The use of Wikis in Education - a review of the literature

This paper reviews the literature surrounding the use of Web 2.0 in education. It examines various perspectives of what Web 2.0 means, and how Web 2.0 can support a constructivist pedagogy. Case studies involving Wikis are examined and the problems experienced are considered from both a technological and a group-working perspective. The paper concludes that although Wikis have the potential to support social-constructivism the differences between artificially constructed learning groups (formal learning) and self-forming and emergent social groups (informal learning) result in a requirement for greater attention to the theories on group working when creating group tasks using Wikis for learning purposes. Wikis are a tool and do not, by themselves, result in satisfactory collaborationPeer reviewe

Interactive composition of WSMO based semantic web services in IRS-III

The discovery and integration of services in a composition are challenging tasks due to the lack of semantic in the Web services' description. WSMO community is working on developing ontologies and infrastructures to support Semantic Web Services. In this paper, we present a tool that takes into account WSMO descriptions to support a user guided, interactive composition approach whereby Web services are discovered and recommended to the users according to the composition context. The generated composition is orchestrated in IRS-III by our Java API for dataflow orchestration

DAMEWARE - Data Mining & Exploration Web Application Resource

Astronomy is undergoing through a methodological revolution triggered by an unprecedented wealth of complex and accurate data. DAMEWARE (DAta Mining & Exploration Web Application and REsource) is a general purpose, Web-based, Virtual Observatory compliant, distributed data mining framework specialized in massive data sets exploration with machine learning methods. We present the DAMEWARE (DAta Mining & Exploration Web Application REsource) which allows the scientific community to perform data mining and exploratory experiments on massive data sets, by using a simple web browser. DAMEWARE offers several tools which can be seen as working environments where to choose data analysis functionalities such as clustering, classification, regression, feature extraction etc., together with models and algorithms.Comment: User Manual of the DAMEWARE Web Application, 51 page

Emergent Capabilities for Collaborative Teams in the Evolving Web Environment

This paper reports on our investigation of the latest advances for the Social Web, Web 2.0 and the Linked Data Web. These advances are discussed in terms of the latest capabilities that are available (or being made available) on the Web at the time of writing this paper. Such capabilities can be of significant benefit to teams, especially those comprised of multinational, geographically-dispersed team members. The specific context of coalition members in a rapidly formed diverse military context such as disaster relief or humanitarian aid is considered, where close working between non-government organisations and non-military teams will help to achieve results as quickly and efficiently as possible. The heterogeneity one finds in such teams, coupled with a lack of dedicated private network infrastructure, poses a number of challenges for collaboration, and the current paper represents an attempt to assess whether nascent Web-based capabilities can support such teams in terms of both their collaborative activities and their access to (and sharing of) information resources

The Intelligent Web

Many people are working on the Semantic Web with the main objective being to enhance web searches. Our proposal is a new research strategy based on the existence of a discrete set of semantic relations for the creation and exploitation of semantic networks on the web. To do so, we have defined in a previous paper (Álamo, Martínez, Jaén) the Rhetoric-Semantic Relation (RSR) based on the results of the Rhetoric Structure Theory. We formulate a general set of RSR capable of building discourse and making it possible to express any concept, procedure or principle in terms of knowledge nodes and RSRs. These knowledge nodes can then be elaborated in the same way. This network structure in terms of RSR makes the objective of developing automatic answering systems possible as well as any other type of utilities oriented towards the exploitation of semantic structure, such as the automatic production of web pages or automatic e-learning generation

PoliSave: Efficient Power Management of Campus PCs

In this paper we study the power consumption of networked devices in a large Campus network, focusing mainly on PC usage. We first define a methodology to monitor host power state, which we then apply to our Campus network. Results show that typically people refrain from turning off their PC during non-working hours so that more than 1500 PCs are always powered on, causing a large energy waste. We then design PoliSave, a simple web-based architecture which allows users to schedule power state of their PCs, avoiding the frustration of wasting long power-down and bootstrap times of today PCs. By exploiting already available technologies like Wake-On-Lan, Hibernation and Web services, PoliSave reduces the average PC uptime from 15.9h to 9.7h during working days, generating an energy saving of 0.6kW/h per PC per day, or a saving of more than 250,000 Euros per year considering our Campus Universit

Digital Repository of Mathematical Formulae

The purpose of the NIST Digital Repository of Mathematical Formulae (DRMF) is to create a digital compendium of mathematical formulae for orthogonal polynomials and special functions (OPSF) and of associated mathematical data. The DRMF addresses needs of working mathematicians, physicists and engineers: providing a platform for publication and interaction with OPSF formulae on the web. Using MediaWiki extensions and other existing technology (such as software and macro collections developed for the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions), the DRMF acts as an interactive web domain for OPSF formulae. Whereas Wikipedia and other web authoring tools manifest notions or descriptions as first class objects, the DRMF does that with mathematical formulae. See http://gw32.iu.xsede.org/index.php/Main_Page

ArchiveSpark: Efficient Web Archive Access, Extraction and Derivation

Web archives are a valuable resource for researchers of various disciplines. However, to use them as a scholarly source, researchers require a tool that provides efficient access to Web archive data for extraction and derivation of smaller datasets. Besides efficient access we identify five other objectives based on practical researcher needs such as ease of use, extensibility and reusability. Towards these objectives we propose ArchiveSpark, a framework for efficient, distributed Web archive processing that builds a research corpus by working on existing and standardized data formats commonly held by Web archiving institutions. Performance optimizations in ArchiveSpark, facilitated by the use of a widely available metadata index, result in significant speed-ups of data processing. Our benchmarks show that ArchiveSpark is faster than alternative approaches without depending on any additional data stores while improving usability by seamlessly integrating queries and derivations with external tools.Comment: JCDL 2016, Newark, NJ, US

Librarians use of Web 2.0 in UK Medical Schools: Outcomes of a national survey

Using the results of an Email survey, this paper reviews the use of Web 2.0 technologies by librarians working in UK Medical Schools. Web 2.0 has been hailed as an innovation for facilitation of two way communication on the net, and it is, therefore, timely to measure how effectively librarians are capturing this opportunity for increased student engagement. The social nature of Web 2.0 can be particularly appropriate for undergraduate medical students who fit their studies around the unsocial hours and geographical isolation of clinical placements. This paper will investigate library use of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Consideration will also be given as to whether they facilitate a more collabroative library service or if they leave undergraduate medical students swamped with yet more information to manage