Application of User Profiling on Ontology Module Extraction for Medical portals

One fit all for approach for searching and ranking discovered knowledge on the Internet does not cater for the diverse variety of users and user groups with different preferences, information needs and priorities. This is of a particular case in the National electronic Library of Infection in the UK (NeLI, www.neli.org.uk) accessed by a number of medical professionals with different preferences and medical information needs. We define personal and group profiles, based on user-specified interests, and develop an ontology module extraction service defining the key area of the infection ontology of a particular relevance to each user group. In this paper we discuss how ontology modularisation can improve the NeLI portal by providing customised alert, recommender service and specialitycustomised browsing tree structure

Adapting Collaborative Learning Tools to Support Group Peer Mentorship

Group peer mentorship is a relatively new addition to the area of collaborative learning. We see an untapped potential in supporting this model of mentorship with the existing collaborative learning tools like peer review and wiki. Therefore, we proposed to use a modified peer review system and a modified wiki system. From our preliminary studies using both peer review and wiki systems, we found that participants preferred the peer-review system to the wiki system in supporting them for mentorship. Therefore, this dissertation specifically addresses how to adapt the peer review system to support group peer mentorship. We proposed a modified peer review system, which comprises seven stages – initial submission of the first draft of the paper by the author, the review of author’s paper by peer reviewers, release of review feedback to the author, back-evaluation of their reviews by the authors, modification of the paper by the author, submission of the final paper and the final stage where both authors and reviewers provide an evaluation of the peer review process with respect to their learning, their perception of the helpfulness of the process, and their satisfaction with the process. We also proposed to use our group matching algorithm, based on some constraints and the principles of the Hungarian algorithm, to achieve a diversified grouping of peers for each peer review session. With these, we conducted six peer review studies with the graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Saskatchewan and teachers in Chile. This dissertation reports on the findings from these studies. We found that peer review, with some modifications, is a good tool to facilitate group peer mentorship. An evaluation of the performance of our group matching algorithm showed an improvement over three other algorithms, with respect to three metrics – knowledge gain of peers, time and space consumption of the algorithm. Finally, this dissertation also shows that wiki has the potential to support group peer mentorship, but needs further research