The World-Wide Web past present and future, and its application to medicine

The World-Wide Web was first developed as a tool for collaboration in the high energy physics community. From there it spread rapidly to other fields, and grew to its present impressive size. As an easy way to access information, it has been a great success, and a huge number of medical applications have taken advantage of it. But there is another side to the Web, its potential as a tool for collaboration between people. Medical examples include telemedicine and teaching. New technical developments offer still greater potential in medical and other fields. This paper gives some background to the early development of the World-Wide Web, a brief overview of its present state with some examples relevant to medicine, and a look at the future

Virtual Institutes: Between Immersion and Communication

In the two expressions "virtual reality" and "virtual community", the term "virtual" has different meanings. A virtual reality is a depiction or, more generally speaking, a sensuous representation of reality that allows - mainly by means of interactivity - to experience various features of reality without actually being in contact with the reality depicted. Therefore, any interactive depiction that is able to imitate reality to such an extent that a high degree of sensory-motor immersion becomes possible is called a virtual reality (Heim 1998, 6f). Since reality is always much more complex than its depiction and full of unpredictable surprises, hardly ever a user has doubts about the difference between the depiction and the thing depicted. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for preferring the imitation to the reality: at least, the imitation is usually not as dangerous as reality sometimes turns out to be. Accordingly, quite different platforms for virtual institutes may be used emphasizing either the immersion aspect or the communication aspect. The decision for a platform depends on the goals pursued with the institute: text-based chat systems allow virtual communities to flourish, single-user VRML scenes convey a highly immersive 3D impression to its users. This is particularly true for virtual institutes realized as a 3D environment, as well as for corresponding virtual communities since 3D environments are adequate for certain tasks only. As an overall framework for the evaluation it is helpful to distinguish three major application areas: research, presentation, and communicative work. The Virtual Institute for Image Science (VIB), which we would like to describe in the following (3) as a case study, is almost exclusively designed for the third task: communicative working. It intends to provide a working space persons can share for joint projects despite being physically separated. Before describing the VIB in more detail we would like to give an overview of virtual institutes between the poles of realistic immersion and of communication in a community (2). The discussion of the case study leads to some more general considerations about the balance virtual institutes must find along that bi-polar dimension (4). In the concluding remarks we focus on the technical tools for virtual communities in 3D presently available

Centro de Informações Tecnológicas e Comerciais para a fruticultura tropical.

bitstream/CNPAT/7914/1/doc57.pd

FIGIT, eLib, Ariadne and the future.

Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), how some of the other eLib projects influenced the web we have today and what changes have come, and may yet come, to affect how digital libraries work

Introduction to the Semantic Web and the Web of Linked Data

Presentation given as part of the EPrints/dotAC training event on 26 Mar 2010

A Longitudinal Study of Consumer Perceptions of Travel Websites: The Case of Hong Kong

Knowing how consumers perceive travel websites can help practitioners better understand consumers’ online requirements. This paper reports the findings of a longitudinal study that investigated the changes and trends in the profile and behavior of online travel-website users in Hong Kong. The profiles of e-buyers and e-browsers in 2009, when compared with those established by prior studies conducted in 2000 and 2007, point in a new direction for practitioners and researchers investigating online travelwebsite user behavior. The results indicated that more middle-aged consumers have become online travel-website users, and that website security and price are perceived to be the most important factors for travel-website use by both e-browsers and e-buyers

Some reflections on knowledge representation in the semantic web

The knowledge representation technology Description Logics (DLs) has become an important component of developments around the Semantic Web. It is suggested here that in order to be really useful, the knowledge represented in DLs should in some fundamental way reflect the way the human mind organises and structures the same knowledge. There is a short historical review of some relevant background work in cognitive psychology, including WordNet. This is followed by a brief introduction to the importance of automatic classification in DLs before considering some issues around ontologies

Influence of Pop-Up News Headlines in Internet-Enabled Devices on the Readership of the Stories among Youths in Owerri Metropolis, Nigeria

This research examined the influence of pop-up news headlines on the readership of the stories that they introduce among youths in Owerri metropolis. The objectives were to, among others, examine whether pop-up news headlines influence the readership of the stories among youths in Owerri metropolis, and identify what factor that is most responsible for determining the influence of pop-up news headlines on the readership of the stories among youths in Owerri metropolis. The uses and gratification theory was used to anchor the study, and the survey design was adopted. Data were gathered from 380 young users of internet-enabled devices in the Owerri metropolis. Findings indicate that pop-up news headlines are a common feature in online news distribution, as 100% of the respondents admitted to having seen pop-up news headlines on their internet-enabled devices; while pop-up news headlines influence readership of the stories among a majority (53%) of the young people, the said influence is limited as a result of several factors. Based on the findings, it was recommended that, among others, news organisations can increase the influence of the popup news headlines by introducing cash or point tokens for those who read the stories

Co-Participation and Co-Creation in Higher Education: the use of ICT in the interdisciplinary project “Voz Delas”

Implementing ICTs in the educational environment is one of the greatest challenges related to pedagogical and technological innovation, since their use can influence how to teach, constituting educational resources. The aim of this article is describe one teaching experience, based on colaborative learning through co-participation and co-creation, that used a lot of resources and digital plattaforms in an undergraduate course. The stages of the construction of co-creation and co-participation took place in four phases. The project lasted 4 months and was developed by 40 students. In conclusion, the introduction of ICTs and virtual learning environments into the traditional teaching model can improve interaction in the teaching-learning process. The activities developed show the possibilities of the use of ICTs as a potential for co-participation and co-creation. The contact with students through the virtual environment created different possibilities to enrich their knowledge