Student user preferences for features of next-generation OPACs: a case study of University of Sheffield international students

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to identity the features that international student users prefer for next generation OPACs. Design/ methodology/ approach. 16 international students of the University of Sheffield were interviewed in July 2008 to explore their preferences among potential features in next generation OPACs. A semi-structured interview schedule with images of mock-up screens was used. Findings. The results of the interviews were broadly consistent with previous studies. In general, students expect features in next generation OPACs should be save their time, easy to use and relevant to their search. This study found that recommender features and features that can provide better navigation of search results are desired by users. However, Web 2.0 features, such as RSS feeds and those features which involved user participation were among the most popular. Practical implications. This paper produces findings of relevance to any academic library seeking to implement a next-generation OPAC. Originality/value. There have been no previous published research studies of users’ preferences among possible features of next-generation OPACs

A Relation-Based Page Rank Algorithm for Semantic Web Search Engines

With the tremendous growth of information available to end users through the Web, search engines come to play ever a more critical role. Nevertheless, because of their general-purpose approach, it is always less uncommon that obtained result sets provide a burden of useless pages. The next-generation Web architecture, represented by the Semantic Web, provides the layered architecture possibly allowing overcoming this limitation. Several search engines have been proposed, which allow increasing information retrieval accuracy by exploiting a key content of Semantic Web resources, that is, relations. However, in order to rank results, most of the existing solutions need to work on the whole annotated knowledge base. In this paper, we propose a relation-based page rank algorithm to be used in conjunction with Semantic Web search engines that simply relies on information that could be extracted from user queries and on annotated resources. Relevance is measured as the probability that a retrieved resource actually contains those relations whose existence was assumed by the user at the time of query definitio

Awareness of Discovery Tool among Library Professionals: A Survey

The aim of this study to find out the awareness, use of discovery tool among library professionals. The study preferred the survey method and a structured questionnaire tool for gathering data. Finding of the study that library professionals need to aware of the new technology related to the library activities using federated searching, discovery tool, next-generation catalog and web-scale discovery tool. In this paper analysed and found that the awareness of ICT and knowledge management required to the library professionals. The library professionals (more than 98%) aware of the library software terminology and they do not know the other new terminology, i.e. Discovery Tool, Federated Search, Facet Search, Web-Scale Discovery and Next-Generation Catalog

Creating a web-scale video collection for research

This paper begins by considering a number of important design questions for a web-scale, widely available, multimedia test collection intended to support long-term scientific evaluation and comparison of content-based video analysis and exploitation systems. Such exploitation systems would include the kinds of functionality already explored within the annual TRECVid benchmarking activity such as search, semantic concept detection, and automatic summarisation. We then report on our progress in creating such a multimedia collection which we believe to be web scale and which will support a next generation of benchmarking activities for content-based video operations, and we report on our plans for how we intend to put this collection, the IACC.1 collection, to use

Develop a Tool to Measure Web Service Impact

Web services represent the next generation of applications with a focus on integration. As companies continue to search for better methods to be cost effective and simplify business and IT operations process, it is critical to identify the factors that impact business operations. In this work, we explore how Web services affect businesses and people. A tool was developed to assess the impact of Web services from security, integrity and task perspectives

Intelligent Information Retrieval

The World Wide Web has become an invaluable information resource but the explosion of information available via the web has made web search a time consuming and complex process. Index-based search engines, such as AltaVista, Google or Info seek help, but they are not enough. This paper describes the rationale, architecture, and implementation of a next generation information gathering system 2013; a system that integrates several areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research under a single umbrella. Our solution to the information explosion is an information gathering agent, IIR , that plans to gather information to support a decision process, reasons about the resource trade-offs of different possible gathering approaches, extracts information from both unstructured and structured documents, and uses the extracted information to refine its search and processing activities

CS 875: Semantic Web

World Wide Web (Web 1.0, or the Web, as we now know it) centers on documents and semistructured data in html, rss, and xml. The next generation Web, also called Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, has already started to emerge. Web 2.0 is about user-generated content, user participation such as through tagging, and social networking. Web 3.0, also called Semantic Web, is about labeling content such that machines can process it more intelligently and humans can exploit it more effectively. These labels or metadata add semantics (meaning) to data, and their formal representation enables powerful reasoning that leads not only to better (semantic) search but also to analysis, discovery, and decision making. Semantic Web is already a rapidly emerging field, with standards, technologies, products, and applications-as well as to excellent job prospects (for MS students) and research opportunities (for PhD students)

Applying digital content management to support localisation

The retrieval and presentation of digital content such as that on the World Wide Web (WWW) is a substantial area of research. While recent years have seen huge expansion in the size of web-based archives that can be searched efficiently by commercial search engines, the presentation of potentially relevant content is still limited to ranked document lists represented by simple text snippets or image keyframe surrogates. There is expanding interest in techniques to personalise the presentation of content to improve the richness and effectiveness of the user experience. One of the most significant challenges to achieving this is the increasingly multilingual nature of this data, and the need to provide suitably localised responses to users based on this content. The Digital Content Management (DCM) track of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is seeking to develop technologies to support advanced personalised access and presentation of information by combining elements from the existing research areas of Adaptive Hypermedia and Information Retrieval. The combination of these technologies is intended to produce significant improvements in the way users access information. We review key features of these technologies and introduce early ideas for how these technologies can support localisation and localised content before concluding with some impressions of future directions in DCM

Perancangan Next Generation OPAC Berbasis Library 2.0 (Next Generation OPAC Design Based on Library 2.0)

ABSTRACTLibrary catalogue is challenged by the development of web technology that produce search engines dan also has change users’ interaction with information in this Web 2.0 enviroment. Users expect to participate and collaborate in the creation of information. This study aims to create a prototype of next generation OPAC which will use users’ contribution as an enrichment to OPAC. Users can contribute information to existing bibliographic record with tagging, rating and comment. Prototype was created using Drupal 7 and tested using Black Box method. Testing results shows that this prototype can fufill all functional requirements.Keywords: next generation OPAC, Web 2.0, Library 2.0, tagging, rating, review