Building multi-layer social knowledge maps with google maps API

Google Maps is an intuitive online-map service which changes people's way of navigation on Geo-maps. People can explore the maps in a multi-layer fashion in order to avoid information overloading. This paper reports an innovative approach to extend the "power" of Google Maps to adaptive learning. We have designed and implemented a navigator for multi-layer social knowledge maps, namely ProgressiveZoom, with Google Maps API. In our demonstration, the knowledge maps are built from the Interactive System Design (ISD) course at the School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh. Students can read the textbooks and reflect their individual and social learning progress in a context of pedagogical hierarchical structure

GroupCollaborate2: Interactive Community Mapping

This paper presents GroupCollaborate2, a prototype Participatory GIS for the management of 3D community maps which support the shared design of public policies by offering a virtual representation of the territory and by enabling the crowdsourcing of heterogeneous types of contributions, including documents, 3D models and comments, within focus group

Personalization by website transformation: Theory and practice

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user’s interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built that enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site’s structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users to experience a vast number of paths through a site not traversable through browsing and demonstrate that it supports traversals with multiple steps, where the semblance of a hierarchy is preserved, as well as shortcuts directly to the desired information

The Creation of a Building Map Application for a University Setting

The use of navigational technology in mobile and web devices has sharply increased in recent years. With the capability to create interactive maps now available, navigating in real time between locations has become possible. This is especially essential in areas and organizations experiencing rapid expansion like Liberty University (LU). Therefore, the author proposes a project to create an interactive map application (IMA) for LU’s academic buildings that is scalable and usable through both the university’s website and with a mobile application. There are several considerations that must be taken into account when creating the LU map application, such as development methods, platforms, programming languages, software, userbase, and cost. The software development lifecycle is used in order to properly analyze, plan, design, and implement the LU map application. Activity, use-case, and entity-relationship diagrams are used as a basis for the implementation of the application which is created with a user-centric design and security as a priority. Despite some limitations to the LU map application, it provides a preliminary model of how an interactive building map could be used to provide students and faculty new ways to navigate a university setting

Towards automated knowledge-based mapping between individual conceptualisations to empower personalisation of Geospatial Semantic Web

Geospatial domain is characterised by vagueness, especially in the semantic disambiguation of the concepts in the domain, which makes defining universally accepted geo- ontology an onerous task. This is compounded by the lack of appropriate methods and techniques where the individual semantic conceptualisations can be captured and compared to each other. With multiple user conceptualisations, efforts towards a reliable Geospatial Semantic Web, therefore, require personalisation where user diversity can be incorporated. The work presented in this paper is part of our ongoing research on applying commonsense reasoning to elicit and maintain models that represent users' conceptualisations. Such user models will enable taking into account the users' perspective of the real world and will empower personalisation algorithms for the Semantic Web. Intelligent information processing over the Semantic Web can be achieved if different conceptualisations can be integrated in a semantic environment and mismatches between different conceptualisations can be outlined. In this paper, a formal approach for detecting mismatches between a user's and an expert's conceptual model is outlined. The formalisation is used as the basis to develop algorithms to compare models defined in OWL. The algorithms are illustrated in a geographical domain using concepts from the SPACE ontology developed as part of the SWEET suite of ontologies for the Semantic Web by NASA, and are evaluated by comparing test cases of possible user misconceptions

Detecting Mismatches between a User's and an Expert's Conceptualisations

The work presented in this paper is part of our ongoing research on applying commonsense reasoning to elicit and maintain models that represent users' conceptualisations. Such user models will enable taking into account the users' perspective of the world and will empower personalisation algorithms for the Semantic Web. A formal approach for detecting mismatches between a user's and an expert's conceptual model is outlined. The formalisation is used as the basis to develop algorithms to compare two conceptualisations defined in OWL. The algorithms are illustrated in a geographical domain using a space ontology developed at NASA, and have been tested by simulating possible user misconceptions