Elin K. Jacob

The everyday world of work: two approaches to the investigation of classification in context

One major aspect of T.D. Wilson’s research has been his insistence on situating the investigation of information behaviour within the context of its occurrence O within the everyday world of work. The significance of this approach is reviewed in light of the notion of embodied cognition that characterises the evolving theoretical episteme in cognitive science research. Embodied cognition employs complex external props such as stigmergic structures and cognitive scaffoldings to reduce the cognitive burden on the individual and to augment human problem‐solving activities. The cognitive function of the classification scheme is described as exemplifying both stigmergic structures and cognitive scaffoldings. Two different but complementary approaches to the investigation of situated cognition are presented: cognition‐as‐scaffolding and cognition‐as‐infrastructure. Classification‐as‐scaffolding views the classification scheme as a knowledge storage device supporting and promoting cognitive economy. Classification‐as‐infrastructure views the classification system as a social convention that, when integrated with technological structures and organisational practices, supports knowledge management work. Both approaches are shown to build upon and extend Wilson’s contention that research is most productive when it attends to the social and organisational contexts of cognitive activity by focusing on the everyday world of work.

A usability assessment of online indexing structures in the networked environment

Usability of Web sites has become an increasingly important area of research as Web sites proliferate and problems with use are noted. Generally, aspects of Web sites that have been investigated focus on such areas as overall design and navigation. The exploratory study reported on here investigates one specific component of a Web site—the index structure. By employing index usability metrics developed by Liddy and Jorgensen (1993; Jorgensen & Liddy, 1996) and modified to accommodate a hypertext environment, the study compared the effectiveness and efficiency of 20 subjects who used one existing index (the A–Z index on the FedStats Web site at http://www.fedstats.gov) and three experimental variants to complete five researcher‐generated tasks. User satisfaction with the indexes was also evaluated. The findings indicate that a hypertext index with multiple access points for each concept, all linked to the same resource, led to greater effectiveness and efficiency of retrieval on almost all measures. Satisfaction measures were more variable. The study offers insight into potential improvements in the design of Web‐based indexes and provides preliminary assessment of the validity of the measures employed.

Overlaying communities and topics: an analysis on publication networks

Two layers of enriched information are constructed for communities: a paper-to-paper network based on shared author relations and a paper-to-paper network based on shared word relations. k-means and VOSviewer, a modularity-based clustering technique, are used to identify publication clusters in the two networks. Results show that a few research topics such as webometrics, bibliometric laws, and language processing, form their own research community; while other research topics contain different research communities, which may be caused by physical distance.

A logging scheme for comparative digital library evaluation

Evaluation of digital libraries assesses their effectiveness, quality and overall impact. To facilitate the comparison of different evaluations and to support the re-use of evaluation data, we are proposing a new logging schema. This schema will allow for logging and sharing of a wide array of data about users, systems and their interactions. We discuss the multi-level logging framework presented in [19] and describe how the community can add to and gain from using the framework. The main focus of this paper is the logging of events within digital libraries on a generalised, conceptual level, as well as the services based on it. These services will allow diverse digital libraries to store their log data in a common repository using a common format. In addition they provide means for analysis and comparison of search history data.

Profiling Social Networks: A Social Tagging Perspective

The web is rapidly becoming both more open and more social through the provision of technologies that make it easier for end users to access resources and join in social networks. Social networks have pioneered online communities, allowing users to contribute to collective knowledge by tagging online resources. Tagging behavior increased dramatically between 2005 and 2007. This paper reports on an investigation of social tagging using data gathered from Delicious, Flickr and YouTube for the years 2005, 2006 and 2007. Preliminary findings indicate both that it is possible to profile a social network through the analysis of tagging data and that Delicious is a more representative venue for analyzing the social tagging behavior of users than either Flickr or YouTube.

An experimental framework for comparative digital library evaluation: the logging scheme

Evaluation of digital libraries assesses their effectiveness, quality and overall impact. In this paper we present a novel, multi-level logging framework that will provide complete coverage of the different aspects of DL usage for user-system interactions. Based on this framework, we can analyse for various DL stakeholders the logging data according to their specific interests. In addition, analysis tools and a freely accessible log data repository will yield synergies and sustainability in DL evaluation and encourage a community for DL evaluation by providing for discussion on a common ground

Community: issues, definitions, and operationalization on the web

This paper addresses the concepts of community and online community and discusses the physical, functional, and symbolic characteristics of a community that have formed the basis for traditional definitions. It applies a four-dimensional perspective of space and place (i.e., shape, structure, context, and experience) as a framework for refining the definition of traditional offline communities and for developing a definition of online communities that can be effectively operationalized. The methods and quantitative measures of social network analysis are proposed as appropriate tools for investigating the nature and function of communities because they can be used to quantify the typically subjective social phenomena generally associated with communities.

Applying FRBR model as a conceptual model in development of metadata for digitized thai palm leaf manuscripts

This paper outlines the adaptation of IFLAs Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) for development of a metadata scheme to represent palm leaf manuscripts (PLMs) and facilitate their retrieval in digital collections. The FRBR model uses a structured, four-level hierarchy to represent an intellectual work with multiple titles, editions or formats. Because FRBR focuses on representation of the conceptual work rather than the physical entity, it must be modified for representation of PLMs. In this modified model, the level of work applies to the physical PLM rather than its conceptual content; expression applies to the languages in which the PLM occurs; manifestation applies to the formats in which each expression is available; and item applies to individual copies of a single format. The modified model has been used to devise a metadata scheme where each level has its own set of elements.

A hybrid approach to faceted classification based on analysis of descriptor suffixes

This study explores the construction of a faceted vocabulary that can be used as a mechanism for organizing Webbased resources. After analyzing the manual process of faceted vocabulary construction using existing organizational structures to identify heuristics for automating the construction process, we modeled a hybrid, semi-automatic approach to facet generation that integrates the strengths of manual and automatic methods. This approach is based on the organization of terms according to the meanings of their suffixes. Although this heuristic could not usefully organize the majority of terms of the lexicon bases to which it was applied, it nevertheless shows promise as a component of hybrid classification.

Topic Level Disambiguation for Weak Queries

Despite limited success, today’s information retrieval (IR) systems are not intelligent or reliable. IR systems return poor search results when users formulate their information needs into incomplete or ambiguous queries (i.e., weak queries). Therefore, one of the main challenges in modern IR research is to provide consistent results across all queries by improving the performance on weak queries. However, existing IR approaches such as query expan sion are not overly effective because they make little effort to analyze and exploit the meanings of the queries. Furthermore, word sense disambiguation approaches, which rely on textual context, are ineffective against weak queries that are typically short. Motivated by the demand for a robust IR system that can consistently provide highly accurate results, the proposed study implemented a novel topic detection that leveraged both the lan guage model and structural knowledge of Wikipedia and systematically evaluated the effect of query disam biguation and topic-based retrieval approaches on TREC collections. The results not only confirm the effective ness of the proposed topic detection and topic-based retrieval approaches but also demonstrate that query dis ambiguation does not improve IR as expected.