Characterizing and Evaluating Users' Information Seeking Behavior in Social Tagging Systems

Social tagging systems in the Web 2.0 era present an innovative information seeking environment succeeding the library and traditional Web. The primary goals of this study were to, in this particular context: (1) identify the general information seeking strategies adopted by users and determine their effectiveness; (2) reveals the characteristics of the users who prefer different strategies; and (3) identify the specific traits of users' information seeking paths and understand factors shaping them. A representative social tagging system, Douban (http://www.douban.com/) was chosen as the research setting in order to generate empirical findings.Based on the mixed methods research design, this study consists of a quantitative phase and a qualitative phase. The former firstly involved a clickstream data analysis of 20 million clickstream records requested from Douban at the footprint, movement, and track levels. Limited to studying physical behavior, it was complemented by an online survey which captured Douban users' background information from various aspects. In the subsequent qualitative phase, a focus group gathered a number of experienced Douban users to help interpret the quantitative results.Major findings of this study show that: (1) the general strategies include encountering, browsing by resource, browsing by tag, browsing by user/group, searching, and monitoring by user/group; (2) while browsing by resource is the most popular strategy, browsing by tag is the most effective one; (3) users preferring different strategies do not have significantly different characteristics; and (4) on users' information seeking paths these exist two resource viewing patterns - continuous and sporadic, and two resource collecting patterns - lagged and instant, and they can be attributed to user, task, and system factors.A model was developed to illustrate the strategic and tactic layers of users' information seeking behavior in social tagging systems. It offers a deep insight into the behavioral changes brought about by this new environment as compared to the Web in general. This model can serve as the theoretical base for designing user-oriented information seeking interfaces for social tagging systems so that the general strategies and specific tactics will be accommodated efficiently

Scripts in a Frame: A Framework for Archiving Deferred Representations

Web archives provide a view of the Web as seen by Web crawlers. Because of rapid advancements and adoption of client-side technologies like JavaScript and Ajax, coupled with the inability of crawlers to execute these technologies effectively, Web resources become harder to archive as they become more interactive. At Web scale, we cannot capture client-side representations using the current state-of-the art toolsets because of the migration from Web pages to Web applications. Web applications increasingly rely on JavaScript and other client-side programming languages to load embedded resources and change client-side state. We demonstrate that Web crawlers and other automatic archival tools are unable to archive the resulting JavaScript-dependent representations (what we term deferred representations), resulting in missing or incorrect content in the archives and the general inability to replay the archived resource as it existed at the time of capture. Building on prior studies on Web archiving, client-side monitoring of events and embedded resources, and studies of the Web, we establish an understanding of the trends contributing to the increasing unarchivability of deferred representations. We show that JavaScript leads to lower-quality mementos (archived Web resources) due to the archival difficulties it introduces. We measure the historical impact of JavaScript on mementos, demonstrating that the increased adoption of JavaScript and Ajax correlates with the increase in missing embedded resources. To measure memento and archive quality, we propose and evaluate a metric to assess memento quality closer to Web users’ perception. We propose a two-tiered crawling approach that enables crawlers to capture embedded resources dependent upon JavaScript. Measuring the performance benefits between crawl approaches, we propose a classification method that mitigates the performance impacts of the two-tiered crawling approach, and we measure the frontier size improvements observed with the two-tiered approach. Using the two-tiered crawling approach, we measure the number of client-side states associated with each URI-R and propose a mechanism for storing the mementos of deferred representations. In short, this dissertation details a body of work that explores the following: why JavaScript and deferred representations are difficult to archive (establishing the term deferred representation to describe JavaScript dependent representations); the extent to which JavaScript impacts archivability along with its impact on current archival tools; a metric for measuring the quality of mementos, which we use to describe the impact of JavaScript on archival quality; the performance trade-offs between traditional archival tools and technologies that better archive JavaScript; and a two-tiered crawling approach for discovering and archiving currently unarchivable descendants (representations generated by client-side user events) of deferred representations to mitigate the impact of JavaScript on our archives. In summary, what we archive is increasingly different from what we as interactive users experience. Using the approaches detailed in this dissertation, archives can create mementos closer to what users experience rather than archiving the crawlers’ experiences on the Web

Visualization of analytic provenance for sensemaking

Sensemaking is an iterative and dynamic process, in which people collect data relevant to their tasks, analyze the collected information to produce new knowledge, and possibly inform further actions. During the sensemaking process, it is difficult for the human’s working memory to keep track of the progress and to synthesize a large number of individual findings and derived hypotheses, thus limits the performance. Analytic provenance captures both the data exploration process and and its accompanied reasoning, potentially addresses these information overload and disorientation problems. Visualization can help recall, revisit and reproduce the sensemaking process through visual representations of provenance data. More interesting and challenging, analytic provenance has the potential to facilitate the ongoing sensemaking process rather than providing only post hoc support. This thesis addresses the challenge of how to design interactive visualizations of analytic provenance data to support such an iterative and dynamic sensemaking. Its original contribution includes four visualizations that help users explore complex temporal and reasoning relationships hidden in the sensemaking problems, using both automatically and manually captured provenance. First SchemaLine, a timeline visualization, enables users to construct and refine narratives from their annotations. Second, TimeSets extends SchemaLine to explore more complex relationships by visualizing both temporal and categorical information simultaneously. Third, SensePath captures and visualizes user actions to enable analysts to gain a deep understanding of the user’s sensemaking process. Fourth, SenseMap visualization prevents users from getting lost, synthesizes new relationship from captured information, and consolidates their understanding of the sensemaking problem. All of these four visualizations are developed using a user-centered design approach and evaluated empirically to explore how they help target users make sense of their real tasks. In summary, this thesis contributes novel and validated interactive visualizations of analytic provenance data that enable users to perform effective sensemaking

Usability Tool Support for Model-Based Web Development

When web engineering methods are used for the development of web applications, models are created during the development process which describe the website. Using the information present in these models, it is possible to create usability tool support that is more advanced than current approaches, which do not rely on the presence of models. This dissertation presents ideas for tool support during different phases of the development, such as the implementation phase or the testing phase. For example, if a tool knows from a model that the audience of a website are teenagers, it can examine whether the words and sentences used on the website are likely to be understood by teenagers. An approach is presented to augment existing web engineering models with the additional information ("age" in this case) and to make it available to tools, e.g. via embedding it in HTML code. Two prototypes demonstrate the concepts for integrating usability tool support into web engineering

Sou tudo e não sou nada: as funções de director técnico nos organismos de apoio social a crianças e idosos no concelho de Caldas da Rainha

Dissertação de Mestrado em Política SocialAs Instituições Particulares de Solidariedade Social, organizações de economia social, especializadas na acção social, reflectem um papel social muito importante para o Estado, bem como para a sociedade civil. Para que estas tenham uma melhor qualidade de serviço é fundamental serem executadas por profissionais competentes e que tenham definidas as suas habilitações funcionais. Um dos requisitos para se poder alcançar este objectivo é a existência de um perfil profissional específico, com definição de funções, bem como a urgência do reconhecimento legal da profissão. É neste contexto que se realizou este trabalho cujos objectivos principais são identificar e caracterizar as competências pessoais e funcionais requeridas, as funções que executam e que se prevêem realizar, bem como o ambiente profissional em que se inserem. Para a concretização dos objectivos definidos começou-se por realizar uma revisão bibliográfica procurando definir os principais conceitos associadas à gestão das Instituições Particulares de Solidariedade Social, à Gestão de Recursos Humanos e ao papel dos Directores Técnicos. A realização deste estudo assentou na aplicação de um inquérito por questionário a treze Directoras Técnicas do concelho de Caldas da Rainha. Como principais conclusões deste trabalho salienta-se a inexistência de categoria profissional, de progressão de carreira e um progressivo aumento das responsabilidades e competências exigidas.Private Institutions of Social Solidarity, social economy organizations, specializing in social action, reflect a very important social role for the state and civil society. For them to have a better quality of service it is essential that it be performed by competent professionals and have their functional skills defined. One of the requirements in order to achieve this objective is a specific profile, with definition of tasks and the urgency of legal recognition of the profession. It is in this context that this work was held, whose main objectives are to identify and characterize the functional and personal skills required in performing the functions and are expected to perform as well as the professional environment in which they operate. To achieve these objectives a literature review was conducted to seek and define the main concepts associated with the management of Private Institutions of Social Solidarity, the Human resources Management and the role of technical director. This study relied on the implementation of a survey by questionnaire to thirteen technical director of the municipality of Caldas da Rainha. The main conclusions of this study, highlights the lack of professional category of career development and a gradual increase in responsibilities and skills required