Finding Information on a Menu: Linking Menu Organization to the User's Goals

Design paradigms often ignore the diverse goals users bring to the computer interface. Any human-computer interaction can be viewed as a marriage of two systems: The user begins the interaction by formulating an information goal, and the computer software meets that goal with a sometimes complex list of potential topic areas. The user then accesses that topic list through the computer interface. Part of the act of accessing the topic list is selecting a potential topic, and this action is often supported by a menu interface. Although research is pervasive on how best to organize menu items to facilitate learning, search speed, and reduced selection errors, little has been done to examine the impact of different types of user goals or cues on a menu's effectiveness. In a study using three distinct cues-direct match, synonym, and iconic - and two menu organizations - alphabetical and functional-data suggest that (a) the functional menu is more effective than the alphabetical menu for the synonym and iconic cues, (b) learning occurs with both menu designs (i.e., selection speed increases rapidly across the five trial blocks), and (c) users make fewer errors with the functionally organized menu. The results, in general, encourage more rigorous investigation of the interaction between the tasks users bring to menu interfaces and the optimal design of those menus.     

A study on development of cognitive support features in recent ontology visualization tools

Ontologies are currently emerging as representation techniques for overlapping compatibility context domains. The continuing need for more effective information retrieval has lead to the creation of the notions of the semantic web and personalized information management. Subsequently, the need for effective ontology visualization for design, management and browsing has arisen. Several ontology visualization tools have come out to strengthen the users’ cognitive support. The primary goal of this paper is to present a survey on recently implemented ontology visualization tools and their contributions in the enrichment of users’ cognitive support. This work also presents the preliminary results of an evaluation of three visualization tools to determine the suitability of each method for end user applications where ontologies are used as browsing aids.     

The impacts of banner location,banner content and navigation style on banner recognition

This study is an attempt to examine factors that might impact banner recognition. These factors include banner location, banner content and navigation style. Via an experimental design conducted on a sample of 90 students, we manipulate these factors over several levels. Our key finding is that banner recognition is affected by the interaction of banner content and navigation style. In particular, as far as aimless browsing participants were concerned, they recognized the banner ad with a URL address significantly better than the one with some service information as well as the URL address. However, for goal-directed search participants, there was no significant difference among the three banner content types. The results also indicated that goal-directed search participants had higher recognition scores than aimless browsing subjects only when the banner ad with some service information and URL address was used. Managerial implications of these results are discussed and future research avenues are proposed.     

Towards a contingency approach with whitelist- and blacklist-based anti-phishing applications: what do usability tests indicate?

In web browsers, a variety of anti-phishing tools and technologies are available to assist users to identify phishing attempts and potentially harmful pages. Such anti-phishing tools and technologies provide Internet users with essential information, such as warnings of spoofed pages. To determine how well users are able to recognise and identify phishing web pages with anti-phishing tools, we designed and conducted usability tests for two types of phishing-detection applications: blacklist-based and whitelist-based anti-phishing toolbars. The research results mainly indicate no significant performance differences between the application types. We also observed that, in many web browsing cases, a significant amount of useful and practical information for users is absent, such as information explaining professional web page security certificates. Such certificates are crucial in ensuring user privacy and protection. We also found other deficiencies in web identities in web pages and web browsers that present challenges to the design of anti-phishing toolbars. These challenges will require more professional, illustrative, instructional, and reliable information for users to facilitate user verification of the authenticity of web pages and their content.     

Personalized recommendation of popular blog articles for mobile applications

Weblogs have emerged as a new communication and publication medium on the Internet for diffusing the latest useful information. Providing value-added mobile services, such as blog articles, is increasingly important to attract mobile users to mobile commerce, in order to benefit from the proliferation and convenience of using mobile devices to receive information any time and anywhere. However, there are a tremendous number of blog articles, and mobile users generally have difficulty in browsing weblogs owing to the limitations of mobile devices. Accordingly, providing mobile users with blog articles that suit their particular interests is an important issue. Very little research, however, has focused on this issue.In this work, we propose a novel Customized Content Service on a mobile device (m-CCS) to filter and push blog articles to mobile users. The m-CCS includes a novel forecasting approach to predict the latest popular blog topics based on the trend of time-sensitive popularity of weblogs. Mobile users may, however, have different interests regarding the latest popular blog topics. Thus, the m-CCS further analyzes the mobile users’ browsing logs to determine their interests, which are then combined with the latest popular blog topics to derive their preferred blog topics and articles. A novel hybrid approach is proposed to recommend blog articles by integrating personalized popularity of topic clusters, item-based collaborative filtering (CF) and attention degree (click times) of blog articles. The experiment result demonstrates that the m-CCS system can effectively recommend mobile users’ desired blog articles with respect to both popularity and personal interests.     

MIDS: a framework for information organization and discovery

The MITRE Information Discovery System (MIDS) is a baseline system for integrating advanced processing tools for information discovery and retrieval in large-scale distributed environments. The system is built on a modular, extendible architecture that allows for system-level decoupling and allocation of component processing tools across network nodes to provide for efficient processing in distributed environments. At one level, the system provides for multi-platform user access to HTTP, Gopher, FTP, and news servers using an HTML based client interface. However, more significantly, the system provides advanced tools for metadata generation from disparate network objects, and a content routing mediation layer for classification of metadata into appropriate information brokers. This bottom-up layered information organization approach supports a wide range of information retrieval and browsing strategies.     

An adaptive website system to improve efficiency with web mining techniques

The paper proposes an adaptive web system—that is, a website that is capable of changing its original design to fit user requirements. For the purpose of improving shortcomings of the website, and also to make it much easier for users to access information, the system analyzes user browsing patterns from their access records. This paper concentrates on the operating-efficiency of a website—that is, the efficiency with which a group of users browse a website. By achieving high efficiency, users spend less operating cost to accomplish a desired user goal. Based on user access data, we analyze each user's operating activities as well as their browsing sequences. With this data, we can calculate a measure of the efficiency of the user's browsing sequences. The paper develops an algorithm to accurately calculate this efficiency and to suggest how to increase the efficiency of user operations. This can be achieved in two ways: (i) by adding a new link between two web pages, or (ii) by suggesting to designers to reconsider existing inefficient links so as to allow users to arrive at their target pages more quickly. Using this algorithm, we develop a prototype to prove the concept of efficiency. The implementation is an adaptive website system to automatically change the website architecture according to user browsing activities and to improve website usability from the viewpoint of efficiency.     

Dynamic content-page identification for media-rich websites

Knowledge of the information goal of users is critical in website design, analyzing the efficacy of such designs, and in ensuring effective user-access to desired information. Determining the information goal is complex due to the subjective and latent nature of user information needs. This challenge is further exacerbated in media-rich websites since the semantics of media-based information is context-based and emergent. A critical step in determining information goals lies in the identification of content pages. These are the pages which contain the information the user seeks. We propose a method to automatically determine the content pages by taking into account the organization of the web site, the media-based information content, as well as the influence of a specific user browsing pattern. Given a specific browsing pattern, in our method, putative content pages are identified as the pages corresponding to the local minima of page-content entropy values. For an (unknown) user information goal this intuitively corresponds to modeling the progressive transition of the user from pages with generic information to those with specific information. Experimental investigations on media rich sites demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique and underline its potential in modeling user information needs and actions in a media-rich web.     

Calling Out Fake News on Social Media: A Comparison of Literature in Librarianship and Journalism

This study compared 475 scholarly journal articles in librarianship and journalism on social media published between 2006 and early 2017. Though articles from these two information professions are mostly positive on social media, various journalism articles pointed out the information credibility issue on social media while no librarianship article did that. With fake news being a major issue in the information business since the 2016?US election, librarians should do more in calling out fake news on social media in their publications as well as in information literacy classrooms.     

网站数据相关内容提取功能的设计与研究

本文根据内容提取的相关知识,以及它们在用户浏览信息时的应用,提出了内容匹配的高效算法,重点研究提取信息时如何提高匹配精度。通过这种算法,系统预测用户可能感兴趣的文章,并按感兴趣的程度向用户提供内容导航,得到一个个性化的相关信息显示页面。     

DIV+CSS在实现导航下拉子菜单效果中的应用

Navigation drop-down menu is a common effect in browsing web pages, and it is an important content in the frontend development of WEB. Using DIV + CSS, we can make navigation drop-down menu with rich effect. In this paper, DIV is used for navigation layout. The drop-down menu of horizontal navigation consists of UL unordered list and CSS. In the process of realizing the effect of navigation drop-down submenu, the method of setting the CSS style of each page element is given, and the specific application method of each CSS style attribute is analyzed.     

Feature set and architecture of a multimedia news system over an ATM network

In this paper we discuss a multimedia news system that we have developed in the Multimedia Information Research Laboratory at the University of Ottawa and beyond. We focus on the feature set—that is, the tools and facilities associated with the system. We explain the functionality of each and give some real examples of the system in action. We then outline the architecture—the system consists of a production server for document authoring, a conferencing system for collaborative news article creation, a content database for authors, a hypernews database for hypermedia news documents, a news database server with aging and archiving, and user sites. The goal was to have all components of the system communicating on OCRInet—an R&D ATM network in the Ottawa region. We then introduce the challenges of representing and browsing large video objects and to this end we introduce a novel solution that we call video-tiles. This video tool is an effective way to browse large news videos that are frequently connected with our multimedia news articles.     

Browsers to support awareness and social interaction

Information sharing and social interaction are the Web's main features that have enabled online communities to abound and flourish. However, the Web is lacking cues and browsing mechanisms for the online social spaces. The challenge of creating social browsing tools to access such social information and patterns is of interest as a visual analytic problem for two reasons. Browsers that combine social visualizations and tools let newcomers and visitors explore information and patterns. Here we present social browsers for two Web communities. In addition to the novel visualizations and representation of two facets of a group's identity, our work has three other notable contributions.     

基于BBS热点主题发现的文本聚类方法

针对电子公告板(BBS)帖子浏览机制不完善和主题发现效率不高的问题,提出一种基于BBS热点主题发现的文本聚类方法。将含有关键词的文档向量相加,经权重处理后计算其两两距离,合并最小的2类,并逐次进行,使最终类的大小比较均匀,以分等级的菜单方式组织帖子便于逐层浏览。实验结果表明,该方法比常规方法更适用于BBS主题浏览。     

Refinery: Visual Exploration of Large,Heterogeneous Networks through Associative Browsing

Browsing is a fundamental aspect of exploratory information‐seeking. Associative browsing represents a common and intuitive set of exploratory strategies in which users step iteratively from familiar to novel bits of information. In this paper, we examine associative browsing as a strategy for bottom‐up exploration of large, heterogeneous networks. We present Refinery, an interactive visualization system informed by guidelines for associative browsing drawn from literature on exploratory information‐seeking. These guidelines motivate Refinery's query model, which allows users to simply and expressively construct queries using heterogeneous sets of nodes. This system computes degree‐of‐interest scores for associated content using a fast, random‐walk algorithm. Refinery visualizes query nodes within a subgraph of results, providing explanatory context, facilitating serendipitous discovery, and stimulating continued exploration. A study of 12 academic researchers using Refinery to browse publication data demonstrates how the system enables discovery of valuable new content, even within existing areas of expertise.     

Confirmation Bias in Online Searches: Impacts of Selective Exposure Before an Election on Political Attitude Strength and Shifts

Impacts of Internet use on political information seeking and subsequent processes have been subject to much debate. A 2‐session online field study presented online search results on political topics to examine selective exposure and its attitudinal impacts. Session 1 captured attitudes, including their accessibility. Session 2 tracked what online search results participants selected and how long they read them; participants then reported attitudes again. The study represented a 4x8x2x2 within‐subjects design: 4 topics, 8 browsing intervals each, with articles presenting opposing stances, with low versus high source credibility. Attitude‐consistent messages and messages from high‐credibility sources were preferred. Exposure to attitude‐consistent search results increased attitude accessibility and reinforced attitudes, whereas exposure to attitude‐discrepant content had opposite effects, regardless of messages' source credibility.     

Direct content access and extraction from JPEG compressed images

In this paper, we propose a novel design of content access and extraction algorithm for compressed image browsing and indexing, which is critical for all visual information systems. By analyzing the relationship between DCT coefficients of one block of 8×8 pixels and its four sub-blocks of 4×4 pixels, the proposed algorithm extract an approximated image with smaller size for indexing and content browsing without incurring full decompression. While the computing cost is significantly lower than full decompression, the approximated image also reserves the content features, which are sufficient for indexing and browsing as evidenced by our extensive experiments.     

SOFTLIB — a documentation management system

This paper describes a software sysem (SOFTLIB) that has been developed to assist in the management of software documentation generated during systems development projects. It provides facilities to manage large numbers of documents, to file documents when they are complete and to issue them to system developers and maintainers. It also includes an information retrieval facility that allows programming staff to find documents, to examine their contents before issue and to assess the state of the software project documentation. SOFTLIB is explicitly intended to help manage the documentation generated during software development — it is not designed for use by end-users of that software or for managing end-user documentation. The novel characteristic of this system is the approach that is taken to the consistency and completeness of documentation. The documentation associated with a software system is organized in such a way that it may be detected if document sets are complete (that is, if all documentation which should be provided for a software component is available) and if document sets are likely to be inconsistent. This means that if a document has been changed without a comparable change being made to other associated documents, this is detectable by the librarian system. In addition, a subsidiary aim of our work was to investigate the utility of menu systems to complex software tools by building a user interface to SOFTLIB. We conclude that menu systems are far from ideal in such situations because of the range of possible options which must be handled by the system.