Scalable peer‐to‐peer networking architecture: DIVINE

This paper describes the issues that are involved in designing and implementing a large‐scale cooperative object database server for a collaborative virtual environment. The focus of the paper is about the way to handle the distributing factors and the communication model among nodes within a collaborative virtual environment. Within the system, all objects are decentralized and scattered among three tiers of object databases. By limiting the knowledge and refining the tasks for each server, the network and processor workload can be reduced. The objective of the system is to provide a virtual environment for distributed computing that is k‐fault tolerant and subject to expansion without the interruption of services. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Business value of B2B electronic commerce: the critical role of inter-firm collaboration

B2B (business-to-business) electronic commerce provides firms with different business value depending on how organizations use the online network. In this paper, we distinguish two different types of B2B e-commerce adoption: basic and collaborative B2B e-commerce. With “basic B2B e-commerce”, firms implement the electronic network simply to automate the exchange of commercial documents. In contrast, B2B networks are used to create new inter-firm operations with channel partners in “collaborative B2B e-commerce.” The central claim of this paper is that firms are unlikely to achieve significant benefits with Basic B2B e-commerce. B2B electronic networks offer dramatic performance improvement only when the B2B network is used to create new collaboration with channel partners. Based on the survey conducted in the grocery industry, this study suggests that the real source of performance improvement in the B2B electronic commerce is not an electronic linkage itself, but the collaboration enabled by the electronic network.     

Integration of manufacturing services into virtual environments over the internet

Virtual reality (VR) is a rapidly developing technology that has a wide spectrum of industrial and commercial applications. Networked (distributed or shared) virtual environments (VE) are of growing interest to modern manufacturing industry; a dominating use of networked virtual manufacturing environments (VMEs) is on-line visualisation and collaborative control of 3D information. This has to be supported by real-time data transfer. To meet a broad range of common requirements for Internet-based VE communications, particularly for virtual manufacturing and collaborative design and control, this paper presents a networked virtual environment system that is designed to support networked virtual design and manufacturing. The system is implemented with manufacturing message specification (MMS) standards so as to integrate a range of manufacturing services into networked VEs over the Internet.     

Designing a semantic bliki system to support different types of knowledge and adaptive learning

Though blogs and wikis have been used to support knowledge management and e-learning, existing blogs and wikis cannot support different types of knowledge and adaptive learning. A case in point, types of knowledge vary greatly in category and viewpoints. Additionally, adaptive learning is crucial to improving one’s learning performance. This study aims to design a semantic bliki system to tackle such issues. To support various types of knowledge, this study has developed a new social software called “bliki” that combines the advantages of blogs and wikis. This bliki system also applies Semantic Web technology to organize an ontology and a variety of knowledge types. To aid adaptive learning, a function called “Book” is provided to enable learners to arrange personalized learning goals and paths. The learning contents and their sequences and difficulty levels can be specified according to learners’ metacognitive knowledge and collaborative activities. An experiment is conducted to evaluate this system and the experimental results show that this system is able to comprehend various types of knowledge and to improve learners’ learning performance.     

基于协同虚拟环境的装配设计系统

针对分布式环境中复杂产品协同开发的装配设计需求,研究基于协同虚拟环境的装配设计系统的体系结构和关键技术,提出分布式条件下支持多用户实时交互操作的协同虚拟装配方法,包括复杂场景高分辨率实时渲染和多通道沉浸输出方案。以此为基础开发分布式协同虚拟装配环境,并通过面向汽车整车的多用户协同虚拟装配实例验证了系统的有效性。结果证明,用户可在该系统中完成复杂产品的协同虚拟装配设计工作。     

基于上下文的分布式协同过滤推荐技术

针对传统协同过滤推荐技术应用于大规模动态数据集时难以兼顾准确度和效率的问题,提出一种基于上下文的分布式协同过滤推荐技术,引入推荐上下文的概念,并在此基础上充分考虑用户的即时兴趣以提高推荐的准确度,采用评分矩阵的分布式存储和计算以提高推荐的效率。实验结果表明,该分布式协同过滤技术能同时保证推荐的准确度和效率,使其在大规模动态数据集上的应用更具优势。     

A study on learning effect among different learning styles in a Web-based lab of science for elementary school students

The purpose of this study is to explore the learning effect related to different learning styles in a Web-based virtual science laboratory for elementary school students. The online virtual lab allows teachers to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) into science lessons. The results of this experimental teaching method demonstrate that: (a) students in the experimental group using the online virtual lab achieved better grades than those in the control group under traditional class instruction, (b) in the experimental group, grade achievements of students having different learning styles were not significantly different from each other leading us to conclude that the Web-based virtual learning environment is suitable for various learning styles, (c) students with the “accommodator” learning style made the most significant achievements in this study, the scores obtained by the experimental group being remarkably better than those in the control group, and (d) up to 75% of the students surveyed indicated that they preferred using the Web-based virtual lab to reading textbooks only. The results of the experimental teaching and the survey show the feasibility and effectiveness of the Web-based learning environment being studied. It encourages further development of the Web-based virtual lab.     

SweetWiki: A semantic wiki

Everyone agrees that user interactions and social networks are among the cornerstones of “Web 2.0”. Web 2.0 applications generally run in a web browser, propose dynamic content with rich user interfaces, offer means to easily add or edit content of the web site they belong to and present social network aspects. Well-known applications that have helped spread Web 2.0 are blogs, wikis, and image/video sharing sites; they have dramatically increased sharing and participation among web users. It is possible to build knowledge using tools that can help analyze users’ behavior behind the scenes: what they do, what they know, what they want. Tools that help share this knowledge across a network, and that can reason on that knowledge, will lead to users who can better use the knowledge available, i.e., to smarter users. Wikipedia, a wildly successful example of web technology, has helped knowledge-sharing between people by letting individuals freely create and modify its content. But Wikipedia is designed for people—today's software cannot understand and reason on Wikipedia's content. In parallel, the “semantic web”, a set of technologies that help knowledge-sharing across the web between different applications, is starting to gain attraction. Researchers have only recently started working on the concept of a “semantic wiki”, mixing the advantages of the wiki and the technologies of the semantic web. In this paper we will present a state-of-the-art of semantic wikis, and we will introduce SweetWiki, an example of an application reconciling two trends of the future web: a semantically augmented web and a web of social applications where every user is an active provider as well as a consumer of information. SweetWiki makes heavy use of semantic web concepts and languages, and demonstrates how the use of such paradigms can improve navigation, search, and usability.     

Finnish high school students’ readiness to adopt online learning: Questioning the assumptions

The Finnish high school system in rural areas is facing challenges because of a decreasing number of the students. This situation places new emphasis on online learning. Online learning offers new possibilities for high schools to provide equal learning opportunities for their students. This paper explores students’ readiness to adapt their studying habits in the networked high schools by outlining their beliefs about online learning. Beliefs are assumed to direct people’s actions, in this case activities concerning studying online. Three hundred second year high school students from Eastern Finland who had not had the experiences of learning online were studied. The findings suggest that students polarize into negative, neutral and positive groups based on their beliefs concerning online learning. Results also indicate that students’ knowledge about the possibilities of online learning is quite superficial. In contrast to theories about collaborative learning practices, students see online learning rather differently. Students with negative and neutral beliefs especially see online learning merely as a static “warehouse” of materials and study-alone learning tasks instead of offering possibilities for collaborative knowledge building.     

Who benefits from virtuality?

For educational software to take advantage of contemporary views of learning, instructional designers need to employ design models that incorporate the variety of ideas that are based on constructivist frameworks for developing learning environments. These environments, if well designed, can support learner construction of knowledge, however, such frameworks are based upon arguments that learners should be placed in authentic environments that incorporate sophisticated representations of context through such constructs as “virtual worlds”. Within these environments the learner is supported by visual metaphors constructed to represent the information structure and how the “world” operates. This paper will discuss the framework employed in the development of several virtual solutions and the process by which they were constructed.