| Editorial | | BIB | Full-Text | 1-2 | |
| Daniel Cunliffe; Douglas Tudhope | |||
| AnnotatEd: A social navigation and annotation service for web-based educational resources | | BIBA | Full-Text | 3-32 | |
| Rosta Farzan; Peter Brusilovsky | |||
| Web page annotation and adaptive navigation support are two active, but independent research directions focused on the same goal: expanding the functionality of the Web as a hypertext system. The goal of the AnnotatEd system presented in this paper has been to integrate annotation and adaptive navigation support into a single value-added service where the components can reinforce each other and create new unique attributes. This paper describes the implementation of AnnotatEd from early prototypes to the current version, which has been explored in several contexts. We summarize some lessons we learned during the development process and which defined the current functionality of the system. We also present the results of several classroom studies of the system. These results demonstrate the importance of the browsing-based information access supported by AnnotatEd and the value of both the annotation and navigation support functionalities offered by the system. | |||
| An Inquiry-led Personalised Navigation System (IPNS) using multi-dimensional linkbases | | BIBA | Full-Text | 33-55 | |
| Panchit Longpradit; Wendy Hall; Robert J. Walters; Lester Gilbert; Quintin Gee; Gary B. Wills | |||
| The simplicity of the hypertext model behind the World Wide Web is a factor in its success, but this simplicity brings limitations. One of these limitations is embedding links in documents. Open Hypermedia addresses this by instead storing them in separate link databases. Meanwhile, the Adaptive Hypermedia approach seeks to enhance a user's experience by inserting personalised additional content and links on the web page. However, these techniques do not offer the user any control over the adaptation. In this paper, we propose the concept of a multi-dimensional linkbase for adaptive links presentation. Links are created and stored in a single, multi-dimensional, linkbase that provides presentation links based on the user's preferences and profile. We present a web-based system Inquiry-led Personalised Navigation System that implements this multi-dimensional concept for controlling its personalisation of hyperlinks. We give the results of our evaluation, which confirm that user-controlled adaptation is a satisfactory approach to providing users with control over personalisation, and can alleviate the link overload problem. | |||
| Towards the unification of formats for overlapping markup | | BIBA | Full-Text | 57-94 | |
| Paolo Marinelli; Fabio Vitali; Stefano Zacchiroli | |||
| Overlapping markup refers to the issue of how to represent data structures
more expressive than trees -- for example direct acyclic graphs -- using markup
(meta-) languages which have been designed with trees in mind -- for example
XML. In this paper we observe that the state of the art in overlapping markup
is far from being the widespread and consistent stack of standards and
technologies readily available for XML and develop a roadmap for closing the
gap.
In particular we present in the paper the design and implementation of what we believe to be the first needed step, namely: a syntactic conversion framework among the plethora of overlapping markup serialization formats. The algorithms needed to perform the various conversions are presented in pseudo-code, they are meant to be used as blueprints for researchers and practitioners which need to write batch translation programs from one format to the other. | |||
| Semantics on demand: Can a Semantic Wiki replace a knowledge base? | | BIBA | Full-Text | 95-120 | |
| David E. Millard; Christopher P. Bailey; Philip Boulain; Swapna Chennupati; Hugh C. Davis; Yvonne Howard; Gary Wills | |||
| In the same way that Wikis have become the mechanism that has enabled groups of users to collaborate on the production of hypertexts on the web, Semantic Wikis promise a future of collaboration on the production of semantically linked and ontologically structured hypertexts. In this paper we describe our efforts to convert an existing ontologically structured web site called Framework Reference Model for Assessment (FREMA) into a Semantic Wiki specifically to enable community contribution. We compare a number of existing Semantic Wikis, and explore how the notion of semantics-on-demand affects a system's ability to control the creation of useful ontologies and annotations. The FREMA case study introduces a number of the problems we encountered and solved, and sets the template for others considering implementing web-based knowledge bases using Semantic Wikis. Our conclusions will contribute to the agenda for those implementing the next generation of Semantic Wikis. | |||
| Automatic detection of cohesive subgroups within social hypertext: A heuristic approach | | BIBA | Full-Text | 121-143 | |
| Alvin Chin; Mark Chignell | |||
| The problem of identifying cohesive subgroups in social hypertext is reviewed. A computationally efficient three-step framework for identifying cohesive subgroups is proposed, referred to as the Social Cohesion Analysis of Networks (SCAN) method. In the first step of this method (Select), people within a social network are screened using a level of network centrality to select possible subgroup members. In the second step (Collect), the people selected in the first step are collected into subgroups identified at each point in time using hierarchical cluster analysis. In the third step (Choose), similarity modeling is used to choose cohesive subgroups based on the similarity of subgroups when compared across different points in time. The application of this SCAN method is then demonstrated in a case study where a subgroup is automatically extracted from a social network formed based on the online interactions of a group of about 150 people that occurred over a two-year period. In addition, this paper also demonstrates that similarity-based cohesion can provide a different, and in this case more compelling, subgroup representation than a method based on splitting a hierarchical clustering dendrogram using an optimality criterion. | |||
| Introduction to Special Issue on Web Accessibility | | BIB | Full-Text | 145-148 | |
| Leo Ferres | |||
| The perception of accessibility in Web development by academy, industry and government: a survey of the Brazilian scenario | | BIBA | Full-Text | 149-175 | |
| A. P. Freire; C. M. Russo; R. P. M. Fortes | |||
| Accessibility has become a serious issue to be considered by various sectors of the society. However, what are the differences between the perception of accessibility by academy, government and industry? In this paper, we present an analysis of this issue based on a large survey carried out with 613 participants involved with Web development, from all of the 27 Brazilian states. The paper presents results from the data analysis for each sector, along with statistical tests regarding the main different issues related to each of the sectors, such as: government and law, industry and techniques, academy and education. The concern about accessibility law is poor even amongst people from government sector. The analyses have also pointed out that the academy has not been addressing accessibility training accordingly. The knowledge about proper techniques to produce accessible contents is better than other sectors', but still limited in industry. Stronger investments in training and in the promotion of consciousness about the law may be pointed as the most important tools to help a more effective policy on Web accessibility in Brazil. | |||
| Cooperative multimedia management for participative learning: A case study | | BIBA | Full-Text | 177-197 | |
| Stefano Ferretti; Silvia Mirri; Ludovico Antonio Muratori; Marco Roccetti; Paola Salomoni | |||
| Web 2.0 has definitively twisted roles and rules within processes leading to
the final online resources we all can enjoy on the Internet. Producers and
consumers of Web contents merged into "prosumers", dialectically sharing their
knowledge, their experiences, as well as their needs. Such novel dynamics
provide a strong spin-off for e-learning methodologies and technologies, by
allowing students participation along learning materials life cycle, from
simple feedbacks, up to real enrichments of didactical resources. As elsewhere
on the Web 2.0 scenario, inclusive aspects of e-learning 2.0 represent either a
new challenge or a new opportunity.
This paper presents an e-learning 2.0 tool which is able to support users during the collaborative editing of didactical contents, from simple text to compound multimedia. Starting from a resource provided by the lecturer, learners can contribute in adding alternative contents and views, creating a multidimensional information structure. The resulting enriched material can be tailored to a specific user by resorting to automatic adaptation mechanisms. By utilizing typical Web 2.0 interfaces, our system involves all the different actors (lecturers, learning technologists, student support services, staff developers and students) to play a key role in improving the accessibility and, more generally, the effectiveness of learning materials. | |||
| Analysis of navigation behaviour of blind users using Browsing Shortcuts | | BIBA | Full-Text | 199-228 | |
| Christos Kouroupetroglou; Michail Salampasis; Athanasios Manitsaris | |||
| The World Wide Web is today the largest information seeking environment. Millions of people use it to satisfy their information needs. Although it is quite easy for able-bodied users to use it, there are still a lot of problems for people with disabilities. A major group of them are blind users. Blind users navigate the web in a different and less effective and efficient way especially when it comes to information seeking tasks. To ease the problem we introduced the Browsing Shortcuts (BSs) mechanism to enable blind people to move efficiently to various elements of a web page (e.g. functional elements such as forms, navigational aids, etc.), hence operating effectively as an interaction method and a vital counterbalance to low navigability of web pages. Although there are proofs that navigation performance was improved using the BSs mechanism, this effect had never been examined and explained in detail. In this paper, we re-analyse data collected from past experiments and review BSs usage from a navigation behaviour perspective. This is achieved by a new analysis using a visualisation method of "travel graphs" for studying the navigation methods of blind users. We compare behaviours of blind users using the BSs feature to the ones used without it to determine changes in behaviour. The basic aim behind this analysis is to examine how BSs have affected the navigation behaviour of blind users. We wished to determine how non-visual navigation using BSs assists users in parsing a web page into functional or semantic regions. Additionally, we wished to examine if and how these regions are accessed during an information seeking episode with and without the BSs mechanism. Finally, we wished to examine whether these changes are towards more rationalised information seeking behaviour. In overall, this new analysis of the recorded results indicate that the navigation model using BSs signifies more rationalised navigation and significantly change information seeking behaviour improving both navigability and information seeking performance. | |||