Development of a unified web-based national HIV/AIDS information system in China

Background In the past, many data collection systems were in operation for different HIV/AIDS projects in China. We describe the creation of a unified, web-based national HIV/AIDS information system designed to streamline data collection and facilitate data use

eCulture: examining and quantifying cultural differences in user acceptance between Chinese and British web site users

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of LutonThe World Wide Web (WWW) has become an important medium for communicating between people all over the world. It is regarded as a global system and is associated with a wide user and social system diversity. The effects of differing user-groups and their associated cultures on user acceptance of web sites can be significant, and as a result understanding the behaviour of web users in various cultures is becoming a significant concern. The eCulture research project is based on previous classical theories and research in culture. It applies a factorial experimental design strategy (the Taguchi method) in crosscultural usability / acceptability, together with other approaches such as semiotic analysis and card sorting. Two types of analysis, both top-down and bottom-up have been implemented to investigate differences in web site usability and acceptability between users from Mainland China and the United Kingdom. Based on experiments on web sites investigating the relationship between cultural issues and usability lacceptability aspects between Chinese and British web users, several issues, such as cultural factors, cognitive abilities, social semiotic differences and other issues have emerged. One of the goals has been to develop 'cultural fingerprints' for both web sites and users in different cultures. By comparing cultural and site fingerprints, usability and acceptability of web sites can be diagrammatically matched to the target culture. Experiments investigating qualitative factors and quantitative data collection and analysis based on the Taguchi method has led to the successful development of two versions of 'cultural fingerprint' for both web sites and target cultures in the UK and China. It has been possible to relate these studies to a wider body of knowledge, and to suggest ways in which the work may be extended in the future

Networks of reader and country status: An analysis of Mendeley reader statistics

The number of papers published in journals indexed by the Web of Science core collection is steadily increasing. In recent years, nearly two million new papers were published each year; somewhat more than one million papers when primary research papers are considered only (articles and reviews are the document types where primary research is usually reported or reviewed). However, who reads these papers? More precisely, which groups of researchers from which (self-assigned) scientific disciplines and countries are reading these papers? Is it possible to visualize readership patterns for certain countries, scientific disciplines, or academic status groups? One popular method to answer these questions is a network analysis. In this study, we analyze Mendeley readership data of a set of 1,133,224 articles and 64,960 reviews with publication year 2012 to generate three different kinds of networks: (1) The network based on disciplinary affiliations of Mendeley readers contains four groups: (i) biology, (ii) social science and humanities (including relevant computer science), (iii) bio-medical sciences, and (iv) natural science and engineering. In all four groups, the category with the addition "miscellaneous" prevails. (2) The network of co-readers in terms of professional status shows that a common interest in papers is mainly shared among PhD students, Master's students, and postdocs. (3) The country network focusses on global readership patterns: a group of 53 nations is identified as core to the scientific enterprise, including Russia and China as well as two thirds of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures (also web-based startable), and 2 table

Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services

One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS). WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296 WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs. Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for 1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure

Anatomy of the Third-Party Web Tracking Ecosystem

The presence of third-party tracking on websites has become customary. However, our understanding of the third-party ecosystem is still very rudimentary. We examine third-party trackers from a geographical perspective, observing the third-party tracking ecosystem from 29 countries across the globe. When examining the data by region (North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, Middle East, and Oceania), we observe significant geographical variation between regions and countries within regions. We find trackers that focus on specific regions and countries, and some that are hosted in countries outside their expected target tracking domain. Given the differences in regulatory regimes between jurisdictions, we believe this analysis sheds light on the geographical properties of this ecosystem and on the problems that these may pose to our ability to track and manage the different data silos that now store personal data about us all

What country, university or research institute, performed the best on COVID-19? Bibliometric analysis of scientific literature

In this article, we conduct data mining to discover the countries, universities and companies, produced or collaborated the most research on Covid-19 since the pandemic started. We present some interesting findings, but despite analysing all available records on COVID-19 from the Web of Science Core Collection, we failed to reach any significant conclusions on how the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we increased our analysis to include all available data records on pandemics and epidemics from 1900 to 2020. We discover some interesting results on countries, universities and companies, that produced collaborated most the most in research on pandemic and epidemics. Then we compared the results with the analysing on COVID-19 data records. This has created some interesting findings that are explained and graphically visualised in the article