Congenial Web Search : A Conceptual Framework for Personalized, Collaborative, and Social Peer-to-Peer Retrieval

Traditional information retrieval methods fail to address the fact that information consumption and production are social activities. Most Web search engines do not consider the social-cultural environment of users' information needs and the collaboration between users. This dissertation addresses a new search paradigm for Web information retrieval denoted as Congenial Web Search. It emphasizes personalization, collaboration, and socialization methods in order to improve effectiveness. The client-server architecture of Web search engines only allows the consumption of information. A peer-to-peer system architecture has been developed in this research to improve information seeking. Each user is involved in an interactive process to produce meta-information. Based on a personalization strategy on each peer, the user is supported to give explicit feedback for relevant documents. His information need is expressed by a query that is stored in a Peer Search Memory. On one hand, query-document associations are incorporated in a personalized ranking method for repeated information needs. The performance is shown in a known-item retrieval setting. On the other hand, explicit feedback of each user is useful to discover collaborative information needs. A new method for a controlled grouping of query terms, links, and users was developed to maintain Virtual Knowledge Communities. The quality of this grouping represents the effectiveness of grouped terms and links. Both strategies, personalization and collaboration, tackle the problem of a missing socialization among searchers. Finally, a concept for integrated information seeking was developed. This incorporates an integrated representation to improve effectiveness of information retrieval and information filtering. An integrated information retrieval process explores a virtual search network of Peer Search Memories in order to accomplish a reputation-based ranking. In addition, the community structure is considered by an integrated information filtering process. Both concepts have been evaluated and shown to have a better performance than traditional techniques. The methods presented in this dissertation offer the potential towards more transparency, and control of Web search

Recherche d'information et contexte

My research work is related the field of Information Retrieval (IR) whose objective is to enable a user to find information that meets its needs within a large volume of information. The work in IR have focused primarily on improving information processing in terms of indexing to obtain optimal representations of documents and queries and in terms of matching between these representations. Contributions have long made no distinction between all searches assuming a unique type of search and when proposing a model intended to be effective for this unique type of search. The growing volume of information and diversity of situations have marked the limits of existing IR approaches bringing out the field of contextual IR. Contextual IR aims to better respond to users' needs taking into account the search context. The principle is to differentiate searches by integrating in the IR process, contextual factors that will influence the IRS effectiveness. The notion of context is broad and refers to all knowledge related to information conducted by a user querying an IRS. My research has been directed toward taking into account the contextual factors that are: the domain of information, the information structure and the user. The first three directions of my work consist in proposing models that incorporate each of these elements of context, and a fourth direction aims at exploring how to adapt the process to each search according to its context. Various European and national projects have provided application frameworks for this research and have allowed us to validate our proposals. This research has also led to development of various prototypes and allowed the conduct of PhD theses and research internships.Mes travaux de recherche s'inscrivent dans le domaine de la recherche d'information (RI) dont l'objectif est de permettre à un utilisateur de trouver de l'information répondant à son besoin au sein d'un volume important d'informations. Les recherches en RI ont été tout d'abord orientées système. Elles sont restées très longtemps axées sur l'appariement pour évaluer la correspondance entre les requêtes et les documents ainsi que sur l'indexation des documents et de requêtes pour obtenir une représentation qui supporte leur mise en correspondance. Cela a conduit à la définition de modèles théoriques de RI comme le modèle vectoriel ou le modèle probabiliste. L'objectif initialement visé a été de proposer un modèle de RI qui possède un comportement global le plus efficace possible. La RI s'est longtemps basée sur des hypothèses simplificatrices notamment en considérant un type unique d'interrogation et en appliquant le même traitement à chaque interrogation. Le contexte dans lequel s'effectue la recherche a été ignoré. Le champ d'application de la RI n'a cessé de s'étendre notamment grâce à l'essor d'internet. Le volume d'information toujours plus important combiné à une utilisation de SRI qui s'est démocratisée ont conduit à une diversité des situations. Cet essor a rendu plus difficile l'identification des informations correspondant à chaque besoin exprimé par un utilisateur, marquant ainsi les limites des approches de RI existantes. Face à ce constat, des propositions ont émergé, visant à faire évoluer la RI en rapprochant l'utilisateur du système tels que les notions de réinjection de pertinence utilisateur ou de profil utilisateur. Dans le but de fédérer les travaux et proposer des SRI offrant plus de précision en réponse au besoin de l'utilisateur, le domaine de la RI contextuelle a récemment émergé. L'objectif est de différencier les recherches au niveau des modèles de RI en intégrant des éléments de contexte susceptibles d'avoir une influence sur les performances du SRI. La notion de contexte est vaste et se réfère à toute connaissance liée à la recherche de l'utilisateur interrogeant un SRI. Mes travaux de recherche se sont orientés vers la prise en compte des éléments de contexte que sont le domaine de l'information, la structure de l'information et l'utilisateur. Ils consistent, dans le cadre de trois premières orientations, à proposer des modèles qui intègrent chacun de ces éléments de contexte, et, dans une quatrième orientation, d'étudier comment adapter les processus à chaque recherche en fonction de son contexte. Différents projets européens et nationaux ont servi de cadre applicatifs à ces recherches et ainsi à valider nos propositions. Mes travaux de recherche ont également fait l'objet de développements dans différents prototypes et ont permis le déroulement de thèses de doctorat et stages de recherche

Program in social-civic education through middle grade history

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Interprofessional working : cultures, identities and conceptualisations of practice

The relationship between poor interprofessional working and child tragedies has been made apparent by numerous inquiries into child deaths. In seeking to address the well documented problems of professional communication, cooperation and collaboration; transformation in the structure (Children's Trusts) and delivery of services (integrated teams) for children and young people was initiated under the UK New Labour government (DfES, 2004). Focused on early interventions to meet the additional needs of children, the Common Assessment Framework brings together professionally and vocationally qualified practitioners from statutory, public and voluntary agencies. This research charts the origins and evolution of interprofessional practice in the context of children and young people highlighting historically important cases. Key developments in the legislative, social and cultural contexts and the effects of their interactions are scrutinised to aid further understanding of present day structures and practice. Semi-structured interview data was analysed to generate themes at individual and practitioner group level. Utilisation of the qualitative methodology Interpretative Phenomenological Analyses supported identification of three super-ordinate themes: Roles, Identities and Relationships, Change and Adaptation and Conflict and Contradictions. Theoretical connections with the literature on identity are explored providing insight into objectives, learning and new forms of practice. Drawing on ideas from Cultural Historical Activity Theory the implications for policy and practice are assessed. The thesis answers the call for the greater application of theory to interprofessional working (IPW) and education (IPE) contexts. Furthermore the research prioritises the perspective of the practitioner generating greater understanding of what it means to work collaboratively. Research findings pertain to the double binds experienced by practitioners which impeded collaboration but also generated unexpected innovations in practice and the identification of different practice orientations amongst professionally and vocationally qualified practitioners. The research concludes by asserting that partnership and child centred practice are being distorted by a performance culture.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

African field reports, 1952-1961

Mr. Edwin S. Munger is a successful experiment. The experiment started a number of years ago. It was an experiment with a new method of producing an expert. After World War II ten million men returned from overseas to the United States. Many of them had been in Africa, Asia, Europe and elsewhere for years on end. But the country to which they returned was deeply ignorant of the very world which it had helped to save from conquest by Germany and Japan. There were some experts on Russia and China, fewer still on India and Southeast Asia. On Africa there were a couple of lonely men with no one to talk to and nobody much who wanted to listen. Expertness in the American university world, especially in those days, was often training in the difficult art of looking at the world through the eye of a needle. Geographers of China without history, historians of Russia without economics, economists of Japan without anthropology, anthropologists of Africa without geography - this gave concentration, good thesis titles and no community of discourse. But help was at hand. During the war a few bright spirits recognized that fighting Japan and then making peace with Japan might be carried on more successfully if the geography, history, economics and anthropology were regarded as aspects of a total Japanese culture. Moreover, it did not seem to be quite so ridiculous or impossible for well-trained men to acquire an expert understanding of a whole people, an entire country or a large and even diverse area. Universities experimented with area studies, and for a while the experts permitted the upstarts to look round instead of through the eye of a needle. Of the many excellent things about America is a readiness to try something that has not been tried before, even though it may look silly or wrong. And so a bold foundation undertook the experiment of trying to create an expert generalist or a general expert. There appeared in India, South Africa, East Africa, Brazil and elsewhere able young men with the mission of seeing all they wanted to see, learning each according to his qualities, all they could learn, and setting down in writing their opinions, observations and conclusions. If any of them had a thesis, or wanted a Ph.D., or planned ultimately to get back of the eye of a needle, that was incidental. Otherwise, it was not cricket. Edwin Munger was one of these people. He was a geographer, which meant that he had his own eye of a needle. With a Ph.D. under his belt, he could run for cover if he had to. But he did not. As any reading of his published work shows, he became very skillful at looking at Africa from all sorts of angles. He skipped over the Germanic spirit of the nineteenth century scholarship into a free-ranging eighteenth century Voltairean spirit willing to look at geography, history, politics and even Afrikaans poetry. It was not a pure zest for scholarship that caused him to marry a South African girl, but his admirers know that this was helpful. Of Voltaire the historians of the day said that he was a master of all knowledge except history. Mathematicians, philosophers and divines made the same exception in the case of their own subjects. Scholars may want to express the same qualifications about a geographer who writes on constitutions, ethnology, penal codes and even rape. But they would miss the point. Ten years of traveling, looking, learning, writing and talking have produced in Mr. Munger an expert generalist. He has much of Africa, and certainly South Africa, in his veins and in his pores. His has been a systemic as well as a cerebral education. For the United States the appearance of a growing number of men with this systemic, visceral, pervasive understanding of other lands and peoples is a superb enrichment. It means that Americans are less prone to fashion their opinions out of theoretical deductions from their own history. This bad habit explains much of the naive or clumsy handling of America's foreign policy. A position based on American political thought does, of course, lead to more sympathy for Julius Nyerere than for Verwoerd. But the new generation of scholars like Edwin Munger make it possible for American public opinion to understand that Mr. Verwoerd is a man involved in one of the most difficult problems of modern history. If one, indeed, accepts Mr. Verwoerd's assumptions, which I cannot, then Mr. Verwoerd becomes a very logical man, acting according to principle, and in a spirit of great courage. One of the saddest paradoxes about Africa is that it needs literally millions of fresh highly skilled experts. But the clash of grinding racial antagonisms may be leading to the expulsion of nearly four million people already in Africa who have many of the skills that Africa must have in order to prosper. Maybe the dams have already burst, and the destroying floods are inexorably on their way. Mr. Verwoerd is certainly in their path. But meanwhile it is valuable to read the understanding and thoughtful things Mr. Munger has to say about Germans and Afrikaners, Jews and Indians, black men and colored men. He knows that if there is hope in South Africa it must come from Afrikaner liberals, although here I myself would wish that he had more to say of the now lonely, and courageous and generously minded English liberals. It is always a little harder to see the virtues of a people whose language is the same as your own. There is a special bias towards people whose tongue you have arduously learned to speak. All this will be written again, later on, in fuller knowledge, maybe not through a haze of tears or after the atomic dust has settled upon a broken world. If the fates are very kind, this may be written again by men free of the angers that now rack Africa. That Mr. Munger has written so fully, so variously means that the final and more definitive story will be better and more fairly told