Semantic technologies: from niche to the mainstream of Web 3? A comprehensive framework for web Information modelling and semantic annotation

Context: Web information technologies developed and applied in the last decade have considerably changed the way web applications operate and have revolutionised information management and knowledge discovery. Social technologies, user-generated classification schemes and formal semantics have a far-reaching sphere of influence. They promote collective intelligence, support interoperability, enhance sustainability and instigate innovation. Contribution: The research carried out and consequent publications follow the various paradigms of semantic technologies, assess each approach, evaluate its efficiency, identify the challenges involved and propose a comprehensive framework for web information modelling and semantic annotation, which is the thesis’ original contribution to knowledge. The proposed framework assists web information modelling, facilitates semantic annotation and information retrieval, enables system interoperability and enhances information quality. Implications: Semantic technologies coupled with social media and end-user involvement can instigate innovative influence with wide organisational implications that can benefit a considerable range of industries. The scalable and sustainable business models of social computing and the collective intelligence of organisational social media can be resourcefully paired with internal research and knowledge from interoperable information repositories, back-end databases and legacy systems. Semantified information assets can free human resources so that they can be used to better serve business development, support innovation and increase productivity

Mapping the Current Landscape of Research Library Engagement with Emerging Technologies in Research and Learning: Final Report

The generation, dissemination, and analysis of digital information is a significant driver, and consequence, of technological change. As data and information stewards in physical and virtual space, research libraries are thoroughly entangled in the challenges presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution:1 a societal shift powered not by steam or electricity, but by data, and characterized by a fusion of the physical and digital worlds.2 Organizing, structuring, preserving, and providing access to growing volumes of the digital data generated and required by research and industry will become a critically important function. As partners with the community of researchers and scholars, research libraries are also recognizing and adapting to the consequences of technological change in the practices of scholarship and scholarly communication. Technologies that have emerged or become ubiquitous within the last decade have accelerated information production and have catalyzed profound changes in the ways scholars, students, and the general public create and engage with information. The production of an unprecedented volume and diversity of digital artifacts, the proliferation of machine learning (ML) technologies,3 and the emergence of data as the “world’s most valuable resource,”4 among other trends, present compelling opportunities for research libraries to contribute in new and significant ways to the research and learning enterprise. Librarians are all too familiar with predictions of the research library’s demise in an era when researchers have so much information at their fingertips. A growing body of evidence provides a resounding counterpoint: that the skills, experience, and values of librarians, and the persistence of libraries as an institution, will become more important than ever as researchers contend with the data deluge and the ephemerality and fragility of much digital content. This report identifies strategic opportunities for research libraries to adopt and engage with emerging technologies,5 with a roughly fiveyear time horizon. It considers the ways in which research library values and professional expertise inform and shape this engagement, the ways library and library worker roles will be reconceptualized, and the implication of a range of technologies on how the library fulfills its mission. The report builds on a literature review covering the last five years of published scholarship, primarily North American information science literature, and interviews with a dozen library field experts, completed in fall 2019. It begins with a discussion of four cross-cutting opportunities that permeate many or all aspects of research library services. Next, specific opportunities are identified in each of five core research library service areas: facilitating information discovery, stewarding the scholarly and cultural record, advancing digital scholarship, furthering student learning and success, and creating learning and collaboration spaces. Each section identifies key technologies shaping user behaviors and library services, and highlights exemplary initiatives. Underlying much of the discussion in this report is the idea that “digital transformation is increasingly about change management”6 —that adoption of or engagement with emerging technologies must be part of a broader strategy for organizational change, for “moving emerging work from the periphery to the core,”7 and a broader shift in conceptualizing the research library and its services. Above all, libraries are benefitting from the ways in which emerging technologies offer opportunities to center users and move from a centralized and often siloed service model to embedded, collaborative engagement with the research and learning enterprise

Technology in Museums: New Tools for Traditional Goals

This thesis has examined the ways that museums might theoretically incorporate technology in addition to current technologies employed in museums. Analysis has been done on the ways that technology can be useful in engaging visitors who might come to museums alone, in a group, or as part school fieldtrips. The various uses of social-media are discussed, including social-media strategy recommendations for museums. Museum mobile applications are investigated and features for such applications have been analyzed for how they might benefit both museums and visitorsMaster of ArtsArts AdministrationUniversity of Michigan-Flinthttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145732/1/Bellinger2018.pdfDescription of Bellinger2018.pdf : Thesi

ID5.2 Roadmap for KRSM RTD

Roadmap for KRSM RTD activities.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

Evaluating humanoid embodied conversational agents in mobile guide applications

Evolution in the area of mobile computing has been phenomenal in the last few years. The exploding increase in hardware power has enabled multimodal mobile interfaces to be developed. These interfaces differ from the traditional graphical user interface (GUI), in that they enable a more “natural” communication with mobile devices, through the use of multiple communication channels (e.g., multi-touch, speech recognition, etc.). As a result, a new generation of applications has emerged that provide human-like assistance in the user interface (e.g., the Siri conversational assistant (Siri Inc., visited 2010)). These conversational agents are currently designed to automate a number of tedious mobile tasks (e.g., to call a taxi), but the possible applications are endless. A domain of particular interest is that of Cultural Heritage, where conversational agents can act as personalized tour guides in, for example, archaeological attractions. The visitors to historical places have a diverse range of information needs. For example, casual visitors have different information needs from those with a deeper interest in an attraction (e.g., - holiday learners versus students). A personalized conversational agent can access a cultural heritage database, and effectively translate data into a natural language form that is adapted to the visitor’s personal needs and interests. The present research aims to investigate the information needs of a specific type of visitors, those for whom retention of cultural content is important (e.g., students of history, cultural experts, history hobbyists, educators, etc.). Embodying a conversational agent enables the agent to use additional modalities to communicate this content (e.g., through facial expressions, deictic gestures, etc.) to the user. Simulating the social norms that guide the real-world human-to-human interaction (e.g., adapting the story based on the reactions of the users), should at least theoretically optimize the cognitive accessibility of the content. Although a number of projects have attempted to build embodied conversational agents (ECAs) for cultural heritage, little is known about their impact on the users’ perceived cognitive accessibility of the cultural heritage content, and the usability of the interfaces they support. In particular, there is a general disagreement on the advantages of multimodal ECAs in terms of users’ task performance and satisfaction over nonanthropomorphised interfaces. Further, little is known about what features influence what aspects of the cognitive accessibility of the content and/or usability of the interface. To address these questions I studied the user experiences with ECA interfaces in six user studies across three countries (Greece, UK and USA). To support these studies, I introduced: a) a conceptual framework based on well-established theoretical models of human cognition, and previous frameworks from the literature. The framework offers a holistic view of the design space of ECA systems b) a research technique for evaluating the cognitive accessibility of ECA-based information presentation systems that combine data from eye tracking and facial expression recognition. In addition, I designed a toolkit, from which I partially developed its natural language processing component, to facilitate rapid development of mobile guide applications using ECAs. Results from these studies provide evidence that an ECA, capable of displaying some of the communication strategies (e.g., non-verbal behaviours to accompany linguistic information etc.) found in the real-world human guidance scenario, is not affecting and effective in enhancing the user’s ability to retain cultural content. The findings from the first two studies, suggest than an ECA has no negative/positive impact on users experiencing content that is similar (but not the same) across different locations (see experiment one, in Chapter 7), and content of variable difficulty (see experiment two, in Chapter 7). However, my results also suggest that improving the degree of content personalization and the quality of the modalities used by the ECA can result in both effective and affecting human-ECA interactions. Effectiveness is the degree to which an ECA facilitates a user in accomplishing the navigation and information tasks. Similarly, affecting is the degree to which the ECA changes the quality of the user’s experience while accomplishing the navigation and information tasks. By adhering to the above rules, I gradually improved my designs and built ECAs that are affecting. In particular, I found that an ECA can affect the quality of the user’s navigation experience (see experiment three in Chapter 7), as well as how a user experiences narrations of cultural value (see experiment five, in Chapter 8). In terms of navigation, I found sound evidence that the strongest impact of the ECAs nonverbal behaviours is on the ability of users to correctly disambiguate the navigation of an ECA instructions provided by a tour guide system. However, my ECAs failed to become effective, and to elicit enhanced navigation or retention performances. Given the positive impact of ECAs on the disambiguation of navigation instructions, the lack of ECA-effectiveness in navigation could be attributed to the simulated mobile conditions. In a real outdoor environment, where users would have to actually walk around the castle, an ECA could have elicited better navigation performance, than a system without it. With regards to retention performance, my results suggest that a designer should not solely consider the impact of an ECA, but also the style and effectiveness of the question-answering (Q&A) with the ECA, and the type of user interacting with the ECA (see experiments four and six, in Chapter 8). I found that that there is a correlation between how many questions participants asked per location for a tour, and the information they retained after the completion of the tour. When participants were requested to ask the systems a specific number of questions per location, they could retain more information than when they were allowed to freely ask questions. However, the constrained style of interaction decreased their overall satisfaction with the systems. Therefore, when enhanced retention performance is needed, a designer should consider strategies that should direct users to ask a specific number of questions per location for a tour. On the other hand, when maintaining the positive levels of user experiences is the desired outcome of an interaction, users should be allowed to freely ask questions. Then, the effectiveness of the Q&A session is of importance to the success/failure of the user’s interaction with the ECA. In a natural-language question-answering system, the system often fails to understand the user’s question and, by default, it asks the user to rephrase again. A problem arises when the system fails to understand a question repeatedly. I found that a repetitive request to rephrase the same question annoys participants and affects their retention performance. Therefore, in order to ensure effective human-ECA Q&A, the repeat messages should be built in a way to allow users to figure out how to ask the system questions to avoid improper responses. Then, I found strong evidence that an ECA may be effective for some type of users, while for some others it may be not. I found that an ECA with an attention-grabbing mechanism (see experiment six, in Chapter 8), had an inverse effect on the retention performance of participants with different gender. In particular, it enhanced the retention performance of the male participants, while it degraded the retention performance of the female participants. Finally, a series of tentative design recommendations for the design of both affecting and effective ECAs in mobile guide applications in derived from the work undertaken. These are aimed at ECA researchers and mobile guide designers

AXMEDIS 2008

The AXMEDIS International Conference series aims to explore all subjects and topics related to cross-media and digital-media content production, processing, management, standards, representation, sharing, protection and rights management, to address the latest developments and future trends of the technologies and their applications, impacts and exploitation. The AXMEDIS events offer venues for exchanging concepts, requirements, prototypes, research ideas, and findings which could contribute to academic research and also benefit business and industrial communities. In the Internet as well as in the digital era, cross-media production and distribution represent key developments and innovations that are fostered by emergent technologies to ensure better value for money while optimising productivity and market coverage

Accessibility of Health Data Representations for Older Adults: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

Health data of consumer off-the-shelf wearable devices is often conveyed to users through visual data representations and analyses. However, this is not always accessible to people with disabilities or older people due to low vision, cognitive impairments or literacy issues. Due to trade-offs between aesthetics predominance or information overload, real-time user feedback may not be conveyed easily from sensor devices through visual cues like graphs and texts. These difficulties may hinder critical data understanding. Additional auditory and tactile feedback can also provide immediate and accessible cues from these wearable devices, but it is necessary to understand existing data representation limitations initially. To avoid higher cognitive and visual overload, auditory and haptic cues can be designed to complement, replace or reinforce visual cues. In this paper, we outline the challenges in existing data representation and the necessary evidence to enhance the accessibility of health information from personal sensing devices used to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, sleep, activity, heart rate and more. By creating innovative and inclusive user feedback, users will likely want to engage and interact with new devices and their own data

Internet Marketing for Profit Organizations: A framework for the implementation of strategic internet marketing

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/828 on 13.03.2017 by CS (TIS)The development of the Internet has significantly changed the face of established markets and operation approaches across a tremendous spectrum of different industries. Within the competitive environment of those industries, the opportunities and risks derived from the new platform are so ubiquitous that unused opportunities quickly translate into potential risks. Those opportunities and risks demand for a structured approach how to implement a sustainable Internet marketing strategy that targets clear business objectives. Marketing and strategic management theory describes very clear structural principles towards their operational implementation. Based on those principles an extensive literature review has been conducted which confirms the result from representative statistics that demonstrate the lack of a comprehensive framework for strategic Internet marketing. The distinct result of this research is such a comprehensive framework which has been directly derived from the illustrated principles of strategic management and Internet marketing. All major components of this generic framework are designed, evaluated in dedicated surveys and validated in extensive case studies. The main achievements of the research are: • A comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art Internet marketing strategies • Conceptual specification of a strategic Internet marketing framework with generic applicability to profit organizations • Demonstration of the practical feasibility of the proposed framework at the implementation level (via several examples like the SIMTF and SIMPF) • Confirmation of the applicability of the framework based upon a survey of potential beneficiaries • Validation of the effectiveness of the approach via case study scenarios Changing the understanding of a former technical discipline, the thesis describes how Internet marketing becomes a precise strategic instrument for profit organizations. The new structured, complete and self-similar framework facilitates sales organizations to significantly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their marketing operations. Furthermore, the framework ensures a high level of transparency about the impact and benefit of individual activities. The new model explicitly answers concerns and problems raised and documented in existing research and accommodate for the current limitations of strategic Internet marketing. The framework allows evaluating existing as well as future Internet marketing tactics and provides a reference model for all other definitions of objectives, KPI and work packages. Finally this thesis also matures the subject matter of Internet marketing as a discipline of independent scientific research providing an underlying structure for subsequent studies.Darmstadt Node of the CSCAN Network at University of Applied Sciences, Darmstad