Personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries

Widespread use of the Internet has resulted in digital libraries that are increasingly used by diverse communities of users for diverse purposes and in which sharing and collaboration have become important social elements. As such libraries become commonplace, as their contents and services become more varied, and as their patrons become more experienced with computer technology, users will expect more sophisticated services from these libraries. A simple search function, normally an integral part of any digital library, increasingly leads to user frustration as user needs become more complex and as the volume of managed information increases. Proactive digital libraries, where the library evolves from being passive and untailored, are seen as offering great potential for addressing and overcoming these issues and include techniques such as personalisation and recommender systems. In this paper, following on from the DELOS/NSF Working Group on Personalisation and Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries, which met and reported during 2003, we present some background material on the scope of personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. We then outline the working group’s vision for the evolution of digital libraries and the role that personalisation and recommender systems will play, and we present a series of research challenges and specific recommendations and research priorities for the field

A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations

Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases. Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type, such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive version of the system

Moving Towards Performance-Based Specifications in Public Procurement

There are environmental benefits associated with the procurement of services instead of, or in addition to, discrete products. Under the right conditions, transitioning to a more service-intensive purchasing model can reduce natural resource consumption in the production, use and disposal phases of product life cycles. Generally, financial savings can be realized too—even in the short term. In order for public procurers who purchase goods, services, buildings and infrastructure on a significant scale to take advantage of these potential savings and benefits, performancebased specifications are invaluable tools. Performance-based specifications allow public authorities to specify their needs in general terms by describing what general functions they require (e.g. lighting, mobility, information management) rather than specifying the minute details of the inputs and process required to get there. The private sector can then innovate and generate savings in resource use and in operating costs. Generally speaking, suppliers are better suited than public procurers to know what options are available in the market, or to innovate and commercialize towards new products and services in order to meet a required performance level. Performance-based specifications are thus a tool with which, under the right conditions, public procurers can stimulate markets to deliver innovative and environmentally sound solutions

Sharing Human-Generated Observations by Integrating HMI and the Semantic Sensor Web

Current “Internet of Things” concepts point to a future where connected objects gather meaningful information about their environment and share it with other objects and people. In particular, objects embedding Human Machine Interaction (HMI), such as mobile devices and, increasingly, connected vehicles, home appliances, urban interactive infrastructures, etc., may not only be conceived as sources of sensor information, but, through interaction with their users, they can also produce highly valuable context-aware human-generated observations. We believe that the great promise offered by combining and sharing all of the different sources of information available can be realized through the integration of HMI and Semantic Sensor Web technologies. This paper presents a technological framework that harmonizes two of the most influential HMI and Sensor Web initiatives: the W3C’s Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces (MMI) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) with its semantic extension, respectively. Although the proposed framework is general enough to be applied in a variety of connected objects integrating HMI, a particular development is presented for a connected car scenario where drivers’ observations about the traffic or their environment are shared across the Semantic Sensor Web. For implementation and evaluation purposes an on-board OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) architecture was built, integrating several available HMI, Sensor Web and Semantic Web technologies. A technical performance test and a conceptual validation of the scenario with potential users are reported, with results suggesting the approach is soun

This Time It's Personal: from PIM to the Perfect Digital Assistant

Interacting with digital PIM tools like calendars, to-do lists, address books, bookmarks and so on, is a highly manual, often repetitive and frequently tedious process. Despite increases in memory and processor power over the past two decades of personal computing, not much has changed in the way we engage with such applications. We must still manually decompose frequently performed tasks into multiple smaller, data specific processes if we want to be able to recall or reuse the information in some meaningful way. "Meeting with Yves at 5 in Stata about blah" breaks down into rigid, fixed semantics in separate applications: data to be recorded in calendar fields, address book fields and, as for the blah, something that does not necessarily exist as a PIM application data structure. We argue that a reason Personal Information Management tools may be so manual, and so effectively fragmented, is that they are not personal enough. If our information systems were more personal, that is, if they knew in a manner similar to the way a personal assistant would know us and support us, then our tools would be more helpful: an assistive PIM tool would gather together the necessary material in support of our meeting with Yves. We, therefore, have been investigating the possible paths towards PIM tools as tools that work for us, rather than tools that seemingly make us work for them. To that end, in the following sections we consider how we may develop a framework for PIM tools as "perfect digital assistants" (PDA). Our impetus has been to explore how, by considering the affordances of a Real World personal assistant, we can conceptualize a design framework, and from there a development program for a digital simulacrum of such an assistant that is not for some far off future, but for the much nearer term

Learning design – making practice explicit

New technologies have immense potential for learning, but the sheer variety possible also creates challenges for learners in terms of navigating through an increasingly complex digital landscape and for teachers in terms of how to design and support learning interventions. How can learners and teachers make informed decisions about what technologies to use in the design and support of learning activities? This presentation will consider this question and present a new methodology for design – 'learning design', which aims to shift the creation and support of learning from what has traditionally been an implicit, belief-based practice to one that is explicit and design based. Learning design research at the Open University, UK has included the development of a set of conceptual design views, a tool for visualising designs (CompendiumLD) and a social networking site, for sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas and designs (Cloudworks). An overview of this work will be provided, along with a discussion of the perceived benefits of this new approach to educational design

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research