bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Genomatrices and the Genetic Octet Yin-Yang-Algebras
Authors: Petoukhov Sergey , He Matthew
Published: May 2010

Algebraic properties of the genetic code are analyzed. The investigations of the genetic code on the basis of matrix approaches (“matrix genetics”) are described. The degeneracy of the vertebrate mitochondrial genetic code is reflected in the black-and-white mosaic of the (8*8)-matrix of 64 triplets, 20 amino acids, and stop-signals. The special algorithm, which is based on features of genetic molecules, exists to transform the mosaic genomatrix into the matrices, which are members of the special 8-dimensional algebra. Main mathematical properties of this genetic algebra and its relations with other algebras are analyzed together with some important consequences from the adequate algebraic models of the genetic code. Elements of new “genovector calculation” and ideas of “genetic mechanics” are discussed. The revealed fact of the relation between the genetic code and these genetic algebras, which define new multi-dimensional numeric systems, is discussed in connection with the famous idea by Pythagoras: “All things are numbers.” Simultaneously, these genetic algebras can be utilized as the algebras of genetic operators in biological organisms. The described results are related to the problem of algebraization of bioinformatics. They draw attention to the question: what is life from the viewpoint of algebra?
Course Management Meets Social Networking in Moodle
Authors: Crosslin Matt
Published: May 2010

Moodle is currently one of the more popular opensource course management systems in online education. Some evaluations have also indicated that Moodle is one of the top-rated programs when compared to other open-source course management systems (Graf & List, 2005). The creators of Moodle describe their program as a course management system built on social constructivist pedagogy. Social constructivist pedagogy is a collaborative approach to learning based upon the works of Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget. Moodle’s unique focus on pedagogy allows online learning to cross over from the traditional educational realm of factual recall and rote memorization into the realm of social networking. Social networking has recently become one of the more popular uses of the Internet, with sites like MySpace and FaceBook attracting millions of users every month. Social networking Web sites began to appear on the Internet around 2002 (Downes, 2005). Social networks are now seen as an important component of modern society – even in educational contexts (Finin, Ding, Zhou, & Joshi, 2005). Current online social networking sites thrive on social constructivism pedagogy – whether the users or designers know this or not.
Exploring the Role of Social Software in Higher Education
Authors: Ryan Yoni , Fitzgerald Robert
Published: May 2010

This chapter considers the potential of social software to support learning in higher education. It outlines a current project funded by the then Australian Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, now the Australian Learning and Teaching COuncil (ALTC) (http://www.altc.edu. au/carrick/go) to explore the role of social software in supporting peer engagement and group learning. The project has established a series of pilot projects that examine ways in which social software can provide students with opportunities to engage with their peers in a discourse that explores, interrogates and provides a supplementary social ground for their in-class learning. Finding creative ways of using technology to expand and enrich the social base of learning in higher education will become increasingly important to lecturers and instructional designers alike. This project represents one small step in testing the applicability of social software to these contexts. While many of our students are already using various technologies to maintain and develop their personal networks, it remains to be seen if these offer viable uses in more scholarly settings.
Living, Working, Teaching and Learning by Social Software
Authors: Keegan Helen , Lisewski Bernard
Published: May 2010

This chapter explores emergent behaviours in the use of social software across multiple online communities of practice where informal learning occurs beyond traditional higher education (HE) institutional boundaries. Employing a combination of research literature, personal experience and direct observation, the authors investigate the blurring of boundaries between work/home/play as a result of increased connectivity and hyper availability in the “information age”. Exploring the potentially disruptive nature of new media, social software and social networking practices, the authors ask what coping strategies are employed by the individual as their online social networks and learning communities increase in number and density? What are the implications for the identity and role of the tutor in online HE learning environments characterised by multiple platforms and fora? The authors conclude by posing a series of challenges for the HE sector and its participants in engaging with social software and social networking technologies.
Pedagogical Responses to Social Software in Universities
Authors: McLoughlin Catherine , Lee Mark J.W.
Published: May 2010

Learning management systems (LMS’s) that cater for geographically dispersed learners have been widely available for a number of years, but many higher education institutions are discovering that new models of teaching and learning are required to meet the needs of a generation of learners who seek greater autonomy, connectivity, and socio-experiential learning. The advent of Web 2.0, with its expanded potential for generativity and connectivity, propels pedagogical change and opens up the debate on how people conceptualize the dynamics of student learning. This chapter explores how such disruptive forces, fuelled by the affordances of social software tools, are challenging and redefining scholarship and pedagogy, and the accompanying need for learners to develop advanced digital literacy skills in preparation for work and life in the networked society. In response to these challenges, the authors propose a pedagogical framework, Pedagogy 2.0, which addresses the themes of participation in networked communities of learning, personalization of the learning experience, and learner productivity in the form of knowledge building and creativity.
Agent Cognitive Capabilities and Orders of Social Emergence
Authors: Goldspink Christopher , Kay Robert
Published: May 2010

This chapter critically examines our theoretical understanding of the dialectical relationship between emergent social structures and agent behaviors. While much has been written about emergence individually as a concept, and the use of simulation methods are being increasingly applied to the exploration of social behavior, the concept of “social emergence” remains ill defined. Furthermore, there has been little theoretical treatment or practical explorations of how both the range and type of emergent structures observed may change as agents are endowed with increasingly sophisticated cognitive abilities. While we are still a very long way from being able to build artificial agents with human-like cognitive capabilities, it would be timely to revisit the extent of the challenge and to see where recent advances in our understanding of higher order cognition leave us. This chapter provides a brief recount of the theory of emergence, considers recent contributions to thinking about orders of emergence, and unpacks these in terms of implied agent characteristics. Observations are made about the implications of alternative cognitive paradigms and the position is proposed that an enactivist view provides the most logical pathway to advancing our understanding. The chapter concludes by presenting an account of reflexive and non-reflexive modes of emergence, which incorporates this view.
Modeling Cognitive Agents for Social Systems and a Simulation in Urban Dynamics
Authors: Zhang Yu , Lewis Mark , Drennon Christine , Pellon Michael , Coleman
Published: May 2010

Multi-agent systems have been used to model complex social systems in many domains. The entire movement of multi-agent paradigm was spawned, at least in part, by the perceived importance of fostering human-like adjustable autonomy and behaviors in social systems. But, efficient scalable and robust social systems are difficult to engineer. One difficulty exists in the design of how society and agents evolve and the other diffi- culties exist in how to capture the highly cognitive decision-making process that sometimes follows intuition and bounded rationality. We present a multi-agent architecture called CASE (Cognitive Agents for Social Environments). CASE provides a way to embed agent interactions in a three-dimensional social structure. It also presents a computational model for an individual agent’s intuitive and deliberative decision-making process. This chapter also presents our work on creating a multi-agent simulation which can help social and economic scientists use CASE agents to perform their tests. Finally, we test the system in an urban dynamic problem. Our experiment results suggest that intuitive decision-making allows the quick convergence of social strategies, and embedding agent interactions in a three-dimensional social structure speeds up this convergence as well as maintains the system’s stability.
Tools for Automatic Audio Management
Authors: Helén Marko , Lahti Tommi , Klapuri Anssi
Published: May 2010

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce tools for automatic audio management. The authors present applications which are already available for the users and describe the algorithms and methods behind these applications and their performance. They also discuss the concept of metadata, which is an important prerequisite for modern distributed personal content applications. The variety of automatic audio management tools is wide-ranging. This chapter covers audio segmentation and classification, query by example of audio, music retrieval and recommendation, and speech management, which they consider as being the most important aspects of audio information management. Computational complexity is one major concern in the present era of personal mobile devices and large multimedia collections available on the internet. Therefore they also introduce clustering and indexing techniques which are developed for faster access in large databases.
Situational Awareness In Collaborative Work Environments
Authors: Kulyk Olga , van Dijk Betsy , van der Vet Paul , Nijholt Anton , van der Veer Gerrit
Published: May 2010

This chapter addresses awareness support to enhance teamwork in co-located collaborative environments. In particular, the authors focus on the concept of situational awareness which is essential for successful team collaboration. Mutual situational awareness leads to informal social interactions, development of shared working cultures which are essential aspects of maintaining working relationships. First, an overview of the studies on team coordination and situational awareness support is presented. Second, a collaborative working environment is described for scientific teams in a molecular biology omics experimentation domain. Then, the results of practical case studies are discussed, as well as situational awareness support for scientific teams in collaborative environments. Finally, the authors discuss practical challenges in design and evaluation of group support systems for collaborative working environments and our multi-level analysis approach. The chapter gives new insights into how shared displays support group awareness, and how to design and evaluate interactive systems and visualisations that afford awareness in order to stimulate existing and new forms of collaboration in advanced working environments.
Translation of Biomedical Terms by Inferring Rewriting Rules
Authors: Claveau Vincent
Published: May 2010

This chapter presents a simple yet efficient approach to translate automatically unknown biomedical terms from one language into another. This approach relies on a machine learning process able to infer rewriting rules from examples, that is, from a list of paired terms in two studied languages. Any new term is then simply translated by applying the rewriting rules to it. When different translations are produced by conflicting rewriting rules, we use language modeling to single out the best candidate. The experiments reported here show that this technique yields very good results for different language pairs (including Czech, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and even Russian). The author also shows how this translation technique could be used in a cross-language information retrieval task and thus complete the dictionary-based existing approaches.
Lexical Enrichment of Biomedical Ontologies
Authors: Reiter Nils , Buitelaar Paul
Published: May 2010

This chapter is concerned with lexical enrichment of ontologies, that is how to enrich a given ontology with lexical information derived from a semantic lexicon such as WordNet or other lexical resources. The authors present an approach towards the integration of both types of resources, in particular for the human anatomy domain as represented by the Foundational Model of Anatomy and for the molecular biology domain as represented by an ontology of biochemical substances. The chapter describes our approach on enriching these biomedical ontologies with information derived from WordNet and Wikipedia by matching ontology class labels to entries in WordNet and Wikipedia. In the first case the authors acquire WordNet synonyms for the ontology class label, whereas in the second case they acquire multilingual translations as provided by Wikipedia. A particular point of emphasis here is on selecting the appropriate interpretation of ambiguous ontology class labels through sense disambiguation, which we address by use of a simple algorithm that selects the most likely sense for an ambiguous term by statistical signi?cance of co-occurring words in a domain corpus. Acquired synonyms and translations are added to the ontology by use of the LingInfo model, which provides an ontology-based lexicon model for the annotation of ontology classes with (multilingual) terms and their linguistic properties.
Word Sense Disambiguation in Biomedical Applications
Authors: Schiemann Torsten , Leser Ulf , Hakenberg Jörg
Published: May 2010

Ambiguity is a common phenomenon in text, especially in the biomedical domain. For instance, it is frequently the case that a gene, a protein encoded by the gene, and a disease associated with the protein share the same name. Resolving this problem, that is, assigning to an ambiguous word in a given context its correct meaning is called word sense disambiguation (WSD). It is a pre-requisite for associating entities in text to external identifiers and thus to put the results from text mining into a larger knowledge framework. In this chapter, we introduce the WSD problem and sketch general approaches for solving it. The authors then describe in detail the results of a study in WSD using classification. For each sense of an ambiguous term, they collected a large number of exemplary texts automatically and used them to train an SVM-based classifier. This method reaches a median success rate of 97%. The authors also provide an analysis of potential sources and methods to obtain training examples, which proved to be the most difficult part of this study.
Analysing Clinical Notes for Translation Research
Authors: Patrick Jon , Asgari Pooyan
Published: May 2010

There have been few studies of large corpora of narrative notes collected from the health clinicians working at the point of care. This chapter describes the principle issues in analysing a corpus of 44 million words of clinical notes drawn from the Intensive Care Service of a Sydney hospital. The study identifies many of the processing difficulties in dealing with written materials that have a high degree of informality, written in circumstances where the authors are under significant time pressures, and containing a large technical lexicon, in contrast to formally published material. Recommendations on the processing tasks needed to turn such materials into a more usable form are provided. The chapter argues that these problems require a return to issues of 30 years ago that have been mostly solved for computational linguists but need to be revisited for this entirely new genre of materials. In returning to the past and studying the contents of these materials in retrospective studies we can plan to go forward to a future that provides technologies that better support clinicians. They need to produce both lexically and grammatically higher quality texts that can then be leveraged successfully for advanced translational research thereby bolstering its momentum.
Visualization and Modelling in Dental Implantology
Authors: Pongracz Ferenc
Published: May 2010

Intraoperative transfer of the implant and prosthesis planning in dentistry is facilitated by drilling templates or active, image-guided navigation. Minimum invasion concept of surgical interaction means high clinical precision with immediate load of prosthesis. The need for high-quality, realistic visualization of anatomical environment is obvious. Moreover, new elements of functional modelling appear to gain ground. Accordingly, future trend in computerized dentistry predicts less use of CT (computer tomography) or DVT (digital volume tomography) imaging and more use of 3D visualization of anatomy (laser scanning of topography and various surface reconstruction techniques). Direct visualization of anatomy during surgery revives wider use of active navigation. This chapter summarizes latest results on developing software tools for improving imaging and graphical modelling techniques in computerized dental implantology.
Finite Element Analysis and its Application in Dental Implant Research
Authors: Zampelis Antonios , Tsamasphyros George
Published: May 2010

Biomechanical research has gained recognition in medical sciences. Osseointegrated dental implants, being medical devices functioning under constant load, are one of the focal points of such research. One of the most powerful tools for biomechanical research on dental implants is finite element analysis (FEA). This chapter will cope with basic elements of FEA research, the mechanical properties of bone and the various parts of dental implants, as well as delve into published literature on the subject.
Integrated Intelligence
Authors: Campos Marcos M. , Milenova Boriana L.
Published: May 2010

Warehousing and analytics of sensor network data is an area growing in relevance as more and more sensor data are collected and made available for analysis. Applications that involve processing of streaming sensor data require efficient storage, analysis, and monitoring of data streams. Traditionally, in these applications, RDBMSs have been confined to the storage stage. While contemporary RDBMSs were not designed to handle stream-like data, the tight integration of sophisticated analytic capabilities into the core database engine offers a powerful infrastructure that can more broadly support sensor network applications. Other useful components found in RDBMs include: extraction, transformation and load (ETL), centralized data warehousing, and automated alert capabilities. The combination of these components addresses significant challenges in sensor data applications such as data transformations, feature extraction, mining model build and deployment, distributed model scoring, and alerting/messaging infrastructure. This chapter discusses the usage of existing RDBMS functionality in the context of sensor network applications.
Event/Stream Processing for Advanced Applications
Authors: Jiang Qingchun , Adaikkalavan Raman , Chakravarthy Sharma
Published: May 2010

Event processing in the form of ECA rules has been researched extensively from the situation monitoring viewpoint to detect changes in a timely manner and to take appropriate actions. Several event specification languages and processing models have been developed, analyzed, and implemented. More recently, data stream processing has been receiving a lot of attention to deal with applications that generate large amounts of data in real-time at varying input rates and to compute functions over multiple streams that satisfy quality of service (QoS) requirements. A few systems based on the data stream processing model have been proposed to deal with change detection and situation monitoring. However, current data stream processing models lack the notion of composite event specification and computation, and they cannot be readily combined with event detection and rule specification, which are necessary and important for many applications. This chapter discusses a couple of representative scenarios that require both stream and event processing. The authors then summarize the similarities and differences between the event and data stream processing models. The comparison clearly indicates that for most of the applications considered for stream processing, event component is needed and is not currently supported. And conversely, earlier event processing systems assumed primitive (or simple) events triggered by DBMS and other applications and did not consider computed events. By synthesizing these two and combining their strengths, the authors present an integrated model – one that will be better than the sum of its parts. The authors discuss the notion of a semantic window, which extends the current window concept for continuous queries, and stream modifiers in order to extend current stream computation model for complicated change detection. They further discuss the extension of event specification to include continuous queries. Finally, the authors demonstrate how one of the scenarios discussed earlier can be elegantly and effectively modeled using the integrated approach.
In Love and War
Authors: Chew Esyin , Turner David A. , Jones Norah
Published: May 2010

Blended learning involves the combination of two fields of concern: technological and instrumental considerations are, to a greater or lesser extent, combined with pedagogy and educational theory. The result of this is that blended learning suffers from considerable difficulties of definition, and its theoretical foundation is correspondingly weak. For this reason it is desirable to expose the philosophical and theoretical foundations of blended learning to critical scrutiny. Creating a foundation for blended learning will involve an examination of the gap between the paradigms and practices of educational theory and educational technology. The result should be a space within which academics from the diverse disciplines involved may be able to discuss and resolve their problems. This chapter will explore the contrasting disciplinary perceptions and suggest a sketch for blended learning theory.
Performance and Agility in Orchestrating Learning Online
Authors: Yuen Lai Yung , Tsui Eric
Published: May 2010

Hybrid learning is taking centre stage and the conductor, by means of visible gestures, directs performances on the e-learning platform. Real-time personalized communication takes place as it does in a harmonious ensemble. Intellectual agility ensures that bottom-line contributors to the performance are in good shape and are fit to contribute in this participatory theatre. In the new knowledge era, everyone gets connected, everything is personalized, and adapted to the digital world. Orchestrating the music on the e-learning platform, the conductor and individual performers are joining forces with the artists to produce the desired response or near perfect performance. The technological world enhances the bottom-line contributions with the latest Web 2.0 instruments which make it increasingly effortless for a conductor to access a world of information both which is comprehensive and yet personal. Furthermore, Web 2.0 applications often help to bring novelty to the stage. In this chapter the authors will adopt an empirical approach to explore how the new but less hyped Web 2.0 instruments will be helping the next generation to make full use of an e-learning platform. They will also explore the strengths and ascertain the suitability of the instruments and demonstrate the process of making such a performance a reality on the platform. This scenario is in support of the Hong Kong SAR Government’s initiative of its implementation of the Government Wi-Fi Programme, under the 2008 Digital 21 Strategy.
A Tool for Model-Driven Design of Rich Internet Applications Based on AJAX
Authors: Brambilla Marco , Fraternali Piero , Molteni Emanuele
Published: May 2010

This chapter describes how the design tool WebRatio (and its companion conceptual model WebML) have been extended to support the new requirements imposed by rich Internet applications (RIAs), that are recognized to be one of the main innovations that lead to the Web 2.0 revolution. Complex interactions such as drag and drop, dynamic resizing of visual components, graphical editing of objects, and partial page refresh are addressed by the RIA extensions of WebRatio. The chapter discusses what kinds of modelling primitives are required for specifying such patterns and how these primitives can be integrated in a CASE tool. Finally, a real industrial case is presented in which the novel RIA features are successfully applied.
Towards Web 3.0
Authors: Pomonis Tzanetos , Koutsomitropoulos Dimitrios A. , Christodoulou Sotiris P. , Papatheodorou Theodore S.
Published: May 2010

While the term Web 2.0 is used to describe the current trend in the use of Web technologies, the term Web 3.0 is used to describe the next generation Web, which will combine Semantic Web technologies, Web 2.0 principles, and artificial intelligence. Towards this perspective, in this work we introduce a 3-tier architecture for Web applications that will fit into the Web 3.0 definition. We present the fundamental features of this architecture, its components, and their interaction, as well as the current technological limitations. Furthermore, some indicative application scenarios are outlined in order to illustrate the features of the proposed architecture. The aim of this architecture is to be a step towards supporting the development of intelligent Semantic Web applications of the near future, as well as supporting the user collaboration and community-driven evolution of these applications.
Web 2.0—Social Bookmarking
Authors: Derham Richard , Mills Annette
Published: May 2010

Folksonomies is a relatively new concept and, as yet, it has not been widely studied in academic circles. In practice, folksonomies have therefore outpaced academic research in finding solutions to the problems facing them. The goal of this chapter is to bring together the current literature on folksonomies and explore avenues for future work. Hence, this chapter will examine what are folksonomies, what they are/can be used for, and explore their benefits and challenges using real world examples from systems such as Delicious and Flickr. The chapter also overviews some of the current research and suggests avenues for further work.
Social Bookmarking and Web Search
Authors: Yanbe Yusuke , Jatowt Adam , Nakamura Satoshi , Tanaka Katsumi
Published: May 2010

Social bookmarking is an emerging type of a Web service for reusing, sharing, and discovering resources. By bookmarking, users preserve access points to encountered documents for their future access. On the other hand, the social aspect of bookmarking results from the visibility of bookmarks to other users helping them to discover new, potentially interesting resources. In addition, social bookmarking systems allow for better estimation of the popularity and relevance of documents. In this chapter, we provide an overview of major aspects involved with social bookmarking and investigate their potential for enhancing Web search and for building novel applications. We make a comparative analysis of two popularity measures of Web pages, PageRank and SBRank, where SBRank is defined as an aggregate number of bookmarks that a given page accumulates in a selected social bookmarking system. The results of this analysis reveal the advantages of SBRank when compared to PageRank measure and provide the foundations for utilizing social bookmarking information in order to enhance and improve search in the Web. In the second part of the chapter, we describe an application that combines SBRank and PageRank measures in order to rerank results delivered by Web search engines and that offers several complimentary functions for realizing more effective search.
Towards Disambiguating Social Tagging Systems
Authors: Dattolo Antonina , Duca Silvia , Tomasi Francesca , Vitali Fabio
Published: May 2010

Social tagging to annotate resources represents one of the innovative aspects introduced with Web 2.0 and the new challenges of the (semantic) Web 3.0. Social tagging, also known as user-generated keywords or folksonomies, implies that keywords, from an arbitrarily large and uncontrolled vocabulary, are used by a large community of readers to describe resources. Despite undeniable success and usefulness of social tagging systems, they also suffer from some drawbacks: the proliferation of social tags, coming as they are from an unrestricted vocabulary leads to ambiguity when determining their intended meaning; the lack of predefined schemas or structures for inserting metadata leads to confusions as to their roles and justification; and the flatness of the structure of the keywords and lack of relationships among them imply difficulties in relating different keywords when they describe the same or similar concepts. So in order to increase precision, in the searches and classifications made possible by folksonomies, some experiences and results from formal classification and subjecting systems are considered, in order to help solve, if not to prevent altogether, the ambiguities that are intrinsic in such systems. Some successful and not so successful approaches as proposed in the scientific literature are discussed, and a few more are introduced here to further help dealing with special cases. In particular, we believe that adding depth and structure to the terms used in folksonomies could help in word sense disambiguation, as well as correctly identifying and classifying proper names, metaphors, and slang words when used as social tags.
Electronic Reputation Systems
Authors: Paolucci Mario , Picascia Stefano , Marmo Samuele
Published: May 2010

Reputation is a social control artefact developed by human communities to encourage socially desirable behaviour in absence of a central authority. It is widely employed in online contexts to address a number of dilemmas that the interaction among strangers can raise. This chapter presents a social-cognitive theory as a framework to describe the dynamics of reputation formation and spreading. In Section 2, we examine the technology of reputation as implemented in some popular Web platforms, testing theory predictions about the tendency towards either a rule of courtesy or a rule of prudence in evaluation reporting, and thus trying to better understand the outcomes that each system promotes and inhibits.
University 2.0
Authors: Griffin David
Published: May 2010

The social networking Web site is one type of Web 2.0 innovation that has been embraced by universityaged young people. The success of Facebook and similar Web sites has prompted universities to explore how they might use social networking Web sites to engage with their students. In this chapter, I argue that universities are misguided in their attempts to use social networking groups to attempt to engage with students registered with the Web sites. I present empirical evidence from a case study university to substantiate this claim. A framework is developed to categorise the university-related Facebook groups and competing theoretical perspectives on diffusion of innovation are employed to analyse the participation in these groups by students. Recommendations are made for universities, and other organisations, intending to use social networking Web sites to engage with students.
Integration of Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools into Education
Authors: Olla Phillip , Qureshi Elena
Published: May 2010

Web 2.0 is opening new capabilities for human interaction. It also broadens the way technology is used to collaborate more effectively. This chapter discusses instructional strategies and techniques used to successfully utilize Web 2.0 tools for classroom collaboration. It will also shed light on pedagogical issues that arise with the implementation of Web 2.0 into the educational setting. The chapter will present case studies describing how various Web 2.0 applications can be incorporated into a variety of courses in the areas of nursing, education, and computer information systems. Finally, recommendations for teachers and students on how to effectively use Web 2.0 tools to improve collaboration will be outlined.
Social Issues and Web 2.0
Authors: Olaniran Bolanle A. , Burley Hansel , Chang Maiga
Published: May 2010

Developing the foundations for intelligent applications that efficiently manage information is one goal of Web 2.0 technologies and the Semantic Web. As a result, the organization of Web 2.0 and other Semantic Web approaches to learning hold significant implications for learning, especially when one considers the role of cultures in learning and e-learning. Exploring how these technologies impact learning, this chapter focuses on social and cultural issues from potential users’ and learners’ standpoints. Furthermore, the chapter offers dimensions of cultural variability as a framework for its arguments. The chapter draws from existing literature and research to present implications of Semantic Web and Web 2.0, along with the issue of digital divide which is critical when exploring access to Web 2.0 technology platforms. The chapter ends by addressing key implications for Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web regarding usage and general effectiveness in the learning context.
A Comparative Analysis of Online Social Networking Sites and Their Business Models
Authors: Yang T. Andrew , Kim Dan J.
Published: May 2010

In the world of e-marketing, new business models are introduced to accommodate changes caused by various factors, including the markets, the services, the customers, among others. One latest trend of e-marketing is social networking Web sites, many of which have attracted not only large number of users and visitors, but also business companies to place their online ads on the sites. As an important example of Web 2.0 applications, online social networks deserve comprehensive studying and analysis; they are not only employed as an effective vehicle of e-marketing, but may impact how future Web-based applications would be developed. In this chapter, we explore online social networking as a new trend of e-marketing, by conducting a comparative analysis of online social networking sites. We first discuss the various types of online social networks, based on the classification by Laudon & Traver (2008), and then analyze online social networks from a business strategy point of view, by discussing the primary revenue models for online social networking sites. The primary contribution of this chapter is a comparative analysis and discussions of representative online social networking sites and their respective revenue model(s). This chapter aims to provide the reader with a basic understanding of the emerging online social networking Web sites and their primary revenue models.
Healthcare 2.0
Authors: Manouchehri Shakib , Winand Udo
Published: May 2010

From an economic, as well as a social point of view, healthcare is a significant part of our society and forms a major, ever-growing market. Therefore, this sector has the constant challenge of improving and reducing the cost of services. With respect to interaction, communication, and collaboration between patients and doctors, as well as among each other, the Internet provides new possibilities. Therefore a massive potential for innovation, by so called Web 2.0 applications, is offered. They are also increasingly used via mobile devices. The present article attends to this research with the aim to discuss potentials and restrictions of the use of Web 2.0 applications in healthcare as well as the mobile use of it.
Using a Web-Based Collaboration Portal and Wiki for Making Health Information Technology Decisions
Authors: Crowell R. , Agresta T. , Cook M.J. , Fifield J. , Demurjian S.
Published: May 2010

This chapter presents a case study highlighting development of a Web-based wiki-driven collaboration portal that is being used by a distributed group of community health organizations engaged in developing a strategic implementation plan for health information technology (HIT) at the point of care. The transdisciplinary approach to software development incorporates the perspectives, skill-set, and interests of a diverse group of stakeholders, including staff from the community health organizations, academic researchers, and software developers. The case study describes a select set of the challenges and strategies that have emerged in the planning and development process, including issues surrounding communication, training and development, and infrastructure. Prospects for future development are also explored.
Embracing the Social Web for Managing Patterns
Authors: Kamthan Pankaj
Published: May 2010

In this chapter, the affordances of the social Web in managing patterns are explored. For that, a classification of stakeholders of patterns and a process for producing patterns are proposed. The role of the stakeholders in carrying out the different workflows of the process is elaborated and, in doing so, the prospects presented by the technologies/applications underlying the social Web are highlighted. The directions for future research, including the potential of the convergence of the social Web and the Semantic Web, are briefly explored.
Extending and Applying Web 2.0 and Beyond for Environmental Intelligence
Authors: Unhelkar Bhuvan , Trivedi Bharti
Published: May 2010

This chapter aims to apply the intelligence used in businesses decision making to an organization’s environmental management strategy so as to support its green credentials. While the World Wide Web (WWW or Web for short) has had an impact on every aspect of human life, its current and upcoming versions, dubbed Web 2.0 and beyond, need to be considered in the context of environmental management. The use of decision making technologies and processes in this area of an organization is what we call “environmental intelligence” (EI). This EI can be used by businesses in order to discharge one of their significant corporate responsibilities–that of managing their activities that affect the environment including waste reduction, green house gas reduction, recycling, minimizing unnecessary human and material movements, and so on. Furthermore, the use of EI, it is envisaged, will also help organizations create local and industrial benchmarks, standards, audits, and grading that will help a large cross section of businesses to comply with the environmental requirements. The architecture of such enterprise intelligent systems needs to incorporate technologies like executable services, blogs, and wikis in addition to the standard communication and execution requirements of the Web. This chapter describes the literature review and the initial output of the research being carried out by the authors which, we hope, will eventually result in an environmentally intelligent Web-based business strategic system (EIWBSS).
Visualising Social Networks in Collaborative Environments
Authors: O’Rourke Stephen T. , Calvo Rafael A.
Published: May 2010

Social networking and other Web 2.0 applications are becoming ever more popular, with a staggering growth in the number of users and the amount of data they produce. This trend brings new challenges to the Web engineering community, particularly with regard to how we can help users make sense of all this new data. The success of collaborative work and learning environments will increasingly depend on how well they support users in integrating the data that describes the social aspects of the task and its context. This chapter explores the concept of social networking in a collaboration environment, and presents a simple strategy for developers who wish to provide visualisation functionalities as part of their own application. As an explanatory case study, we describe the development of a social network visualisation (SNV) tool, using software components and data publicly available. The SNV tool is designed to support users of a collaborative application by facilitating the exploration of interactions from a network perspective. Since social networks can be large and complex, graph theory is commonly used as a mathematical framework. Our SNV tool integrates techniques from social networking and graph theory, including the filtering and clustering of data, in this case, from a large email dataset. These functions help to facilitate the analysis of the social network and reveal the embedded patterns of user behaviour in the underlying data.
How Employees Can Leverage Web 2.0 in New Ways to Reflect on Employment and Employers
Authors: Richards James
Published: May 2010

How and why businesses can and should exploit Web 2.0 communication technologies for competitive advantage has recently become the focus of scholarly attention. Yet at the same time, one key organizational actor in the business equation–the employee as an individual and collective actor with distinct interests from that of the employer, has been given scant attention. Using media accounts, questionnaire and interview data, this chapter seeks to map out early trends in employee interests in Web 2.0. The findings point towards three distinct, yet interconnected employee uses for Web 2.0–collaborative practices that extend employee abilities to exchange a wide-range of ‘insider information,’ express conflict, and ‘take action’ against employers. Due to the nature and size of cyberspace, however, more research is required to gauge the popularity and effect of these emergent trends.
Trust-Privacy Tradeoffs in Distributed Computing
Authors: Deghaili Rima , Chehab Ali , Kayssi Ayman
Published: May 2010

In distributed computing environments, it is often needed to establish trust before entities interact together. This trust establishment process involves making each entity ask for some credentials from the other entity, which implies some privacy loss for both parties. The authors present a system for achieving the right privacy-trust tradeoff in distributed environments. Each entity aims to join a group in order to protect its privacy. Interaction between entities is then replaced by interaction between groups on behalf of their members. Data sent between groups is saved from dissemination by a self-destruction process. Simulations performed on the system implemented using the Aglets platform show that entities requesting a service need to give up more private information when their past experiences are not good, or when the requesting entity is of a paranoid nature. The privacy loss in all cases is quantified and controlled.
Querying Web Accessibility Knowledge from Web Graphs
Authors: Lopes Rui , Carriço Luís
Published: May 2010

Web Accessibility is a hot topic today. Striving for social inclusion has resulted in the requirement of providing accessible content to all users. However, since each user is unique, and the Web evolves in a decentralized way, little or none is known about the shape of the Web’s accessibility on its own at a large scale, as well as from the point-of-view of each user. In this chapter the authors present the Web Accessibility Knowledge Framework as the foundation for specifying the relevant information about the accessibility of a Web page. This framework leverages Semantic Web technologies, side by side with audience modeling and accessibility metrics, as a way to study the Web as an entity with unique accessibility properties dependent from each user’s point of view. Through this framework, the authors envision a set of queries that can help harnessing and inferring this kind of knowledge from Web graphs.
Attempting to Model Sense Division for Word Sense Disambiguation
Authors: Gómez Pascual Cantos
Published: May 2010

This chapter starts exploring the potential of co-occurrence data for word sense disambiguation. The findings on the robustness of the different distribution of co-occurrence data on the assumption that distinct meanings of the same word attract different co-occurrence data, has taken the author to experiment (i) on possible grouping of word meanings by means of cluster analysis and (ii) on word sense disambiguation using discriminant function analysis. In addition, two priorities have been pursued: first, find robust statistical techniques, and second, minimize computational costs. Future research aims at the transition from coarse-grained senses to finer-grained ones by means of reiteration of the same model on different levels of contextual differentiation.
Online Virtual Communities as a New Form of Social Relations
Authors: Mínguez Almudena Moreno , Hernán Carolina Suárez
Published: May 2010

The generalization of the new information technologies has favored the transformation of social structures and the way of relating to others. In this changing process, the logic of the social relationships is characterized by the fragility and the temporality of the communicative systems reciprocity which are established “online” in a new cybernetic culture. “Virtual communities” are created in which the interaction systems established by individuals exceed the traditional categories of time and space. In this manner the individuals create online social webs where they connect and disconnect themselves based on their needs or wishes. The new online communication technologies favor the rigid norms of the “solid society” that dilute in flexible referential contexts and reversible in the context of the “global and liquid society” to which the sociologists Bauman or Beck have referred to. Therefore the objective that the authors propose in this chapter is to try new theoretic tools, from the paradigms of the new sociology of technology, which let them analyze the new relational and cultural processes which are being generated in the cultural context of the information global society, as a consequence of the new communication technologies scope. Definitely the authors propose to analyze the meaning of concepts such as “virtual community”, “cyber culture”, or “contacted individualism”, as well as the meaning and extent of some of the new social and individual behaviors which are maintained in the Net society.
Social Networks Applied to E-Gov
Authors: Natale Leandro Pupo , Silveira Ismar Frango , Zucchi Wagner Luiz , Mustaro Pollyana Notargiacomo
Published: May 2010

The technological advances establish new communication forms between people and have also reached the government sphere and its activities, improving access to information and allowing greater interaction between citizens through C2C (Citizen to Citizen) Services. Based on these aspects, this chapter presents a proposal for software architecture, using a social network to map the relationships and interactions between citizens, accounting and storing this knowledge in a government ontological metadata network. Using UML notation (Unified Modeling Language) for Software Engineering process and Java platform for development, a software prototype was modeled and developed in order to manage and handle e-Gov-driven social networks, using ontological metadata to computationally represent the social ties. This prototype is also capable of providing graphical display of social networks, enabling the identification of different social links between citizens, creating a tool intended for government agencies, since it allows a quantitative analysis of information in the social network.