KIIT Digital Library: An open hypermedia Application

The massive use of Web technologies has spurred a new revolution in information storing and retrieving. It has always been an issue whether to incorporate hyperlinks embedded in a document or to store them separately in a link base. Research effort has been concentrated on the development of link services that enable hypermedia functionality to be integrate into the general computing environment and allow linking from all tools on the browser or desktop. KIIT digital library is such an application that focuses mainly on architecture and protocols of Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS), providing on-line document authoring, browsing, cataloguing, searching and updating features. The WWW needs fundamentally new frameworks and concepts to support new search and indexing functionality. This is because of the frequent use of digital archives and to maintain huge amount of database and documents. These digital materials range from electronic versions of books and journals offered by traditional publishers to manuscripts, photographs, maps, sound recordings and similar materials digitized from libraries' own special collections to new electronic scholarly and scientific databases developed through the collaboration of researchers, computer and information scientists, and librarians. Metadata in catalogue systems are an indispensable tool to find information and services in networks. Technological advances provide new opportunities to facilitate the process of collecting and maintaining metadata and to facilitate using catalogue systems. The overall objective is how to make best use of catalogue systems. Information systems such as the World Wide Web, Digital Libraries, inventories of satellite images and other repositories contain more data than ever before, are globally distributed, easy to use and, therefore, become accessible to huge, heterogeneous user groups. For KIIT Digital Library, we have used Resource Development Framework (RDF) and Dublin Core (DC) standards to incorporate metadata. Overall KIIT digital library provides electronic access to information in many different forms. Recent technological advances make the storage and transmission of digital information possible. This project is to design and implement a cataloguing system of the digital library system suitable for storage, indexing, and retrieving information and providing that information across the Internet. The goal is to allow users to quickly search indices to locate segments of interests and view and manipulate these segments on their remote computers

Developing a Framework to Implement Public Key Infrastructure Enabled Security in XML Documents

This paper concentrates on proposing a framework to implement the PKI enables security in XML documents, by defining a common framework and processing rules that can be shared across applications using common tools, avoiding the need for extensive customization of applications to add security. The Framework reuses the concepts, algorithms and core technologies of legacy security systems while introducing changes necessary to support extensible integration with XML. This allows interoperability with a wide range of existing infrastructures and across deployments. Currently no strict security models and mechanisms are available that can provide specification and enforcement of security policies for XML documents. Such models are crucial in order to facilitate a secure dissemination of XML documents, containing information of different sensitivity levels, among (possibly large) user communities

Development of Hypervideo Platform Using Object Databases

Web users are seizing on interactive capabilities that software suppliers have developed so far, and are eagerly awaiting new interactive capabilities now being demonstrated. This paper focuses the development of rich information environment based on a customized platform enabling hyperlinks on objects within a digital video. With the help of such environment, the viewer is able to view multiple videos concurrently and browse them temporally as well as spatially with the help of an object database. Specifically, the platform enables to traverse through that object by linking, and such links have been explored and created. The link may connect to within a video, or multiple running videos and/or World Wide Web object. The issues such as open hypermedia link base (static, generic or dynamic) and object database versus multiple videos are also investigated

Development of video based virtual studio

The objective of this research is multi-fold: to explore the approach for video production in virtual studio with a degree of freedom; to combine various existing technologies targeting each specific feature into one with almost all of the features needed for virtual studio; and above all to create high quality video production using graphics and video. The approach requires breaking down multiple videos up to frame level, so that multiple components/objects can be handled like graphics for further object level processing within three dimensions (3-D). We also provide a framework for describing different features of the stored media object. Initially a workbench is developed; where a user is allowed to open any type of standard graphic format (jpg, gif, bmp, avi or mpg) and can provide annotations. If the object is time based, then a time line is also provided. Real images are considered as a single frame, however the user can select the part of image to construct another media object. Finally, all required objects are mixed together to construct a final video. We compare this approach with existing ones in terms of the degree of freedom, platform independence and show that it can be used effectively in the domain of entertainment and education

Role of Teacher in Personal Learning Environments

This paper aims to discuss the changing roles and competencies of a teacher in context of prevailing developments accomplished by the vast availability of social software, which have made easy the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). This has been accomplished by an in-depth review of the literature on teacher’s socially situated competencies and roles with regard to the tasks and guidance they provide to students shape their PLEs. Review process provides an insight of PLE research studies, constructivist learning theories, and teacher changing roles. The results of this study outline the roles that portray the importance of teacher competencies as role in Planning and Design, Instruction and Learning, Communication and Interaction, Management and Administration, and Use of Technology

Design Considerations for Implementing Security in Web Services

The rapid growth in XML and increasing use of World Wide Web allow users to use internet as a platform for document sharing and hosting embedded with certain security features. XML is becoming most prevalent means through which documents and data are encoded for distribution among users on the web. Currently no strict security models and mechanisms are available that can provide specification and enforcement of security policies for XML documents. Such models are crucial in order to facilitate a secure dissemination of XML documents, containing information of different sensitivity levels, among (possibly large) user communities. This paper concentrates on proposing key design considerations to implement the PKI enables security in XML documents, by defining a component model and processing rules that can be shared across applications using common tools, avoiding the need for extensive customisation of applications to add security. The considerations reuses the concepts, algorithms and core technologies of legacy security systems while introducing changes necessary to support extensible integration with XML. This allows interoperability with a wide range of existing infrastructures and across deployments

Dynamic Distance Learning Framework using Problem Based Assessment

Education is undergoing a major paradigm shift towards learning rather then teaching. Learning is no longer considered as a process transferring and distributing knowledge to the students. It is now viewed as a transformational process whereby students acquire facts, principles, and theories as conceptual tools for reasoning and problem solving in meaningful contexts. Internet is playing an important role for such student based learning. The objective of this paper is to develop an educational framework, using data mining technologies, with the help of Dynamic Web technologies (JSP and .net) that will be used by teachers to organize the course contents on the web according to existing infrastructure, experience, needs, and later on reorganizing it if necessary, depending upon the performance of students. The approach to organize the lecture content is based on the adaptive learning theory, incorporating Problem Based Learning (PBL) strategy. For on-line real time lectures and evaluations, we are using video conferencing tools (VCON Falcon IP, POLYCON view station FX) through IP, at a bandwidth of 1MB-DXX. Finally a good amount of emphasis is given on evaluation procedures that the tutor can adopt to evaluate the students, in order to provide them further course contents. Presently, the course syllabus and handouts on the web sites provided to the student are static in nature. Once distributed, these documents cannot be changed or modified, and also lack depth. When course materials are placed on the web, students can select a topic in the course outline and look at the description of a topic, and required reading assignments. Instructors can easily change schedules in these on-line documents and inform the students via e-mail. Students can also submit assignments, projects and take home exams electronically. A course home page is comprised of syllabus, assignments, projects and exams,readings and references, class presentation charts and student handouts. Students in a course are mostly assessed on the basis of the questions like why, how what, etc. In this way a student can be graded and ranked, which gives in turn provides the feedback to student for future improvements and challenges

Synote: development of a Web-based tool for synchronized annotations

This paper discusses the development of a Web-based media annotation application named Synote, which addresses the important issue that while the whole of a multimedia resource on the Web can be easily bookmarked, searched, linked to and tagged, it is still difficult to search or associate notes or other resources with a certain part of a resource. Synote supports the creation of synchronized notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions. It is a freely available application that enables any user to make annotations in and search annotations to any fragment of a continuous multimedia resource in the most used browsers and operating systems. In the implementation, Synote categorized different media resources and synchronized them via time line. The presentation of synchronized resources makes full use of Web 2.0 AJAX technology to enrich interoperability for the user experience. Positive evaluation results about the performance, efficiency and effectiveness of Synote were returned when using it with students and teachers for a number of undergraduate courses

Translating knowledge for action against stroke – using 5-minute videos for stroke survivors and caregivers to improve post-stroke outcomes: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial (Movies4Stroke)

Participant timeline. (DOCX 48 kb

Academic Program Administration via Semantic Web – A Case Study

Generally, administrative systems in an academic environment are disjoint and support independent queries. The objective in this work is to semantically connect these independent systems to provide support to queries run on the integrated platform. The proposed framework, by enriching educational material in the legacy systems, provides a value-added semantics layer where activities such as annotation, query and reasoning can be carried out to support management requirements. We discuss the development of this ontology framework with a case study of UAE University program administration to show how semantic web technologies can be used by administration to develop student profiles for better academic program management