bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pseudo Independent Models
Authors: Xiang Yang
Published: May 2011

Graphical models such as Bayesian networks (BNs) (Pearl, 1988) and decomposable Markov networks (DMNs) (Xiang, Wong & Cercone, 1997) have been applied widely to probabilistic reasoning in intelligent systems. Figure1 illustrates a BN and a DMN on a trivial uncertain domain: A virus can damage computer files, and so can a power glitch. A power glitch also causes a VCR to reset. The BN in (a) has four nodes, corresponding to four binary variables taking values from {true, false}. The graph structure encodes a set of dependence and independence assumptions (e.g., that f is directly dependent on v, and p but is independent of r, once the value of p is known). Each node is associated with a conditional probability distribution conditioned on its parent nodes (e.g., P(f | v, p)). The joint probability distribution is the product P(v, p, f, r) = P(f | v, p) P(r | p) P(v) P(p). The DMN in (b) has two groups of nodes that are maximally pair-wise connected, called cliques. Each clique is associated with a probability distribution (e.g., clique {v, p, f} is assigned P(v, p, f)). The joint probability distribution is P(v, p, f, r) = P(v, p, f) P(r, p) / P(p), where P(p) can be derived from one of the clique distributions. The networks, for instance, can be used to reason about whether there are viruses in the computer system, after observations on f and r are made.
Search Situations and Transitions
Authors: Pharo Nils , Jarvelin Kalervo
Published: May 2011

In order to understand the nature of Web information search processes it is necessary to identify the interplay of factors at the micro-level, that is, to understand how search process related factors such as the actions performed by the searcher on the system are influenced by various factors that might explain it, for example, those related to his work task, search task, knowledge about the work task or searching and etcetera. The Search Situation Transition (SST) method schema provides a framework for such analysis.
Synthesis with Data Warehouse Applications and Utilities
Authors: Rahman Hakikur
Published: May 2011

Today’s fast moving business world faces continuous challenges and abrupt changes in real-life situations at the context of data and information management. In the current trend of information explosion, businesses recognize the value of the information they can gather from various sources. The information that drives business decisions can have many forms, including archived data, transactional data, e-mail, Web input, surveyed data, data repositories, and data marts. The organization’s business strategy should be to deliver high-quality information to the right people at the right time.
Text Content Approaches in Web Content Mining
Authors: Fernandez Víctor Fresno , Layos Luis Magdalena
Published: May 2011

Since the creation of the Web until now, the Internet has become the greatest source of information available in the world. The Web is defined as a global information system that connects several sources of information by hyperlinks, providing a simple media to publish electronic information and being available to all the connected people.
Text Mining-Machine Learning on Documents
Authors: Mladenic Dunja
Published: May 2011

Intensive usage and growth of the World Wide Web and the daily increasing amount of text information in electronic form have resulted in a growing need for computer-supported ways of dealing with text data. One of the most popular problems addressed with text mining methods is document categorization. Document categorization aims to classify documents into pre-defined categories, based on their content. Other important problems addressed in text mining include document search, based on the content, automatic document summarization, automatic document clustering and construction of document hierarchies, document authorship detection, identification of plagiarism of documents, topic identification and tracking, information extraction, hypertext analysis, and user profiling. If we agree on text mining being a fairly broad area dealing with computer-supported analysis of text, then the list of problems that can be addressed is rather long and open. Here we adopt this fairly open view but concentrate on the parts related to automatic data analysis and data mining.
Web Mining Overview
Authors: Mobasher Bamshad
Published: May 2011

In the span of a decade, the World Wide Web has been transformed from a tool for information sharing among researchers into an indispensable part of everyday activities. This transformation has been characterized by an explosion of heterogeneous data and information available electronically, as well as increasingly complex applications driving a variety of systems for content management, e-commerce, e-learning, collaboration, and other Web services. This tremendous growth, in turn, has necessitated the development of more intelligent tools for end users as well as information providers in order to more effectively extract relevant information or to discover actionable knowledge.
Web Page Extension of Data Warehouses
Authors: Scime Anthony
Published: May 2011

Data warehouses are constructed to provide valuable and current information for decision-making. Typically this information is derived from the organization’s functional databases. The data warehouse is then providing a consolidated, convenient source of data for the decision-maker. However, the available organizational information may not be sufficient to come to a decision. Information external to the organization is also often necessary for management to arrive at strategic decisions. Such external information may be available on the World Wide Web; and when added to the data warehouse extends decision-making power.
Web Usage Mining through Associative Models
Authors: Giudici Paolo , Cerchiello Paola
Published: May 2011

The aim of this contribution is to show how the information, concerning the order in which the pages of a Web site are visited, can be profitably used to predict the visit behaviour at the site. Usually every click corresponds to the visualization of a Web page. Thus, a Web clickstream defines the sequence of the Web pages requested by a user. Such a sequence identifies a user session.
Bioinformatics Data Management and Data Mining
Authors: Galitsky Boris
Published: May 2011

Bioinformatics is the science of storing, extracting, organizing, analyzing, interpreting, and utilizing information from biological sequences and molecules.  The focus of bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to the management of biological information. Specifically, it is the science of developing computer databases and algorithms to facilitate and expedite biological research, particularly in genomics. It has been mainly stimulated by advances in DNA sequencing and genome mapping techniques (Adams, Fields & Venter, 1994). Genomics is the discipline that studies genes and their functions, including the functional study of genes, their resulting proteins, and the role played by the proteins in the biochemical processes, as well as the study of human genetics by comparisons with model organisms such as mice, fruit flies, and the bacterium E. coli
Converting a Legacy Database to Object-Oriented Database
Authors: Alhajj Reda , Polat Faruk
Published: May 2011

We present an approach to transfer content of an existing conventional relational database to a corresponding existing object-oriented database. The major motivation is having organizations with two generations of information systems; the first is based on the relational model, and the second is based on the object-oriented model. This has several drawbacks. First, it is impossible to get unified global reports that involve information from the two databases without providing a wrapper that facilitates accessing one of the databases within the realm of the other. Second, organizations should keep professional staff familiar with the system. Finally, most of the people familiar with the conventional relational technology are willing to learn and move to the emerging object-oriented technology. Therefore, one appropriate solution is to transfer content of conventional relational databases into object-oriented databases; the latter are extensible by nature, hence, are more flexible to maintain. However, it is very difficult to extend and maintain a conventional relational database.
Data Dissemination
Authors: Fiege Ludger
Published: May 2011

One of the driving factors in IT development is the availability of cheap and efficient network technologies. The Internet is no longer used only as a medium for personal communication. Organizations start utilizing this technology to link existing applications and to create new ones. While traditionally systems were designed to respond to interactive user requests, they are now more and more aiming at autonomous, distributed data processing. Systems are connected and instantly react to changes to improve their functionality and utility (cf. zero latency enterprises). Mobile systems and other volatile configurations demand reactions to continuous changes; finance applications must be notified of price fluctuations; supply chain management must observe stock level changes; and information retrieval applications must forward new content (Banavar, Chandra, Strom, & Sturman, 1999; Gray, 2004).
Dataveillance and Panoptic Marketspaces
Authors: Dholakia Nikhilesh , Zwick Detlev , Pandya Anil
Published: May 2011

With continuing global growth of electronic commerce, consumers have come to exist in electronic “marketspaces” (Rayport & Sviokla, 1994) that are frequently surveilled through database techniques. This type of data-driven monitoring has been characterized as “dataveillance.”
Extraction-Transformation-Loading Processes
Authors: Simitsis Alkis , Vassiliadis Panos , Sellis Timos
Published: May 2011

A data warehouse (DW) is a collection of technologies aimed at enabling the knowledge worker (executive, manager, analyst, etc.) to make better and faster decisions. The architecture of a DW exhibits various layers of data in which data from one layer are derived from data of the lower layer (see Figure 1). The operational databases, also called data sources, form the starting layer. They may consist of structured data stored in open database and legacy systems, or even in files. The central layer of the architecture is the global DW. The global DW keeps a historical record of data that result from the transformation, integration, and aggregation of detailed data found in the data sources. An auxiliary area of volatile data, data staging area (DSA) is employed for the purpose of data transformation, reconciliation, and cleaning. The next layer of data involves client warehouses, which contain highly aggregated data, directly derived from the global warehouse. There are various kinds of local warehouses, such as data mart or on-line analytical processing (OLAP) databases, which may use relational database systems or specific multidimensional data structures. The whole environment is described in terms of its components, metadata, and processes in a central metadata repository, located at the DW site.
Hierarchical Architecture of Expert Systems for Database Management
Authors: Manjunath R.
Published: May 2011

Expert systems have been applied to many areas of research to handle problems effectively. Designing and implementing an expert system is a difficult job, and it usually takes experimentation and experience to achieve high performance. The important feature of an expert system is that it should be easy to modify. They evolve gradually. This evolutionary or incremental development technique has to be noticed as the dominant methodology in the expert-system area.
Integration of Data Semantics in Heterogeneous Database Federations
Authors: Balsters H.
Published: May 2011

Modern information systems are often distributed in nature; data and services are spread over different component systems wishing to cooperate in an integrated setting. Information integration is a very complex problem and is relevant in several fields, such as data reengineering, data warehousing, Web information systems, e-commerce, scientific databases, and B2B applications. Information systems involving integration of cooperating component systems are called federated information systems; if the component systems are all databases then we speak of a federated database system (Rahm & Bernstein, 2001; Sheth & Larson, 1990). In this article, we will address the situation where the component systems are so-called legacy systems; i.e., systems that are given beforehand and which are to interoperate in an integrated single framework in which the legacy systems are to maintain as much as possible their respective autonomy.
Intension Mining
Authors: Nigro Héctor Oscar , González Císaro Sandra Elizabeth
Published: May 2011

Knowledge discovery is defined as “the non trivial extraction of implicit, unknown, and potentially useful knowledge of the data” (Fayyad, Piatetsky-Shiapiro, Smyth, & Uthurusamy, 1996, p. 6). According to these principles, the knowledge discovery process (KDP) takes the results just as they come from the data (i.e., the process of extracting tendencies or models of the data), and it carefully and accurately transforms them into useful and understandable information. To consider the discovery of knowledge useful, this knowledge has to be interesting (i.e., it should have a potential value for the user; Han & Kamber, 2001).
Kernelized Database Systems Security
Authors: Haraty Ramzi A.
Published: May 2011

There are two main types of security in database systems: discretionary security and mandatory security. Discretionary security restricts access to data items at the discretion of the owner. Most commercial database management systems (DBMS) employ some form of discretionary security by controlling access privileges and modes of data users (Griffiths & Wade, 1976). Discretionary security is not adequate in a multilevel secure environment, however, because it does not prevent Trojan horse attacks and provides a low level of assurance. Mandatory security, on the other hand, restricts access of data items to cleared database users. It is widely exploited in military applications and provides a high assurance.
Mathematics of Generic Specifications for Model Management, II
Authors: Diskin Zinovy
Published: May 2011

This article (further referred to as Math-II), and the previous one (further referred to as Math-I, see p. 351), form a mathematical companion to Generic Model Management (further referred to as GenMMt, see p. 258). While Math-I is dealing with homogeneous MMt, the goal of Math-II is to develop machinery for heterogenous MMt, where models are not assumed to be similar.
Moving Objects Databases
Authors: Rodríguez-Tastets M. Andrea
Published: May 2011

Moving objects databases are particular cases of spatio-temporal databases that represent and manage changes related to the movement of objects. Unlike spatio-temporal applications associated with geographic phenomena where the identity of geographic features may change over time, in moving objects databases the objects maintain their identities but change their locations or shapes through time. That is, it is the geometric aspect of an object that changes rather than the object itself. Within this domain, the most suitable applications are those where objects are cars, airplanes, or any object with regular movements.
Proper Placement of Derived Classes in the Class Hierarchy
Authors: Alhajj Reda , Polat Faruk
Published: May 2011

Users may derive new classes by defining views1 based on the current database contents. Some virtual classes are classified as brothers of existing classes, and others are either superclasses or subclasses of existing base and virtual classes. A base class is defined directly by the user using class definition constructs. A virtual class is classified as a brother of another class if it is derived from the latter class via a selection. To have a homogeneous system, virtual classes must be treated as first-class citizens in an object-oriented model.
Relational, Object-Oriented and Object-Relational Data Models
Authors: Badia Antonio
Published: May 2011

The relational data model is the dominant paradigm in the commercial database market today, and it has been for several years. However, there have been challenges to the model over the years, and they have influenced its evolution and that of database technology. The object-oriented revolution that got started in programming languages arrived to the database area in the form of a brand new data model. The relational model managed not only to survive the newcomer but to continue becoming a dominant force, transformed into the object-relational model (also called extended relational, or universal) and relegating object-oriented databases to a niche product. Although this market has many nontechnical aspects, there are certainly important technical differences among the mentioned data models. In this article I describe the basic components of the relational, object-oriented, and object-relational data models. I do not, however, discuss query language, implementation, or system issues. A basic comparison is given and then future trends are discussed.
Semantic Information Management
Authors: Schwartz David G. , Schreiber Zvi
Published: May 2011

The need to manage enterprise data has been coming into increasingly sharp focus for some time. Years ago, data sat in silos attached to specific applications. Then came the network, with data becoming available across applications, departments, subsidiaries, and enterprises. Throughout these developments, one underlying problem has remained unsolved: Data resides in thousands of incompatible formats and cannot be systematically managed, integrated, unified, or cleansed.
Sensors, Uncertainty Models, and Probabilistic Queries
Authors: Cheng Reynold , Prabhakar Sunil
Published: May 2011

Sensors are often used to monitor the status of an environment continuously. The sensor readings are reported to the application for making decisions and answering user queries. For example, a fire alarm system in a building employs temperature sensors to detect any abrupt change in temperature. An aircraft is equipped with sensors to track wind speed, and radars are used to report the aircraft’s location to a military application. These applications usually include a database or server to which the sensor readings are sent. Limited network bandwidth and battery power imply that it is often not practical for the server to record the exact status of an entity it monitors at every time instant. In particular, if the value of an entity (e.g., temperature, location) monitored is constantly evolving, the recorded data value may differ from the actual value. Querying the database can then produce incorrect results. Consider a simple example where a user asks the database: “Which room has a temperature between 10oF and 20oF?” If we represent temperature values of rooms A and B stored in the database by A0 and B0 respectively, we can see from Figure 1(a) that the answer to the user query is “Room B”. In reality, the temperature values of both rooms may have changed to newer values, A1 and B1, as shown in Figure 1(b), where the true query answer should be “Room A”. Unfortunately, because of transmission delay, these newest pieces of information are not propagated in time to the system to supply fresh data to the query, and consequently the query is unable to yield a correct answer.
An XML Multi-Tier Pattern Dissemination System
Authors: Gaffar Ashraf , Seffah Ahmed
Published: May 2011

Patterns are widely used in several domains and are rapidly growing in numbers as an effective way of communicating knowledge between designers (Erickson, 2000). Currently, there are hundreds of HCI (human-computer interaction) patterns that are published in books and on the Internet (HCI Patterns, 2003). The sheer number of HCI patterns and the lack of a delivery system can confuse and overwhelm a novice pattern user, even when they are meant to help novice users in the first place.
Context-Awareness in Mobile Commerce
Authors: Sun Jun , Poole Marshall Scott
Published: May 2011

Advances in wireless network and multimedia technologies enable mobile commerce (m-commerce) information service providers to know the location and surroundings of mobile consumers through GPS-enabled and camera-embedded cell phones. Context awareness has great potential for creating new service modes and improving service quality in m-commerce. To develop and implement successful context-aware applications in m-commerce, it is critical to understand the concept of the “context” of mobile consumers and how to access and utilize contextual information in an appropriate way. This article dissects the context construct along both the behavioral and physical dimensions from the perspective of mobile consumers, developing a classification scheme for various types of consumer contexts. Based on this classification scheme, it discusses three types of context-aware applications—non-interactive mode, interactive mode and community mode—and describes newly proposed applications as examples of each.
The Dynamics of Virtual Teams
Authors: Zakaria Norhayati , Mohd Yusof Shafiz A.
Published: May 2011

The world continues to be driven by the rapid development of information technology and globalization. Not surprisingly, the working environments that have been projected to grow the fastest are all related to the usage of computers, the Internet, and information systems. With globalization, many multinational corporations (MNCs) are increasingly employing virtual teams (VTs). It was reported that 137 million workers worldwide are involved in some form of remote electronic work (Solomon, 2001).
Exploiting Captions for Multimedia Data Mining
Authors: Rowe Neil C.
Published: May 2011

Captions are text that describes some other information; they are especially useful for describing non-text media objects (images, audio, video, and software). Captions are valuable metadata for managing multimedia, since they help users better understand and remember (McAninch, Austin, & Derks, 1992-1993) and permit better indexing of media. Captions are essential for effective data mining of multimedia data, since only a small amount of text in typical documents with multimedia—1.2% in a survey of random World Wide Web pages (Rowe, 2002)—describes the media objects. Thus, standard Web browsers do poorly at finding media without knowledge of captions. Multimedia information is increasingly common in documents, as computer technology improves in speed and ability to handle it, and as people need multimedia for a variety of purposes like illustrating educational materials and preparing news stories.
Heterogeneous Wireless Networks Using a Wireless ATM Platform
Authors: Louvros Spiros , Karaboulas Dimitrios , Iossifides Athanassios C. , Kotsopoulos Stavros A.
Published: May 2011

Within the last two decades, the world of telecommunications has started to change at a rapid pace. Data traffic, where the information is transmitted in the form of packets and the flow of information is bursty rather than constant, now accounts for almost 40 to 60% of the traffic that is transmitted over the backbone telecommunication networks (Esmailzadeh, Nakagawa, & Jones, 2003). In addition to data traffic, video traffic (variable rate with real-time constraints) was made possible by low-cost video-digitizing equipment (Houssos et al., 2003).
Information Technology and Virtual Communities
Authors: Vician Chelley , Buche Mari W.
Published: May 2011

Information technologies have made virtual communities possible. A community is a gathering of individuals who share something—be it knowledge, shared interests, a common purpose, or similar geographic surroundings. Traditionally, most communities are bound by time and space such that interaction and communication takes place in a same-time, same-place setting (Johansen, Sibbet, Benson, Martin, Mittman, & Saffo, 1991; Moffitt, 1999). The ready availability, high performance, and rapid diffusion of information technologies that enable communication across time, geography, and formal organizations now permits the development of communities that exist solely in the interaction activities made possible by IT (Igbaria, 1999). In essence, the community exists “virtually” through communication over the Internet (e.g., in cyberspace, as per Lee, Vogel, & Limayem, 2003) rather than taking on physical form at a specific time and in a specific geographic location.
Interactive Digital Television
Authors: Pagani Margherita
Published: May 2011

Interactive television (iTV) can be defined as the result of the process of convergence between television and the new interactive digital technologies (Pagani, 2000, 2003).
International Virtual Offices
Authors: St. Amant Kirk
Published: May 2011

Communication technologies are continually expanding our ideas of the office into cyberspace environments. One result of this expansion is the international virtual office (IVO), a setting in which individuals located in different nations use online media to work together on the same project. Different cultural communication expectations, however, can affect the success with which IVO participants exchange information. This article examines three cultural factors that can affect communication within IVO environments.
Optical Burst Switching
Authors: Rodrigues Joel J.P.C. , Monteiro Paulo P. , Lorenz Pascal
Published: May 2011

The concept of burst switching was proposed initially in the context of voice communications by Haselton (1983) and Amstutz (1983; 1989) in the early 1980s. More recently, in the late 1990s, optical burst switching (OBS) was proposed as a new switching paradigm for the so-called optical Internet in order to overcome the technical limitations of optical packet switching; namely, the lack of optical random access memory (optical RAM) and to the problems with synchronization.(Yoo & Qiao, 1997; Qiao & Yoo, 1999; Chen, Qiao & Yu, 2004; Turner, 1999; Baldine, Rouskas, Perros & Stevenson, 2002; Xu, Perros & Rouskas, 2001). OBS is a technical compromise between wavelength routing and optical packet switching, since it does not require optical buffering or packet-level processing as in optical packet switching, and it is more efficient than circuit switching if the traffic volume does not require a full wavelength channel. According to Dolzer, Gauger, Späth, and Bodamer (2001), OBS has the following characteristics: • Granularity: The transmission unit size (burst) of OBS is between the optical circuit switching and optical packet switching. • Separation Between Control and Data: Control information (header) and data are transmitted on different wavelengths (or channels) with some time interval. • Allocation of Resources: Resources are allocated using mainly one-way reservation schemes. A source node does not need to wait for the acknowledge message from destination node to start transmitting the burst. • Variable Burst Length: The burst size is variable. • No Optical Buffering: Burst switching does not require optical buffering at the intermediate nodes (without any delay).
Reliability Issues of the Multicast-Based Mediacommunication
Authors: Hosszú Gábor
Published: May 2011

Multimedia applications generally support the one-to-many group communication way. Multicasting decreases communication costs for applications that send the same data to multiple receivers. Table 1 summarizes the types of communication among hosts.
Telework Information Security
Authors: Butcher-Powell Loreen Marie
Published: May 2011

The sophistication of technology available to businesses as well as to homes has increased dramatically in the last 10 years. The speed of information exchange and the ease of use of computer software have become a major influence on the decision of businesses to allow unconventional working environments. As a result, telework has become an increasingly preferred option to working in the office (Manochehri & Pinkerton, 2002). In the early 1970s, Jack Nilles coined the word telework. Telework refers to an approved working arrangement whereby an employee—a teleworker—officially performs his or her assigned job tasks in a specified work area of his or her home on a regular basis (United States Department of Defense, 2002). According to the Communications Security Establishment’s Telework Pilot Program (2002), telework has become a very important alternative work pattern, which allows employees to better manage their home life and work life in a complex society. Telework offers many advantages, including the following: 1. Substantial savings in physical facility-related costs, including rent, storage, and electricity; 2. Expanding labor pools without geographic restrictions (Hirsch, 2002; Mehlman, 2002; Motskula, 2001).
Ubiquitous Commerce
Authors: Galanxhi-Janaqi Holtjona , Nah Fiona Fui-Hoon
Published: May 2011

Ubiquitous commerce, also referred to as u-commerce or übercommerce, is the combination of electronic, wireless-mobile, television, voice, and silent commerce. However, its full realization would bring something more than the simple sum of its components. Ubiquitous commerce can be defined as “the use of ubiquitous networks to support personalized and uninterrupted communications and transactions between a firm and its various stakeholders to provide a level of value, above, and beyond traditional commerce” (Watson, Pitt, Berthon, & Zinkhan, 2002).
Usability Assessment in Mobile Computing and Commerce
Authors: Chen Kuanchin , Sockel Hy , Falk Louis K.
Published: May 2011

Usability is an acknowledged important aspect of any system or product design. Researchers have found that a good interface design promotes higher mutuality (feeling similar and connected), which, in turn, leads to higher levels of involvement and a favorable impression of credibility.
Web Content Adaptation Frameworks and Techniques
Authors: Goh Tiong-Thye , Kinshuk
Published: May 2011

Most Web pages are designed with desktop platform access in mind, but with the proliferation of mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones, accessing Web pages through a variety of devices without proper content adaptation can result in an aesthetically unpleasant, un-navigable and, in most cases, unsatisfying experience. This article provides an overview of approaches in Web content adaptation framework and techniques being developed to extend the Web application access to non-desktop platforms. After describing general adaptation techniques, the article focuses particularly on the adaptation requirements of learning systems, especially when they are accessed through mobile devices.
Agent-Based System for Discovering and Building Collaborative Communities
Authors: Nabuco Olga , Koyama Mauro F. , Pereira Edeneziano D. , Drira Khalil
Published: May 2011

Currently, organizations are under a regime of rapid economic, social, and technological change. Such a regime has been impelling organizations to increase focus on innovation, learning, and forms of enterprise cooperation. To assure innovation success and make it measurable, it is indispensable for members of teams to systematically exchange information and knowledge. McLure and Faraj (2000) see an evolution in the way knowledge exchange is viewed from “knowledge as object” to “knowledge embedded in people,” and finally as “knowledge embedded in the community.” The collaborative community is a group of people, not necessarily co-located, that share interests and act together to contribute positively toward the fulfillment of their common goals. The community’s members develop a common vocabulary and language by interacting continuously. They also create the reciprocal trust and mutual understanding needed to establish a culture in which collaborative practices pre-dominate. Such practices can grasp and apply the tacit knowledge dispersed in the organization, embodied in the people’s minds. Tacit knowledge is a concept proposed by Polanyi (1966) meaning a kind of knowledge that cannot be easily transcripted into a code. It can be profitably applied on process and/or product development and production. Therefore, community members can powerfully contribute to the innovation process and create value for the organization. In doing so, they become a fundamental work force to the organization.
Computer-Based Concept Mapping
Authors: Alpert Sherman R.
Published: May 2011

A concept map (also known as a knowledge map) is a visual representation of knowledge of a domain. A concept map consists of nodes representing concepts, objects, events, or actions connected by directional links defining the semantic relationships between and among nodes. Graphically, a node is represented by a geometric object, such as a rectangle or oval, containing a textual name; relationship links between nodes appear as textually labeled lines with an arrowhead at one or both ends indicating the directionality of the represented relation. Together, nodes and links define propositions or assertions about a topic, domain, or thing. For example, an arrow labeled has beginning at a node labeled bird and ending at a wings node represents the proposition “A bird has wings” and might be a portion of a concept map concerning birds, as portrayed in Figure 1.
The Culture(s) of Cyberspace
Authors: Macfadyen Leah P.
Published: May 2011

Computer-mediated communication between humans is becoming ubiquitous. Computers are increasingly connected via high-speed local and wide-area networks, and via wireless technologies. High bandwidth interaction is increasing communication speed, offering the possibility for transmission of images, voice, sound, video and formatted data as well as text. Computer technologies are creating the possibility of entirely new interfaces of human-machine interaction, and entirely new virtual “spaces” for human-human interaction. As a collectivity, these new spaces of communication are known as cyberspace. Human-human interaction is the foundation of culture. Vygotsky and Luria’s (1994) model of cultural development highlights the need to consider the culture(s) of cyberspace (“cyberculture(s)”) in any examination of computer-mediated human communications, because it invokes both the communicative and behavioural practices that humans employ as they interact with their environment.
A Dynamic Personal Portfolio Using Web Technologies
Authors: Verhaart Michael , Kinshuk
Published: May 2011

With the ubiquitous availability of the Internet, the possibility of creating a centralized repository of an individual’s knowledge has become possible. Although, at present, there are many efforts to develop collaborative systems such as wikis (Leuf & Cunningham, 2002), Web logs or blogs (Winer, 2002) and sharable content management systems (Wikipedia, 2004), an area that is overlooked is the development of a system that would manage personal knowledge and information. For example, in an educational setting, it has been found that most lecturers customize content to suit their particular delivery styles. This article outlines a framework that uses Web technologies allowing the storage and management of personal information, the sharing of the content with other personal systems, and allows for annotations to be captured within context from people who visit the personal knowledge portfolio.
Engagability
Authors: Knight John
Published: May 2011

Recent trends in HCI have sought to widen the range of use qualities beyond accessibility and usability. The impetus for this is fourfold. First, some argue that consumer behaviour has become more sophisticated and that people expect products to give them a number of life-style benefits. The benefits that products can give people include functional benefits (the product does something) and suprafunctional benefits (the product expresses something). Engagability is thus important in understanding people’s preferences and relationships with products. Second, technological advances offer the possibility of designing experiences that are like those in the real world. Engagability is therefore important in providing an evaluative and exploratory approach to understanding “real” and “virtual” experiences. Third, the experiences that people value (e.g., sports) require voluntary engagement. Thus, engagability is important in designing experiences that require discretionary use. Lastly, the product life cycle suggests the need to look beyond design to engagement. Products change from their initial production, through distribution to consumption. Each phase of this life cycle contains decision-making activities (e.g., purchasing, design, etc.). Engagability is an important research focus in explaining stakeholders’ values in making these decisions. As such, engagability research seeks to understand the nature of experience in the real and virtual worlds. The activities that people become engaged with are often complex and social and thus challenge the traditional HCI focus on the single task directed user. Important application areas for this inquiry are learning, health and sport, and games.
Eye Tracking in HCI and Usability Research
Authors: Poole Alex , Ball Linden J.
Published: May 2011

Eye tracking is a technique whereby an individual’s eye movements are measured so that the researcher knows both where a person is looking at any given time and the sequence in which the person’s eyes are shifting from one location to another. Tracking people’s eye movements can help HCI researchers to understand visual and display-based information processing and the factors that may impact the usability of system interfaces. In this way, eye-movement recordings can provide an objective source of interface-evaluation data that can inform the design of improved interfaces. Eye movements also can be captured and used as control signals to enable people to interact with interfaces directly without the need for mouse or keyboard input, which can be a major advantage for certain populations of users, such as disabled individuals. We begin this article with an overview of eye-tracking technology and progress toward a detailed discussion of the use of eye tracking in HCI and usability research. A key element of this discussion is to provide a practical guide to inform researchers of the various eye-movement measures that can be taken and the way in which these metrics can address questions about system usability. We conclude by considering the future prospects for eye-tracking research in HCI and usability testing.
Information Interaction Beyond HCI
Authors: Duchastel Philip
Published: May 2011

HCI might well be poised to break out of its mould, as defined by its first half-century history, and to redefine itself in another mould that is at once more abstract and wider in scope. In the process, it would redefine its very name, HCI becoming a subset of the larger field of information interaction (II). This potential transformation is what is described here. At this point in our technological era, we are in the process of symbolically modeling all aspects of reality such that our interactions with those aspects of the world around us that are most important are more digitally mediated. We are beginning to inhabit information environments and to interact ever more with artifacts, events, and processes that are pure information. This is the world of II, and what this means for HCI is what is examined here. The presentation has a largely abstract character to it. Indeed, it seeks to reframe our discussion of the phenomenon of interaction under study in such a way as to go beyond the pitfalls of concrete problems usually associated with the field. By stepping back from the usual issues of concern and from the usual way of categorizing the elements of the field (Helander et al., 2000; Jacko & Sears, 2003), the goal is to contextualize HCI within a broader, necessarily philosophical plane of concern in order to look at it afresh and thereby see where it might be headed. The direction proposed is decidedly more englobing, more abstract, and, hence, more theoretical in its analysis.
Web-Based Human Machine Interaction in Manufacturing
Authors: Blecker Thorsten , Graf Günter
Published: May 2011

The quality of HMI in automation is an important issue in manufacturing. This special form of interaction occurs when the combination of human abilities and machine features are necessary in order to perform the tasks in manufacturing. Balint (1995) has identified three categories of such human-machine systems: 1. Machines might do the job without human involvement, but the feasibility is questionable. For example, weld seams in car assembly are made mostly autonomously by robots, but in many cases, humans have to guide the robot to the weld point, because the robot is not able to locate the point correctly, which is a relatively easy task for a human. 2. Humans might do the job without machines, but the efficiency/reliability is questionable. This is the case in almost all cases of automation (e.g., the varnishing of cars). 3. HMI is necessary (no purely machine- or human-based execution is possible), although robots today are widely in use; in many cases, they cannot substitute humans completely, because the possible conflicts that can occur are so diverse that a robot alone cannot manage them. The term HMI is used widely for the interaction of a human and a somewhat artificial, automated facility, which is true in many situations, including HCI. In this article, we speak of HMI in industrial settings. We term the machine especially for industrial facilities for producing a certain (physical) output; in this case, the term man-machine interaction also is used synonymously for HMI. We define HMI as the relation between a human operator and one or more machines via an interface for embracing the functions of machine handling, programming, simulation, maintenance, diagnosis, and initialization.
Business Applications of Virtual Communities
Authors: Baim Susan A.
Published: May 2011

In studying the broad spectrum of business-focused virtual communities in operation on the Internet today, there are two categorizations that are readily observed by researchers. First, business-focused virtual communities are directly sponsored and/or managed by a firm or they are privately managed by individuals interested in a specific business topic, product/service line, or industry. Second, business-focused virtual communities involve interactions directly between multiple businesses (B2B), interactions between businesses and individual consumers (B2C), or interactions between individual consumers (C2C) on topics of business interest. Understanding where a given business-focused virtual community fits within both categorizations can identify the purposes (mission and vision) that it seeks to fulfill and the specific target audience that it seeks to draw and serve. While neither categorization is fully accurate or appropriate in all cases, the fact that a broad variety of different permutations of business-focused virtual communities exist serves to underscore the importance of virtual communities as a whole to businesses in today’s global marketplace.
Converting Online Community Visitors into Online Consumers
Authors: Shan Lee Moh , Sutanto Juliana , Kankanhalli Atreyi
Published: May 2011

Virtual communities have been studied using various perspectives (Hagel & Armstrong, 1997; Jones, 1998; Rheingold, 1993). Amongst these, Hagel and Armstrong’s (1997) interpretation of the virtual community as a business tool to encourage greater customer loyalty and higher revenues, has the greatest commercial implications. However, as virtual communities often have a high risk of failing, researchers have predominantly concentrated on discovering what factors render some virtual communities successful and others failures. Previous studies (Blanchard & Markus, 2004; Koh & Kim, 2004) suggest that members in successful virtual communities have a strong “sense of virtual community” (SOVC). The presence of SOVC distinguishes a virtual community from other noncommunity-like online social structures, for example, virtual publics. Four dimensions of the “sense of community” have been postulated, that is, feelings of membership, feelings of influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). These dimensions contribute to create the affective bonds that distinguish real-life communities from neighborhoods. The presence of SOVC signifies strong bonds among the members in the community. These affective bonds are crucial in ensuring that members continue participating in that particular virtual community. One of the problems all commercially oriented virtual communities face is that frequently, many of them have visitors but not consumers. Essentially, the e-business hopes that each visitor will make the transition from being a mere surfer to becoming a repeated customer. Affective bonds with other members and a developed obligation toward the community can hasten this process. This article thus focuses on how to convert an online visitor into an online consumer. The stages of the consumer’s decision-making process are reviewed and online and off-line consumer behavior is contrasted, whilst concentrating on changes in consumer perceptions. The literature regarding the stages and changes in the participatory status of a virtual community member is integrated with the consumer decision-making process literature. A framework that considers the needs of the online consumer is then proposed, and some measures facilitating this conversion from visitor to consumer are highlighted.