David C. DeRoure

The ambient wood journals: replaying the experience

The Ambient Wood project aims to facilitate a learning experience using an adaptive infrastructure in an outdoor environment. This involves sensor technology, virtual world orchestration, and a wide range of devices ranging from hand-held computers to speakers hidden in trees.Whilst performing user trials of the Wood, the activities of children participating in the experiments were recorded in detailed log files. An aim of the project has been to replay these log files using adaptive hypermedia techniques to enable the children to further reflect on their experience back in the classroom environment.

MEMOIR — an open framework for enhanced navigation of distributed information

In large companies, whose business is critically dependent on the eAectiveness of their R&D function, the provision of eAective means to access and share all forms of technical information is an acute problem. It is often easier to repeat an activity than it is to determine whether work has been carried out before. In this paper we present experiences in implementing and evaluating the MEMOIR system. MEMOIR is an open framework, i.e., it is extensible and adaptable to an organization’s infrastructure and applications, and it provides its user interface via standard Web browsers. It uses trails, open hypermedia link services and a set of software agents to assist users in accessing and navigating vast amounts of information in Intranet environments. Additionally, MEMOIR exploits trail data to support users in finding colleagues with similar interests. The MEMOIR system has been installed and evaluated by two end-user organizations. This paper describes the results obtained in this evaluation. 7 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Microcosm Link Service and its Application to the World Wide Web

For some time now, designers of hypermedia systems have recognised the need to move away from closed systems to open environments which separate the link structure from the data in the system, and enable separate link and data processing. The main motivations behind this development are the need to reduce authoring effort in large-scale hypermedia applications and to make them more easily modifiable, customisable and extensible. Microcosm is one such open hypermedia system which has been developed at the University of Southampton. At the heart of Microcosm is the Link Service, which allows links maintained by the system to be applied to information native to third-party applications in the host environment. This paper describes the Microcosm system and discusses the benefits of combining its link service capabilities with the WWW distributed technology.

An open architecture for supporting collaboration on the Web

The MEMOIR framework supports researchers working with a vast quantity of distributed information, by assisting them in finding both relevant documents and researchers with related interests. It is an open architecture based on the existing Web infrastructure. Key to the architecture are the use of proxies and the use of an open and extensible message protocol for communication: to support message routing for dynamic reconfiguration and extension of the system, to collect information about the trail of documents that a user visits, and to insert links on-the-fly. We present the MEMOIR architecture and its rationale, and discuss early experiences with the system.

An open framework for collaborative distributed information management

The MEMOIR project supports researchers working with a vast quantity of distributed information, by assisting them in finding both relevant documents and researchers with related interests. It is an open architecture based on the existing Web infrastructure. Key to the architecture is the use of proxies: to support message routing for dynamic reconfiguration and extension of the system, to collect information about the trail of documents that a user visits, and to insert links on-the-fly. In this paper we present the MEMOIR framework and its rationale, and discuss early experiences with the system.

Exact tests for two-way symmetriccontingency tables

A two-way contingency table in which both variables have the same categories is termed a symmetric table. In many applications, because of the social processes involved, most of the observations lie on the main diagonal and the off-diagonal counts are small. For these tables, the model of independence is implausible and interest is then focussed on the off-diagonal cells and the models of quasi-independence and quasi-symmetry. For ordinal variables, a linear-by-linear association model can be used to model the interaction structure. For sparse tables, large-sample goodness-of-fit tests are often unreliable and one should use an exact test. In this paper, we review exact tests and the computing problems involved. We propose new recursive algorithms for exact goodness-of-fit tests of quasi-independence, quasi-symmetry, linear-by-linear association and some related models. We propose that all computations be carried out using symbolic computation and rational arithmetic in order to calculate the exact p-values accurately and describe how we implemented our proposals. Two examples are presented.