'Girlfriends and Strawberry Jam’: Tagging Memories, Experiences, and Events for Future Retrieval

In this short paper we have some preliminary thoughts about tagging everyday life events in order to allow future retrieval of events or experiences related to events. Elaboration of these thoughts will be done in the context of the recently started Network of Excellence PetaMedia (Peer-to-Peer Tagged Media) and the Network of Excellence SSPNet (Social Signal Processing), to start in 2009, both funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme. Descriptions of these networks will be given later in this paper

Shared visiting in Equator city

In this paper we describe an infrastructure and prototype system for sharing of visiting experiences across multiple media. The prototype supports synchronous co-visiting by physical and digital visitors, with digital access via either the World Wide Web or 3-dimensional graphics

Hypermedia as medium

Claims and rebuttals that hypermedia (the associative, nonlinear interconnection of multimedia materials) is a fundamentally innovative means of thinking and communicating are described. This representational architecture has many advantages that make it a major advance over other media; however, it also has several intrinsic problems that severly limits its effectiveness as a medium. These advantages and limits in applications are discussed

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

Educational hypermedia resources facilitator

Se analiza el impacto que la enseñanza en web ha tenido en la educación superior y las distintas herramientas que permiten la creación de documentos hipertexto como recursos de enseñanzaWithin the university the introduction of computers is creating a new criterion of differentiation between those who as a matter of course become integrated in the technocratic trend deriving from the daily use of these machines and those who become isolated by not using them. This difference increases when computer science and communications merge to introduce virtual educational areas, where the conjunction of teacher and pupil in the space-time dimension is no longer an essential requirement, andwhere the written text is replaced (or rather complemented) by the digital text. In this article a historical defence is made of the presence of this new standard in the creation of digital educational resources such as the hyperdocument, as well as the barriers and technological problems deriving from its use. Furthermore, HyCo, an authoring tool, is introduced which facilitates the composition of hypertexts, which arestored as semantic learning objects, looking for that through of a simple and extremely intuitive interface and interaction model, any teacher with a minimum knowledge of computer science has the possibility of transforming his or her experience and knowledge into useful and quality hypermedia educational resources

Collaborative geographic visualization

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe present document is a revision of essential references to take into account when developing ubiquitous Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with collaborative visualization purposes. Its chapters focus, respectively, on general principles of GIS, its multimedia components and ubiquitous practices; geo-referenced information visualization and its graphical components of virtual and augmented reality; collaborative environments, its technological requirements, architectural specificities, and models for collective information management; and some final considerations about the future and challenges of collaborative visualization of GIS in ubiquitous environment

Digital Contents for Enhancing the Communication of Museum Exhibition: The Pervival Project

The PERVIVAL project aims at developing an interactive system with the preliminary function of explaining a complex museum collection in a simple and immediate way and allowing the visitor to better understand the museum collection he is about to see. In particular, the interactive system aims at enhancing the understanding of the collections of funeral furnishings of Egyptians, which are characterized by a multiplicity of objects of rich symbolism and connected to each other through complex funeral rituals. The idea is to explain the religious creed of ancient Egyptians through the objects placed in the tomb, having in this way a double benefit: enlightening the rituals and placing the objects back in their primary function. In this way, the knowledge of the visitor is not only enlarged through the description of something that is described on papyruses or inscriptions (hence, not comprehensible) but also the proper function of every single object will be explained through the connection among them, as a function of amulets or goods necessary to travel through the World of the Dead. The connection between the different objects allows a much greater understanding of the exposed collection that would be perceived in this way not as a set of single isolated pieces, but as a harmonious set of complementary elements between they represent a specific historical-cultural context

DIGITAL CONTENTS FOR ENHANCING THE COMMUNICATION OF MUSEUM EXHIBITION: THE PERVIVAL PROJECT

Abstract. The PERVIVAL project aims at developing an interactive system with the preliminary function of explaining a complex museum collection in a simple and immediate way and allowing the visitor to better understand the museum collection he is about to see. In particular, the interactive system aims at enhancing the understanding of the collections of funeral furnishings of Egyptians, which are characterized by a multiplicity of objects of rich symbolism and connected to each other through complex funeral rituals. The idea is to explain the religious creed of ancient Egyptians through the objects placed in the tomb, having in this way a double benefit: enlightening the rituals and placing the objects back in their primary function. In this way, the knowledge of the visitor is not only enlarged through the description of something that is described on papyruses or inscriptions (hence, not comprehensible) but also the proper function of every single object will be explained through the connection among them, as a function of amulets or goods necessary to travel through the World of the Dead. The connection between the different objects allows a much greater understanding of the exposed collection that would be perceived in this way not as a set of single isolated pieces, but as a harmonious set of complementary elements between they represent a specific historical-cultural context.</p

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web