Fahri Yetim

Motivation mechanisms for participation in human-driven semantic content creation

In the last few years, semantic technologies are continuously maturing and many applications are adopted in various field. To take a step towards overcoming the knowledge acquisition bottleneck, the challenge of generating semantic content persists. It usually requires the involvement of humans, thus motivations and incentives mechanisms that might foster human participation in the semantic content creation should be analysed. We review motivation structures of different successful communities (online communities, social web communities, open source software communities), analyse motivation mechanisms for incentivising semantic content creation, and provide some useful insights for the design of semantic annotation tools which would embed incentives mechanisms.

A Deliberation Theory-Based Approach to the Management of Usability Guidelines

Designing interaction entails addressing multiple issues and challenges, ranging from the technical and economic to the legal and ethical. Usability guidelines recommend or prescribe courses of action and thus play a significant role in designing usable systems. This paper argues that approaches to guidelines need to support processes of deliberation and tradeoff and suggests a deliberation theory-informed model for the organization of guidelines. The model integrates concepts from Habermas’ discourse theory and Toulmin’s model of argumentation to categorize and represent guidelines. In addition, the paper presents two explorative studies conducted to understand the representational fit of the suggested categories to the domain of guidelines. The studies specifically consider the characteristics of coverage and encodability and also explore difficult cases. Finally, a brief summary of the usability evaluation results of the prototype that instantiated the proposed model is provided. This paper contributes to research and praxis by providing a theory-based model and a prototype for the management of guidelines.

From Communicative Action Theory to Socio-Technical Artifacts: Presentation of Three System Prototypes

Social issues have become as critical as technical ones for the designers of modern socio-technical systems that enable social interaction of any type such as group discussions, group writing or others. Design science research in the Information Systems (IS) discipline deals with the construction and evaluation of IT artifacts (Simon 1996; Hevner et al. 2004), which have impacts on people and organizations. Hence, design research encompasses socio-technical design, within which design issues are not merely concerned with how to make technology more efficient or how technology affects society, but also with issues such as how social concepts can be integrated in technology design, use and evaluation or how social ideals can enlighten technical design and evaluation. The combination of social and technical knowledge is necessary in order to reduce the socio-technical gap (Ackerman 2002), and for this purpose, social theories can be of practical value. In line with the view that ‘nothing is as practical as a good theory’ (Lewin 1945), we think that theories are practical as they allow knowledge to be accumulated in a systematic manner and this accumulated knowledge illuminates professional practice.