Services surround you:physical-virtual linkage with contextual bookmarks

Our daily life is pervaded by digital information and devices, not least the common mobile phone. However, a seamless connection between our physical world, such as a movie trailer on a screen in the main rail station and its digital counterparts, such as an online ticket service, remains difficult. In this paper, we present contextual bookmarks that enable users to capture information of interest with a mobile camera phone. Depending on the user’s context, the snapshot is mapped to a digital service such as ordering tickets for a movie theater close by or a link to the upcoming movie’s Web page

Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings

Changing Higher Education Learning with Web 2.0 and Open Education Citation, Annotation, and Thematic Coding Appendices

Appendices of citations, annotations and themes for research conducted on four websites: Delicious, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook

Information augmented museum visit device

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 44-46).This thesis tries to develop a new museum guide device with the combination functions of digital cameras and palms as a tool that maps information onto digital images to support a real-time contextualized learning that goes beyond separate out-of-task-context learning and existing museum guide modes. In order to perform a self-directed, interest-triggering learning process, one needs to gain information from both personal experiences and museum databases. By keeping a continuous personal experience between different journeys, an individual could bring his own knowledge and history into relation with museum databases to support a dynamic information access during museum visits and after the visits. However, existing guide devices and their applications do not fully exploit the potential of real-time learning generated by wireless and mobile technology. This study proposes a tool, which encourages personal-controlled learning during museum visits by mapping dynamic information layer into physical space. The visitor " gets object-oriented knowledge and a coherent experience through the exploration into the information space with the movement in the physical space both real-time and after the visit.by Xingchen Wang.S.M

Enhancing Search User Interface of an Assets Management Solution

In today's time, information is of paramount importance and affects human life in conspicuous ways. Different companies, solutions and tools are developed to harness this information and retrieve is efficiently. One such tool is 'FA Platform', an Asset Management Solutions developed by FA Solutions Oy, which allows users to manage and search their assets and funds. This thesis contemplates over the issues faced by the search user interface of the 'FA Platform'. The thesis then proposes a new design implementation to improve the user experience of using the search functionality from the user's point of view. This study explores the concepts of search user interface in-depth to understand the industry standards and research previously done in these fields that could assist this study. Interviews were then conducted with users of the software to identify problems with the current interface. To further identify the possibilities, client's search-usage history was collected and analysed for patterns. The problems identified were that the existing solution lacked features to add new search criteria, option to select multiple values, and the general user interface was cluttered and difficult to comprehend. This thesis proposed a design prototype of the search user interface and tested ii with users against the existing implementation. Through testing, the new design prototype was found to be easy to use and provided a nice overall user-experience. The proposed design improved over the current implementation in three key areas: Redesigning the layout of search user interfaces to improve legibility; Adding an option to dynamically add more filter-fields as per requirement; and Providing an option to select multiple values for filter-fields. Having a good search user interface design is an important factor while developing a database management tool as it will increase user’s productivity, allowing them to find exactly what they want, how they want and when they want it. Even more so, a good design can also be very profitable for the company as it causes less distress to users

Hytexpros : a hypermedia information retrieval system

The Hypermedia information retrieval system makes use of the specific capabilities of hypermedia systems with information retrieval operations and provides new kind of information management tools. It combines both hypermedia and information retrieval to offer end-users the possibility of navigating, browsing and searching a large collection of documents to satisfy an information need. TEXPROS is an intelligent document processing and retrieval system that supports storing, extracting, classifying, categorizing, retrieval and browsing enterprise information. TEXPROS is a perfect application to apply hypermedia information retrieval techniques. In this dissertation, we extend TEXPROS to a hypermedia information retrieval system called HyTEXPROS with hypertext functionalities, such as node, typed and weighted links, anchors, guided-tours, network overview, bookmarks, annotations and comments, and external linkbase. It describes the whole information base including the metadata and the original documents as network nodes connected by links. Through hypertext functionalities, a user can construct dynamically an information path by browsing through pieces of the information base. By adding hypertext functionalities to TEXPROS, HyTEXPROS is created. It changes its working domain from a personal document process domain to a personal library domain accompanied with citation techniques to process original documents. A four-level conceptual architecture is presented as the system architecture of HyTEXPROS. Such architecture is also referred to as the reference model of HyTEXPROS. Detailed description of HyTEXPROS, using the First Order Logic Calculus, is also proposed. An early version of a prototype is briefly described

Aspectos Socio-técnicos das Interfaces Web para o Design Colaborativo

Based on the Social Construction of Technology model, this work examines the collaborative design in Information Society. It comprehends some cognitive aspects of interface and discusses social and technical issues of collaborative work in different community types. Sustained by an empirical study of web interfaces, it establishes some recommendations for the construction of collaborative design interspaces and identifies some possibilities provided by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). It concludes that if we avoid technologically deterministic approaches, there are strong evidences that ICTs provide special support for collaborative design practices and socially relevant technology oriented to creation and transfer

Hypertext Semiotics in the Commercialized Internet

Die Hypertext Theorie verwendet die selbe Terminologie, welche seit Jahrzehnten in der semiotischen Forschung untersucht wird, wie z.B. Zeichen, Text, Kommunikation, Code, Metapher, Paradigma, Syntax, usw. Aufbauend auf jenen Ergebnissen, welche in der Anwendung semiotischer Prinzipien und Methoden auf die Informatik erfolgreich waren, wie etwa Computer Semiotics, Computational Semiotics und Semiotic Interface Engineering, legt diese Dissertation einen systematischen Ansatz für all jene Forscher dar, die bereit sind, Hypertext aus einer semiotischen Perspektive zu betrachten. Durch die Verknüpfung existierender Hypertext-Modelle mit den Resultaten aus der Semiotik auf allen Sinnesebenen der textuellen, auditiven, visuellen, taktilen und geruchlichen Wahrnehmung skizziert der Autor Prolegomena einer Hypertext-Semiotik-Theorie, anstatt ein völlig neues Hypertext-Modell zu präsentieren. Eine Einführung in die Geschichte der Hypertexte, von ihrer Vorgeschichte bis zum heutigen Entwicklungsstand und den gegenwärtigen Entwicklungen im kommerzialisierten World Wide Web bilden den Rahmen für diesen Ansatz, welcher als Fundierung des Brückenschlages zwischen Mediensemiotik und Computer-Semiotik angesehen werden darf. Während Computer-Semiotiker wissen, dass der Computer eine semiotische Maschine ist und Experten der künstlichen Intelligenz-Forschung die Rolle der Semiotik in der Entwicklung der nächsten Hypertext-Generation betonen, bedient sich diese Arbeit einer breiteren methodologischen Basis. Dementsprechend reichen die Teilgebiete von Hypertextanwendungen, -paradigmen, und -strukturen, über Navigation, Web Design und Web Augmentation zu einem interdisziplinären Spektrum detaillierter Analysen, z.B. des Zeigeinstrumentes der Web Browser, des Klammeraffen-Zeichens und der sogenannten Emoticons. Die Bezeichnung ''Icon'' wird als unpassender Name für jene Bildchen, welche von der graphischen Benutzeroberfläche her bekannt sind und in Hypertexten eingesetzt werden, zurückgewiesen und diese Bildchen durch eine neue Generation mächtiger Graphic Link Markers ersetzt. Diese Ergebnisse werden im Kontext der Kommerzialisierung des Internet betrachtet. Neben der Identifizierung der Hauptprobleme des eCommerce aus der Perspektive der Hypertext Semiotik, widmet sich der Autor den Informationsgütern und den derzeitigen Hindernissen für die New Economy, wie etwa der restriktiven Gesetzeslage in Sachen Copyright und Intellectual Property. Diese anachronistischen Beschränkungen basieren auf der problematischen Annahme, dass auch der Informationswert durch die Knappheit bestimmt wird. Eine semiotische Analyse der iMarketing Techniken, wie z.B. Banner Werbung, Keywords und Link Injektion, sowie Exkurse über den Browser Krieg und den Toywar runden die Dissertation ab