Search results for "World Wide Web"

A Semantic Web Approach for Geodata Discovery

2013

International audience; Currently, vast amounts of geospatial information are o ffered through OGC's services. However this information has limited formal semantics. The most common method to search for a dataset consists in matching keywords to metadata elements. By adding semantics to available descriptions we could use modern inference and reasoning mechanisms currently available in the SemanticWeb. In this paper we present a novel architecture currently in development in which we use state of the art triplestores as the backend of a CSW service. In our approach, each metadata record is considered an instance of a given class in a domain ontology. Our architecture also adds a spatial dat…

Designing and Evaluating Online Language Learning Materials for Higher Education

2011

Nowadays, finding, choosing and developing or adapting materials is a very important component of education as well as a key element for the success of the whole learning process. A language teacher is also a materials developer and the materials development process should aim at ensuring that local needs and wants do not dictate decisions and that important learning principles are not forgotten. In the case of materials for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), a very thorough and pedagogically-sound set of guidelines should be followed prior to the design of the materials. Following that, a careful evaluation should take place so as to guarantee that those guidelines have been follo…

Communities of Communication: Making Sense of the “Social” in Social Media

2012

As social media usage permeates people's lives, an increasing portion of their daily behavior leaves digital traces to be used by researchers. Social scientists can hope to gain new insight into the previously hidden but digitally recorded aspects of our digital social lives. Beyond aggregate and individual-level studies of user behavior, the digital traces also enable scientific examination of the structure of social interaction through networks. At the same time, the large scale and networked nature of social media data pose a new set of challenges to be overcome through the development of sound methodologies. We take stock of current methodological promises and challenges in social media…

Facilitating Access to Health Web Pages with Different Language Complexity Levels

2019

The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is constantly growing. When searching for health information, different types of users, such as patients, clinicians or medical researchers, have different needs and should easily find the information they are looking for based on their specific requirements. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and, often, overload them with the provided amount of information. On the other hand, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and specialized web sites are often not free and contain focused information built by hand. This paper presents a method to facilitate the search of he…

2020

The Internet has become one of the main sources of information for university students’ learning. Since anyone can disseminate content online, however, the Internet is full of irrelevant, biased, or even false information. Thus, students’ ability to use online information in a critical-reflective manner is of crucial importance. In our study, we used a framework for the assessment of students’ critical online reasoning (COR) to measure university students’ ability to critically use information from online sources and to reason on contentious issues based on online information. In addition to analyzing students’ COR by evaluating their open-ended short answers, we also investigated the stude…

Transcribing the "Estoria de Espanna" using crowdsourcing: Strategies and aspirations

2015

This paper examines the specific strategies for recruitment and retention of volunteer transcribers in use in two collaborative transcription projects: Transcribe Bentham (University College, London) and the Estoria de Espanna Digital Project (University of Birmingham). The aim of the paper is to review the strategies used by Transcribe Bentham, a more mature crowdsourced electronic transcription project, with a view to informing the strategies put into place in the Estoria project, which has started transcribing using crowdsourcing more recently. The paper discusses the difficulties faced by crowdsourced electronic transcription projects and how these have been and are being resolved in th…

Digitization and preservation of cultural heritage: The CEPROQHA approach

2017

The humanity has always learned from the previous experiences for many reasons. The national heritage proves to be a great way to discover a nation's history. As a result, these priceless cultural items have a special attention. However, Since the wide adoption of new digital technologies, documenting, storing, and exhibiting cultural heritage assets became more affordable and reliable. These digital records are then used in several applications. Researchers saw the opportunity to use digital heritage recordings for long-term preservation. In this paper, we present the research progress in cultural heritage digital processing and preservation, highlighting the most impactful advances. Addit…

Assessing Peer Review by Gauging the Fate of Rejected Manuscripts: the case of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation

2017

This paper investigates the fate of manuscripts that were rejected from JASSS-The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, the flagship journal of social simulation. We tracked 456 manuscripts that were rejected from 1997 to 2011 and traced their subsequent publication as journal articles, conference papers or working papers. We compared the impact factor of the publishing journal and the citations of those manuscripts that were eventually published against the yearly impact factor of JASSS and the number of citations achieved by the JASSS mean and top cited articles. Only 10% of the rejected manuscripts were eventually published in a journal that was indexed in the Web of Sci…

Web accessibility for individuals with cognitive deficits

2007

Tim Berners-Lee claimed in 2001 that “the power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect”. A considerable amount of work has been done to make the web accessible to those with sensory or motor disability, with an increasing number of government and enterprise intranet webs being “accessible”, and also with some consortiums and groups seriously approaching this commitment. Some authors, such as Harrysson, have already highlighted the need for a cognitively accessible web. However, in spite of good intentions, there has been little work to date that has tackled this task. At least until now, the existing WAI and NI4 recommendations …

Searching the Web for conflicting topics: Page and user factors

2013

Web users tend to search only the pages displayed at the top of the search engine results page (the 'top link' heuristic). Although it might be reasonable to use this heuristic to navigate simple and unambiguous facts, it might be risky when searching for conflicting socio-scientific topics, such as potential measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the present study, we explored the extent to which students consider other Web page characteristics, such as topic relevance and trustworthiness, when searching and bookmarking pages concerning a conflicting topic. We also examined the extent to which prior background knowledge moderates students' behavior. The results revealed that while…