FEMwiki: crowdsourcing semantic taxonomy and wiki input to domain experts while keeping editorial control: Mission Possible!

Highly specialized professional communities of practice (CoP) inevitably need to operate across geographically dispersed area - members frequently need to interact and share professional content. Crowdsourcing using wiki platforms provides a novel way for a professional community to share ideas and collaborate on content creation, curation, maintenance and sharing. This is the aim of the Field Epidemiological Manual wiki (FEMwiki) project enabling online collaborative content sharing and interaction for field epidemiologists around a growing training wiki resource. However, while user contributions are the driving force for content creation, any medical information resource needs to keep editorial control and quality assurance. This requirement is typically in conflict with community-driven Web 2.0 content creation. However, to maximize the opportunities for the network of epidemiologists actively editing the wiki content while keeping quality and editorial control, a novel structure was developed to encourage crowdsourcing – a support for dual versioning for each wiki page enabling maintenance of expertreviewed pages in parallel with user-updated versions, and a clear navigation between the related versions. Secondly, the training wiki content needs to be organized in a semantically-enhanced taxonomical navigation structure enabling domain experts to find information on a growing site easily. This also provides an ideal opportunity for crowdsourcing. We developed a user-editable collaborative interface crowdsourcing the taxonomy live maintenance to the community of field epidemiologists by embedding the taxonomy in a training wiki platform and generating the semantic navigation hierarchy on the fly. Launched in 2010, FEMwiki is a real world service supporting field epidemiologists in Europe and worldwide. The crowdsourcing success was evaluated by assessing the number and type of changes made by the professional network of epidemiologists over several months and demonstrated that crowdsourcing encourages user to edit existing and create new content and also leads to expansion of the domain taxonomy

Mind the Gap: From Desktop to App

In this article we present a new mobile game, edugames4all MicrobeQuest!, that covers core learning objectives from the European curriculum on microbe transmission, food and hand hygiene, and responsible antibiotic use. The game is aimed at 9 to 12 year olds and it is based on the desktop version of the edugames4all platform games. We discuss the challenges and lessons learned transitioning from a desktop based game to a mobile app. We also present the seamless evaluation obtained by integrating the assessment of educa- tional impact of the game into the game mechanics

A roadmap to integrated digital public health surveillance: The vision and the challenges

The exponentially increasing stream of real time big data produced by Web 2.0 Internet and mobile networks created radically new interdisciplinary challenges for public health and computer science. Traditional public health disease surveillance systems have to utilize the potential created by new situationaware realtime signals from social media, mobile/sensor networks and citizens' participatory surveillance systems providing invaluable free realtime event-based signals for epidemic intelligence. However, rather than improving existing isolated systems, an integrated solution bringing together existing epidemic intelligence systems scanning news media (e.g., GPHIN, MedISys) with real-time social media intelligence (e.g., Twitter, participatory systems) is required to substantially improve and automate early warning, outbreak detection and preparedness operations. However, automatic monitoring and novel verification methods for these multichannel event-based real time signals has to be integrated with traditional case-based surveillance systems from microbiological laboratories and clinical reporting. Finally, the system needs effectively support coordination of epidemiological teams, risk communication with citizens and implementation of prevention measures. However, from computational perspective, signal detection, analysis and verification of very high noise realtime big data provide a number of interdisciplinary challenges for computer science. Novel approaches integrating current systems into a digital public health dashboard can enhance signal verification methods and automate the processes assisting public health experts in providing better informed and more timely response. In this paper, we describe the roadmap to such a system, components of an integrated public health surveillance services and computing challenges to be resolved to create an integrated real world solution

Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice around Healthcare Digital Libraries

The recent explosion of medical information available in digital libraries on the Internet provides users with overwhelming amount of medical knowledge. Although the number of patients seeking health related information online is steadily growing, the great potential of this revolutionary technology has not been fully exploited. Professionals often cannot find information when and where they need it; members of public are unaware of varying quality of medical information and often seek health advice from unauthorized and misleading Web sites. In addition, little is known about the real impact of medical knowledge provision on clinical care. Based on our experience with the development of real-world government medical digital libraries in the UK (NeLI and AR DL), we will discuss key issues around knowledge management, healthcare ontologies, quality approval and a new opportunity for online communities of practice around healthcare digital libraries

Learning about Hygiene and Responsible Antibiotic Use through a Mobile Game

Edugames4all MicrobeQuest! is a mobile game that aims to teach microbiology and create awareness about important healthcare issues among 9 to 12 years old. This article presents the game, discusses the game design and integration of the learning objectives into the game mechanics. A pilot study has been performed to assess the game effectiveness in teaching the learning objectives integrated into the game. The study showed that the game can teach the learning objectives, however, the knowledge difference has not been statistically significant across all three learning objectives

On Effective Integration of Educational Content in Serious Games Text vs. Game Mechanics

As serious games are emerging as a new educational paradigm, it is increasingly important to understand how to integrate educational content into the games, and what elements of the game make learning more effective. This research proposes to add to the work in the area by examining whether learning objectives delivered through the game narratives as text, or learning objectives delivered through game mechanics provide a more effective way of integrating educational content in a game. In order to investigate this question, we designed a study to evaluate two types of participants that were divided into two groups to take part in complementary versions of the game. Participants are asked to play a game in which learning objectives are delivered either through text or game mechanics. An evaluation was performed with 60 participants. The results show that for one of the learning objectives, the participants learn more when the educational content was integrated through the game mechanics and that the difference between the group that learns through text and the one that learned through the game mechanics is statistically significant. For the rest of the learning objectives covered, no statistically significant difference was obtained between the two ways of integrating the learning objectives

Design research: The deferred actions of the design of the National electronic Library of Infection (NeLI)

Design research is concerned with developing knowledge of the design process. However, do theoretical system design theories meet the needs of system development in the real world setting? Are technical decisions made and justified on according to system theories or do social, political and financial factors prevail? We investigated the evolution of technical design, specification and development milestones of the National electronic Library of Infection (NeLI) in the UK, one of the major government initiatives in the area of infectious diseases. By investigating project documentation, internal and formal specifications, informal email discussions where key technical decisions we made, we found out that the digital library design was rather unsystematic. We applied Purao’s standard descriptive model of design to understand the design of NeLI and compare the design process with the Theory of Deferred Action, which argues that rather than design being systematic it is subject to deferred action. In this paper, we will discuss the preliminary findings of this a work-in-progress project

Web crawlers on a health related portal: Detection, characterisation and implications

Web crawlers are automated computer programs that visit websites in order to download their content. They are employed for non-malicious (search engine crawlers indexing websites) and malicious purposes (those breaching privacy by harvesting email addresses for unsolicited email promotion and spam databases). Whatever their usage, web crawlers need to be accurately identified in an analysis of the overall traffic to a website. Visits from web crawlers as well as from genuine users are recorded in the web server logs. In this paper, we analyse the web server logs of NRIC, a health related portal. We present the techniques used to identify malicious and non-malicious web crawlers from these logs, using a blacklist database and analysis of the characteristics of the online behaviour of malicious crawlers. We use visualisation to carry out sanity checks along the crawler removal process. We illustrate the use of these techniques using 3 months of web server logs from NRIC. We use a combination of visualisation and baseline measures from Google Analytics to demonstrate the efficacy of our techniques. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work on the analysis of the web traffic to a website using web server logs and on the interpretation of the results from such analysis. © 2011 IEEE

A Study Exploring Different Modalities to Integrate Learning Objectives in Games

This research aims to provide further insight on how to design effective educational games by exploring whether the integration of educational content through game mechanics, text, or a combination of both text and game mechanics is more effective in teaching the learning outcomes in games. The results of the study show that all three methods led to information assimilation. The study showed that the participants did not necessarily learn better through a combination of text and game mechanics as compared with those who were exposed to learning objectives integrated into the game only through text or game mechanics. Some learning objectives were better learned when they were integrated through text while others through game mechanics

If you Build it would they Play It? Challenges and Solutions in Adopting Games for Children

This article discusses the challenges encountered with the adoption of games for children created as part of the ebug/edugames4all project. One of the aims of this project is/was to design health games for 9 to 15 year old children. This paper presents one of the challenges we encountered with games adoption: how to teach children that were not familiar with the Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) game mechanics how to play the games. We solved this issue by using a training mission teaching children the basic concepts, navigation, and methods for “investigation” required to understand before playing the game. This paper presents the evaluation of the training missions and the lessons drawn