Bernard Horan

Supporting flexible roles in a shared space

People in a group play various roles. Manager, intern, department chair, guest speaker, the woman who knows how the fax machine works, the guy who got the pizza, the person speaking now, the person capturing this on the whiteboard; roles can be formal or informal, long-lived or ephemeral. They can be bestowed by ceremony, or assumed with the invisibility of the taken-for-granted. But it is the interaction of minds that creates and sustains a role: a role is a human construct. Even roles like “mother” or “father”, which would seem to demand certain biological characteristics, cannot be defined at any depth without appeal to social convention. The largely hands-off approach taken by nature seems to work fairly well for groups of humans: when there is confusion or concern about who is playing what role, it is generally good for a group to work it out as a social issue. If roles were encoded solely in human biology or in physical law, life might be simpler but certainly more stulfiying.

Using Ontologies and Vocabularies for Dynamic Linking

Ontology-based linking offers a solution to some of the problems with static, restricted, and inflexible traditional Web linking. Conceptual hypermedia provides navigation between Web resources, supported by a conceptual model, in which an ontologys definitions and structure, together with the lexical labels, drive the consistency of link provision and the linkings dynamic aspects. Lightweight standard representations make it possible to use existing vocabularies to support Web navigation and browsing. In this way, the navigation and linking of diverse resources (including those not in our control) based on a community understanding of the domain can be consistently managed.

User centered development of a general practice medical workstation: the PEN&PAD experience

The goal of the PEN&PAD project is to design and develop a useful and usable medical workstation for day–to–day use in patient care. The project has adopted a user centred approach and direct observations of doctors, participative design and Formative Evaluation have therefore been an integral part of the process of software development. Indeed, doctors have been involved from the earliest stages of the project. The project has focussed on British General Practitioners, but the methods which have been evolved are general. This paper describes the strategy by which doctors can be involved in the successful design and development of a medical workstation.

Programming the world with sun SPOTs

We describe the Sun1 Small Programmable Object Technology, or Sun SPOT. The Sun SPOT is a small wireless computing platform that runs Java1 directly, with no operating system. The system comes with an on-board set of sensors, and I/O pins for easy connection to external devices, and supporting software.

Dynamic Linking of Web Resources: Customisation and Personalisation

Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service (COHSE) provides a framework that integrates a knowledge service and the open hypermedia link service to dynamically link Web documents via knowledge resources (e.g., ontologies or controlled vocabularies). The Web can be considered as a closed hypermedia system — Links on the Web are unidirectional, embedded, difficult to author and maintain. With a Semantic Web architecture COHSE addresses these limitations by dynamically creating, multi-headed links on third party documents by integrating third party knowledge resources and third party services. Therefore open-ness is a key aspect of COHSE. This chapter first presents how COHSE architecture is reengineered to support customisation and to create an adaptable open hypermedia system where the user explicitly provides information about himself. It then presents how this architecture is deployed in a portal and discusses how this portal architecture can be extended to turn COHSE from an adaptable system to an adaptive system where system implicitly infers some information about the user.

Knowledge-driven hyperlinks: linking in the wild

Since Ted Nelson coined the term “Hypertext”, there has been extensive research on non-linear documents. With the enormous success of the Web, non-linear documents have become an important part of our daily life activities. However, the underlying hypertext infrastructure of the Web still lacks many features that Hypertext pioneers envisioned. With advances in the Semantic Web, we can address and improve some of these limitations. In this paper, we discuss some of these limitations, developments in Semantic Web technologies and present a system – COHSE – that dynamically links Web pages. We conclude with remarks on future directions for semantics-based linking.

Object-oriented models in user interface design

Objects have been used as the informal basis for the conceptual design of interactive systems for at least a decade. Given recent advances in the development of object-oriented modeling languages and methodologies, it is now timely to re-evaluate the role of object-modeling during the process of user interface design.

+SPACES: Serious Games for Role-Playing Government Policies

This chapter explores how role-play simulations in virtual worlds can be used to support policy discussion and refinement. Although the work described is set primarily within the context of policy formulation for government, the lessons learnt are applicable to online learning and collaboration within virtual environments. The chapter focuses on the most challenging part of the project, which is to provide environments that can simulate some of the complexities of the physical world. Some examples of different approaches to simulation in virtual spaces are provided and the issues associated with them are further examined. We conclude that the use of role-play simulations seem to offer the most benefits in terms of providing a generalizable framework for citizens to engage with real issues arising from future policy decisions.

Personalised Dynamic Links on theWeb

Links on theWeb are unidirectional, embedded, difficult to author and maintain. With a Semantic Web architecture, COHSE (Conceptual Open Hypermedia System) aims to address these limitations by dynamically creating links on the Web. Here we present how this architecture is extended and modified to support customisation and create an adaptable open system by using third party ontologies and services to discover resources on the Web. We then present the deployment of this in a portal and discuss possible extensions to create an adaptive system to dynamically create personalised links.