analysis, design, implementation and testing carried out to develop the Voice Driven Email Client

Uniform: The Form Validation Language

Digital forms are becoming increasingly more prevalent but the ease of creation is not. Web Forms are difficult to produce and validate. This design project seeks to simplify this process. This project is comprised of two parts: a logical programming language (Uniform) and a web application. Uniform is a language that allows its users to define logical relationships between web elements and apply simple rules to individual inputs to both validate the form and manipulate its components depending on user input. Uniform provides an extra layer of abstraction to complex coding. The web app implements Uniform to provide business-level programmers with an interface to build and manage forms. Users will create form templates, manage form instances, and cooperatively complete forms through the web app. Uniform’s development is ongoing, it will receive continued support and is available as open-source. The web application is software owned and maintained by HP Inc. which will be developed further before going to market