Design of trustworthy smartphone-based multimedia services in cultural environments

Smartphone is a dynamic new media that faces high popularity due to its versatile services and the friendliness of its usage. It can be used in many activities of everyday life from e-commerce to e-tourism. In this work, we study smartphone’s secure usability in cultural heritage sites and environments. Our goal is to make a first attempt towards a trustworthy commercial multimedia guiding system targeting cultural sites that will be executed in a set of smartphones. More specifically, we are interested in how the needs of curators and visitors, experts or not, of a cultural heritage site can be facilitated by the provided multimedia guiding services of smartphones employing trustworthy implementations of smartphone services that are controlled by a central server. Furthermore, we make an attempt to propose a simple business model for the commercial exploitation of such services.     

Fluid ontologies for digital museums

With the advent and accessibility of the Internet, artistic and indigenous communities are beginning to realize how digital technologies can be used as a means for documenting and preserving their histories and cultures. However, it is not yet clear what knowledge architectures are most appropriate for creating a digital museum in order to facilitate an effective collection, organization, conservation, and experience of cultural and artistic heritage. In this paper, we discuss the concept of fluid ontologies, a novel, dynamic structure for organizing and browsing knowledge in a digital museum. Fluid ontologies are flexible knowledge structures that evolve and adapt to communities interest based on contextual information articulated by human contributors, curators, and viewers, as well as artificial bots that are able to track interaction histories and infer relationships among knowledge pieces and preferences of viewers. Fluid ontologies allow for a tighter coupling between communities interests and the browsing structure of a digital museum. We present the key ideas behind the use of fluid ontologies within the context of digital museum design and seminal work in metadata/dynamic ontologies, particularly as it pertains to objects of cultural heritage, and discuss these characteristics in three concrete examples: (1) Village Voice, an online agora that ties together the narratives created by a group of Somali refugees using an iteration of community-designed ontologies, (2) Eventspace, a node-based collaborative archive for design activities, and (3) Tribal Peace, an online digital museum still under construction and evaluation that uses proactive agents to tie distributed Kumeyaay, Luiseno, and Cupeno reservations together in their quest to achieve greater political sovereignty .     

Cultural practices in networked classroom learning environments

This paper presents results of a case study conducted in secondary mathematics classrooms using a new generation of networked classroom technology (Participatory Simulations). Potential for drawing on youths’ cultural practices in networked learning environments is explored in terms of opportunities for traditionally underserved students to participate in powerful mathematical discourse and practice. As mediated by the networked technology, the multiple modes of participation and opportunities to contribute to the group’s accomplishment of its task served as important avenues for underserved students to bring to bear resources they develop through participating in everyday practices of their communities. The goal is to provide examples of networked activities’ potential for leveraging cultural practices of marginalized groups through pedagogy that invites youth to draw on linguistic resources and interaction patterns they develop as members of cultural groups.

Canonical processes for creating personalized semantically rich multimedia presentations

Authoring of multimedia content can be considered as composing media assets such as images, videos, text, and audio in time, space, and interaction into a coherent multimedia presentation. Personalization of such content means that it reflects the users’ or user groups’ profile information and context information. Enriching the multimedia content with semantically rich metadata allows for a better search and retrieval of the content. To actually create personalized semantically-rich multimedia content, a manual authoring of the many different documents for all the different users’ and user groups’ needs is not feasible. Rather a (semi-)automatic authoring of the content seems reasonable. We have analyzed in detail today’s approaches and systems for authoring, personalizing, and semantically enriching multimedia presentations. Based on this analysis, we derived a general creation chain for the (semi-)automatic generation of such content. In this paper, we introduce this creation chain. We present our software engineering support for the chain, the component framework SemanticMM4U. The canonical processes supported by the creation chain and SemanticMM4U framework are described in detail. We also provide an explicit mapping of SemanticMM4U framework components to the processes and argue for the benefits of defining canonical processes for creating personalized semantically rich multimedia presentations.     

Evolving General Term-Weighting Schemes for Information Retrieval: Tests on Larger Collections

Term-weighting schemes are vital to the performance of Information Retrieval models that use term frequency characteristics to determine the relevance of a document. The vector space model is one such model in which the weights assigned to the document terms are of crucial importance to the accuracy of the retrieval system. This paper describes a genetic programming framework used to automatically determine term-weighting schemes that achieve a high average precision. These schemes are tested on standard test collections and are shown to perform as well as, and often better than, the modern BM25 weighting scheme. We present an analysis of the schemes evolved to explain the increase in performance. Furthermore, we show that the global (collection wide) part of the evolved weighting schemes also increases average precision over idf on larger TREC data. These global weighting schemes are shown to adhere to Luhn’s resolving power as middle frequency terms are assigned the highest weight. However, the complete weighting schemes evolved on small collections do not perform as well on large collections. We conclude that in order to evolve improved local (within-document) weighting schemes it is necessary to evolve these on large collections     

The MIEL system: Uniform interrogation of structured and weakly-structured imprecise data

We present an information system developed to help assessing the microbiological risk in food. That information system contains experimental results in microbiology, mainly extracted from scientific publications. The increasing amount of the experimental results available and the difficulty to integrate them into a classic relational database schema led us to design a system composed of two distinct subsystems queried through a common interface. The first subsystem is a classic relational database. The second subsystem is a database containing weakly-structured pieces of information expressed in terms of conceptual graphs. The data stored in both bases can be fuzzy ones in order to take into account the specificities of the biological information. The uniform query language used on both relational database and conceptual graph database allows the users to express preferences by using fuzzy sets in their queries. The MIEL system is now operational and used by the microbiologists involved in the Sym’Previus French project.     

Communication gaps in a tender process

Large IT systems are often acquired in a tender process where the customer states the system requirements, a number of suppliers submit their proposals, and the customer selects one of them. Usually the supplier uses an existing system as the basis for his proposal. He adapts it more or less to the customer’s requirements. This paper is a study of a specific tender process. The customer was a Danish municipality that supplied electrical power, water, gas, garbage collection, etc. for around 100,000 households. The customer wanted a new system for meter inspection, invoicing, planning the meter inspector’s routes, etc. We have studied the requirements, how they were perceived by the suppliers, and how they were intended by the customer. The main findings are that the parties didn’t understand each other, although the suppliers sometimes pretended that they did so. One consequence was that the business goals pursued by the customer were not properly achieved. Among the causes of this were an excessively democratic elicitation process and an inadequate use of requirement techniques, particularly use cases. There were also issues that the existing requirement techniques couldn’t deal with, for instance integration with future systems.     

Web-based 3D Reconstruction Service

The use of 3D information in the field of cultural heritage is increasing year by year. From this field comes a large demand for cheaper and more flexible ways of 3D reconstruction. This paper describes a web-based 3D reconstruction service, developed to relieve those needs of the cultural heritage field. This service consists of a pipeline that starts with the user uploading images of an object or scene(s) he wants to reconstruct in 3D. The automatic reconstruction process, running on a server connected to a cluster of computers, computes the camera calibration, as well as dense depth (or range-) maps for the images. This result can be downloaded from an ftp server and visualized with a specific tool running on the user’s PC.     

A multi-region empirical study on the internet presence of global extremist organizations

Extremist organizations are heavily utilizing Internet technologies to increase their abilities to influence the world. Studying those global extremist organizations’ Internet presence would allow us to better understand extremist organizations’ technical sophistication and their propaganda plans. In this work, we explore an integrated approach for collecting and analyzing extremist Internet presence. We employed automatic Web crawling techniques to build a comprehensive international extremist Web collection. We then used a systematic content analysis tool called the Dark Web Attribute System to analyze and compare these extremist organizations’ Internet usage from three perspectives: technical sophistication, content richness, and Web interactivity. By studying 1.7 million multimedia Web documents from around 224 Web sites of extremist organizations, we found that while all extremist organizations covered in this study demonstrate high level of technical sophistication in their Web presence, Middle Eastern extremists are among the most sophisticated groups in both technical sophistication and media richness. US groups are the most active in supporting Internet communications. Our analysis results will help domain experts deepen their understanding on the global extremism movements and make better counter-extremism measures on the Internet.     

Emerging language technologies and the rediscovery of the past: a research agenda

During 2001 and 2002, our Delos/NSF working group explored the possibilities that emerging language technologies open up for teaching, learning, and research in the broad area of cultural heritage. On the one hand, emerging language technologies will profoundly redefine the research and teaching of all those working with cultural heritage languages. At the same time, developers of language technology would also benefit from exploring the needs of new audiences and new collections. While multilingual technologies may ultimately prove the most revolutionary, this report focuses on monolingual technologies such as information extraction, summarization, and other aspects of document understanding. In this paper, we describe some of the audiences affected and technologies to be evaluated and argue for the creation of venues where the application of these technologies to cultural heritage materials can be rigorously evaluated. The potential impact of language technologies for our understanding of the past will emerge over a long period of time and will doubtless include many techniques not covered here. We make no claim to a comprehensive survey. Our goal is to provide enough information to suggest the potential importance of these new technologies.     

非物质文化遗产基于文化创意产业的新思考

赋予非物质文化遗产这一以旧为核心的词新的活力,新的发展与保护方向。文化创意产业是一条捷径。文章认为当代中国的文化产业现状是人们日益增长的精神文化需求。与落后的物质文化产业的矛盾。我们的大环境急需对文化特别是地域特色十足的非物质文化遗产的深开发、新开发,同时文化创意产业越来越被大众重视。它的经济与文化作用被广泛关注。将这两个大的文化概念下来两种不同的形态,结合研究。为研究和发展指明一条新路。     

A web-based e-learning system for increasing study efficiency by stimulating learner’s motivation

Due to the opportunities provided by the Internet, more and more people are taking advantage of distance learning courses and during the last few years enormous research efforts have been dedicated to the development of distance learning systems. So far, many e-learning systems are proposed and used practically. However, in these systems the e-learning completion rate is about 30%. One of the reasons is the low study desire when the learner studies the learning materials. In this research, we propose an interactive Web-based e-learning system. The purpose of our system is to increase the e-learning completion rate by stimulating learner’s motivation. The proposed system has three subsystems: the learning subsystem, learner support subsystem, and teacher support subsystem. The learning subsystem improves the learner’s study desire. The learner support subsystem supports the learner during the study, and the teacher support subsystem supports the teacher to get the learner’s study state. To evaluate the proposed system, we developed several experiments and surveys. By using new features such as: display of learner’s study history, change of interface color, encourage function, ranking function, self-determination of the study materials, and grouping of learners, the proposed system can increase the learning efficiency.

Detecting off-topic pages within TimeMaps in Web archives

Web archives have become a significant repository of our recent history and cultural heritage. Archival integrity and accuracy is a precondition for future cultural research. Currently, there are no quantitative or content-based tools that allow archivists to judge the quality of the Web archive captures. In this paper, we address the problems of detecting when a particular page in a Web archive collection has gone off-topic relative to its first archived copy. We do not delete off-topic pages (they remain part of the collection), but they are flagged as off-topic so they can be excluded for consideration for downstream services, such as collection summarization and thumbnail generation. We propose different methods (cosine similarity, Jaccard similarity, intersection of the 20 most frequent terms, Web-based kernel function, and the change in size using the number of words and content length) to detect when a page has gone off-topic. Those predicted off-topic pages will be presented to the collection’s curator for possible elimination from the collection or cessation of crawling. We created a gold standard data set from three Archive-It collections to evaluate the proposed methods at different thresholds. We found that combining cosine similarity at threshold 0.10 and change in size using word count at threshold ?0.85 performs the best with accuracy = 0.987, \(F_{1}\) score = 0.906, and AUC \(=\) 0.968. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method on several Archive-It collections. The average precision of detecting off-topic pages in the collections is 0.89.     

User-interface design for the Ripoll Monastery exhibition at the National Art Museum of Catalonia

Computer graphics and virtual reality technologies provide powerful tools for visualizing, documenting and disseminating cultural heritage. Virtual inspection tools have been used proficiently to show cultural artifacts either through the web or in museum exhibits. The usability of the user interface has been recognized to play a crucial role in overcoming the typical fearful attitude of the cultural heritage community towards 3D graphics. In this paper we discuss the design of the user interface for the virtual inspection of the impressive entrance of the Ripoll Monastery in Spain. The system was exhibited in the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) and it is now part of the Romanesque exhibition at the MAPFRE foundation. The MNAC is the third most visited art museum in Spain, and features the world's largest collection on Romanesque Art. We analyze the requirements from museum curators and discuss the main interface design decisions. The user interface combines (a) focus-plus-context visualization, with focus (detail view) and context (overview) being shown at separate displays, (b) touch-based camera control techniques, and (c) continuous feedback about the exact location of the detail area within the entrance. The interface allows users to aim the camera at any point of the entrance with centimeter accuracy using a single tap. We provide the results of a user study comparing our user interface with alternative approaches. We also discuss the benefits the exhibition had to the cultural heritage community.     

Enhancing augmented reality with cognitive and knowledge perspectives: a case study in museum exhibitions

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we present our results related to the definition of a methodology that combines augmented reality (AR) with semantic techniques for the creation of digital stories associated with museum exhibitions. In contrast to traditional AR approaches, we augment real-world elements by supplementing contents of a museum exhibition with additional inputs that provide new and different meanings. In this way we augment a cultural resource with respect to both its presentation and meaning. The methodology is framed in the cultural re-mediation theory and is grounded on a set of ontologies aimed at modelling a cultural resource and correlating it with external multimedia objects and resources. To provide an easy tool for the creation of museum narratives, the methodology makes use of a set of recognised practices widely adopted by museum curators that have been formalised through inference rules. The defined methodology has been experimented in a scenario related to Flemish paintings to validate the augmentation of cultural objects with two different approaches, the first basing on similarities and the second on dissimilarities.     

To be or not to B2B: Evaluating managerial choices for e-procurement channel adoption

E-procurement systems are computer systems and communication networks through which firms buy and sell products. We identify two types of e-procurement systems: extranets and e-markets. Extranets connect the buyer and its suppliers with a closed network, while e-markets create open networks for buyer and supplier interactions. The differences between them lie in system implementation costs, marketplace benefits, and the extent of supplier competitive advantage that develops due to information sharing. In this article, we develop a new theoretical model to analyze the adoption of e-procurement systems from the buyer’s perspective, to explore the set of conditions under which the buyer will prefer to procure via an electronic market instead of using proprietary extranet connections. The primary finding is that a buyer will adopt an e-market approach when the supplier’s competitive advantage derived from access to strategic information is modest compared with the marketplace benefits less the channel costs. In addition, we find that the buyer is likely to have a bigger trading network with an e-market than with an extranet in order to capture the greatest available benefits. Overall, this study offers guidelines for managers to design and select e-procurement channels to fit different procurement needs.     

Holistic approach for problem improvement in health education: A human centred basis. A case study on AIDS prevention and control at a Chinese medical school

In order to cope with the changing health needs in the community, an holistic approach on AIDS prevention and control with particular reference to essential quality was introduced at an educational seminar at Hebei Medical University in China, 1996. We have identified three major points in the present study through learning and research process: 1. The importance of cultural norm for the unification of science and technology is identified for the community approach; 2. community care emphasising human quality provides unity in diversity for educational program; and 3. community control emphasising quality assurance demonstrates the effectiveness for program analysis from the viewpoint of human centred systems.     

科技政策库的系统集成与建设

为了满足科技政策研究需要,中国科协设计并实现了一种科技政策库系统.本文首先介绍了科技政策库的总体设计方案、系统工作流程;然后详细介绍了系统组成,整个系统由数据采集子系统、数据清洗子系统、数据分析子系统3个子系统组成.数据采集子系统基于网络爬虫框架Scrapy软件针对大量异构站点设计了可管理的网络爬虫,并基于ABBYY FineReader软件（俄罗斯软件公司ABBYY发行的一款文档识别软件）实现了历史文献OCR识别（Optical Character Recognition,光学字符识别）和入库.数据清洗子系统基于机器学习算法实现了数据去重、非相关数据识别、数据属性缺陷识别等功能.数据分析子系统则对有效入库的科技政策进一步进行了文本分类、关联关系分析、全文检索.从2018年10月上线以来,该系统从226个数据源采集564 749条数据,经过数据清洗之后入库404 083条数据,能够有力地支撑科技政策研究工作.     

An ontological modelling of user requirements for personalised information provision

The knowledge economy offers opportunity to a broad and diverse community of information systems users to efficiently gain information and know-how for improving qualifications and enhancing productivity in the work place. Such demand will continue and users will frequently require optimised and personalised information content. The advancement of information technology and the wide dissemination of information endorse individual users when constructing new knowledge from their experience in the real-world context. However, a design of personalised information provision is challenging because users’ requirements and information provision specifications are complex in their representation. The existing methods are not able to effectively support this analysis process. This paper presents a mechanism which can holistically facilitate customisation of information provision based on individual users’ goals, level of knowledge and cognitive styles preferences. An ontology model with embedded norms represents the domain knowledge of information provision in a specific context where users’ needs can be articulated and represented in a user profile. These formal requirements can then be transformed onto information provision specifications which are used to discover suitable information content from repositories and pedagogically organise the selected content to meet the users’ needs. The method is provided with adaptability which enables an appropriate response to changes in users’ requirements during the process of acquiring knowledge and skills.     

The effects of transparency on trust in and acceptance of a content-based art recommender

The increasing availability of (digital) cultural heritage artefacts offers great potential for increased access to art content, but also necessitates tools to help users deal with such abundance of information. User-adaptive art recommender systems aim to present their users with art content tailored to their interests. These systems try to adapt to the user based on feedback from the user on which artworks he or she finds interesting. Users need to be able to depend on the system to competently adapt to their feedback and find the artworks that are most interesting to them. This paper investigates the influence of transparency on user trust in and acceptance of content-based recommender systems. A between-subject experiment (N = 60) evaluated interaction with three versions of a content-based art recommender in the cultural heritage domain. This recommender system provides users with artworks that are of interest to them, based on their ratings of other artworks. Version 1 was not transparent, version 2 explained to the user why a recommendation had been made and version 3 showed a rating of how certain the system was that a recommendation would be of interest to the user. Results show that explaining to the user why a recommendation was made increased acceptance of the recommendations. Trust in the system itself was not improved by transparency. Showing how certain the system was of a recommendation did not influence trust and acceptance. A number of guidelines for design of recommender systems in the cultural heritage domain have been derived from the study’s results.