Proceedings of RSEEM 2006 : 13th Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets

Electronic markets have been a prominent topic of research for the past decade. Moreover, we have seen the rise but also the disappearance of many electronic marketplaces in practice. Today, electronic markets are a firm component of inter-organisational exchanges and can be observed in many branches. The Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets is an annual conference bringing together researchers working on various topics concerning electronic markets in research and practice. The focus theme of the13th Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets (RSEEM 2006) was ?Evolution in Electronic Markets?. Looking back at more than 10 years of research activities in electronic markets, the evolution can be well observed. While electronic commerce activities were based largely on catalogue-based shopping, there are now many examples that go beyond pure catalogues. For example, dynamic and flexible electronic transactions such as electronic negotiations and electronic auctions are enabled. Negotiations and auctions are the basis for inter-organisational trade exchanges about services as well as products. Mass customisation opens up new opportunities for electronic markets. Multichannel electronic commerce represents today?s various requirements posed on information and communication technology as well as on organisational structures. In recent years, service-oriented architectures of electronic markets have enabled ICT infrastructures for supporting flexible e-commerce and e-market solutions. RSEEM 2006 was held at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany in September 2006. The proceedings show a variety of approaches and include the selected 8 research papers. The contributions cover the focus theme through conceptual models and systems design, application scenarios as well as evaluation research approaches

The classification of gene products in the molecular biology domain: Realism, objectivity, and the limitations of the Gene Ontology

Background: Controlled vocabularies in the molecular biology domain exist to facilitate data integration across database resources. One such tool is the Gene Ontology (GO), a classification designed to act as a universal index for gene products from any species. The Gene Ontology is used extensively in annotating gene products and analysing gene expression data, yet very little research exists from a library and information science perspective exploring the design principles, philosophy and social role of ontologies in biology. Aim: To explore how molecular biologists, in creating the Gene Ontology, devised guidelines and rules for determining which scientific concepts are included in the ontology, and the criteria for how these concepts are represented. Methods: A domain analysis approach was used to devise a mixed methodology to study the design of the Gene Ontology. Concept analysis of a GO term and a critical discourse analysis of GO developer mailing list texts were used to test whether ontological realism is a tenable basis for constructing objective ontologies. A comparison of the current GO vocabulary construction guidelines and a study of the reasons why GO terms are removed from the ontology further explored the justifications for the design of the Gene Ontology. Finally, a content analysis of published GO papers examined how authors use and cite GO data and terminology. Results: Gene Ontology terms can be presented according to different epistemologies for concepts, indicating that ontological realism is not the only way objective ontologies can be designed. Social roles and the exercise of power were found to play an important role in determining ontology content, and poor synonym control, a lack of clear warrant for deciding terminology and arbitrary decisions to delete and invent new terms undermine the objectivity and universal applicability of the Gene Ontology. Authors exhibited poor compliance with GO data citation policies, and in re-wording and misquoting GO terminology, risk exacerbating the semantic problems this controlled vocabulary was designed to solve. Conclusions: The failure of the Gene Ontology to define what is meant by a molecular function, the exercise of power by GO developers in clearing contentious concepts from the ontology, and the strict adherence to ontological realism, which marginalises social and subjective ways of classifying scientific concepts, limits the utility of the ontology as a tool to unify the molecular biology domain. These limitations to the Gene Ontology design could be overcome with the development of lighter, pluralistic, user-controlled ‘open ontologies’ for gene products that can work alongside more traditional, ‘top-down’ developed vocabularies

Supporting the Discoverability of Open Educational Resources: on the Scent of a Hidden Treasury

Open Educational Resources (OERs), now available in large numbers, have a considerable potential to improve many aspects of society, yet one of the factors limiting this positive impact is the difficulty to discover them. This thesis investigates and proposes strategies to better support educators in discovering OERs. The literature suggests that the effectiveness of existing search systems, including for OER discovery, could be improved by supporting users, such as teachers, in carrying out more exploratory search activities closer to their existing methods of working. Hence, a preliminary taxonomy of OER-related search tasks was produced, based on an analysis of the literature, interpreted through Information Foraging Theory. This taxonomy was empirically evaluated to preliminarily identify a set of search tasks that involve finding other OERs similar to one that has already been identified, a process that is generally referred to as Query By Example (QBE). Following the Design Science Research methodology, three prototypes to support as well as to refine those tasks were iteratively designed, implemented, and evaluated involving an increasing number of educators in usability oriented studies. The resulting high-level and domain-oriented blended search/recommendation strategy transparently replicates Google searches in specialized networks, and identifies similar resources with a QBE strategy. It makes use of a domain-oriented similarity metric based on shared alignments to educational standards, and clusters results in expandable classes of comparable degrees of similarity. The summative evaluation shows that educators do appreciate this strategy because it is exploratory and – balancing similarity and diversity – it supports their high-level tasks, such as lesson planning and personalization of education. Finally, potential barriers and opportunities for the uptake of OER discovery tools were investigated in a structured interview study with experts from the OER field. Identified issues included how to work across multiple OER portals, variability in the use of metadata and how to align with the working practices of teachers. The findings of the thesis can be used to inform the research and development of methods and tools for OER discovery as well as their deployment to serve the needs of educators

Policy implementation as a wicked problem: A study of the horse-world

The British Horse Industry Confederation and Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ (2005) Strategy for the Horse Industry in England and Wales (Strategy) expresses an ambitious vision to transform the traditional horse-world into a horse industry by 2015. The Horse Strategy calls for all equestrians to become stakeholders, responsible for implementing its central aims of increasing grassroots participation and encouraging engagement with the Horse Strategy. Since 2005, little is known about stakeholders’ experiences of the implementation process or what degree of progress has been made towards creating the horse industry. Given the complex number of groups involved each with their own sets of interests and motives to engage with the horse-world, it is expected that implementation of the Horse Strategy forms a complex wicked problem that is unforeseen and poorly treated. This thesis explores regional representatives, local authority council policy officers and grassroots equestrians’ experiences of implementing the Horse Strategy. A qualitative analysis of 59 (male and female) semi-structured interviews, diaries (33 adults and 27 children) and profiles, participant and nonparticipant observation, and documentary analysis of equine-related policies and articles is carried out. Sport England’s (2004) Framework for Sport was used to gain an understanding of what factors influence an individual’s choice to participate in equestrianism, and the CLEAR Framework diagnostic tool (Lowndes et al., 2006) was adopted to assess equestrians’ engagement with the Strategy. Interrelated factors were found to influence an individual’s choice to participate in grassroots equestrianism and these synergistically built on each other to increase participation. The notion of a ‘hook’ or bond with a horse emerged as the most influential factor. However, each group showed considerable competing vested interests that led to fragmentation of the horse-world, giving rise to implementation barriers, deficits, and inertia. Even if a shared language can be established around the icon of the horse to increase participation, problems remain in addressing resourcing, cost, and infrastructure constraints. An overarching complex wicked policy problem emerged as the vested interests among different equestrian groups served to constrain and hinder the policy implementation process. This thesis concludes by providing recommendations to the BHIC and Defra, policy officers, regional representatives and grassroots proprietors to increase participation and encourage engagement with policy at local-level

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

UNDERSTANDING, MODELING AND SUPPORTING CROSS-DEVICE WEB SEARCH

Recent studies have witnessed an increasing popularity of cross-device web search, in which users resume their previously-started search tasks from one device to later sessions on another. This novel search mode brings new user behaviors such as cross-device information transfer; however, they are rarely studied in recent research. Existing studies on this topic mainly focused on automatic cross-device search task extraction and/or task continuation prediction; whereas it lacks sufficient understanding of user behaviors and ways of supporting cross-device search tasks. Building an automated search support system requires proper models that can quantify user behaviors in the whole cross-device search process. This motivates me to focus on understanding, modeling and supporting cross-device search processes in this dissertation. To understand the cross-device search process, I examine the main cross-device search topics, the major triggers, the information transfer approaches, and users’ behavioral patterns within each device and across multiple devices. These are obtained through an on-line survey and a lab-controlled user study with fine-grained user behavior logs. Then, I work on two quantitative models to automatically capture users' behavioral patterns. Both models assume that user behaviors are driven by hidden factors, and the identified behavioral patterns are either the hidden factors or a reflection of hidden factors. Following prior studies, I consider two types of hidden factors --- search tactic (e.g., the tactic of information re-finding/finding would drive to click/skip previously-accessed documents) and user knowledge (e.g., knowing the knowledge within a document would drive users to skip the document). Finally, to create a real-world cross-device search support use case, I design two supporting functions: one to assist information re-finding and the other to support information finding. The effectiveness of different support functions are further examined through both off-line and on-line experiments. The dissertation has several contributions. First, this is the first comprehensive investigation of cross-device web search behaviors. Second, two novel computational models are proposed to automatically quantify cross-device search processes, which are rarely studied in existing researches. Third, I identify two important cross-device search support tasks and implement effective algorithms to support both of them, which can beneficial future studies for this topic

State v. Alley Clerk\u27s Record Dckt. 40428

https://digitalcommons.law.uidaho.edu/idaho_supreme_court_record_briefs/1849/thumbnail.jp