Jesús Lorés

Neptuno: Semantic Web Technologies for a Digital Newspaper Archive

Newspaper archives are a fundamental working tool for editorial teams. Their exploitation in digital format through the web, and the provision of technology to make this possible, are also important businesses today. The volume of archive contents, and the complexity of human teams that create and maintain them, give rise to diverse management difficulties. We propose the introduction of the emergent semantic-based technologies to improve the processes of creation, maintenance, and exploitation of the digital archive of a newspaper. We describe a platform based on these technologies, that consists of a) a knowledge base associated to the newspaper archive, based on an ontology for the description of journalistic information, b) a semantic search module, and c) a module for content browsing and visualisation based on ontologies.

Newspaper Archives on the Semantic Web

The introduction of information technologies in the news industry has marked a new evolutionary cycle in the journalistic activity. The creation of new infrastructures, protocols and exchange standards for the automatic or on-demand distribution and/or sale of information packages through dif-ferent channels and transmission formats has deeply transformed the way in which news industry players communicate with each other. One inter-esting consequence of this technological transformation has been the emergence, in very few years, of a whole new market of online services for archive news redistribution, syndication, aggregation, and brokering. Newspaper archives are a highly valuable information asset for the widest range of information consumer profiles: students, researchers, historians, business professionals, the general public, and not the least, news writers themselves. Providing technology for news archive construction, manage-ment, access, publication, and billing, is an important business nowadays. The information collected from everyday news is huge in volume, very loosely organized, and grows without a global a-priori structure. This ever-growing corpus of archived news results from the coordinated but to much extent autonomous work of a team of reporters, whose primary goal is not to build an archive, but to serve the best possible information product for

Towards a Framework to Develop Plastic User Interfaces

In previous works we have been developing a tourism support prototype that offers a proven solution for aspects of multi-platform, personalization and spatial-awareness. The aim of this paper is to analyze its drawbacks and to propose a framework and the underlying architecture, inspired by the model-based approach, to solve those relying on the principle of abstraction. It consists of a reflexive architecture that allows specifying a generic user interface (UI) independently of the rest of the implementation, fulfilling the plasticity property. Developers only have to focus on modelling the functionality of the application -residing at a base level-, leaving the interface to a meta level, constructing thereby {it interfaces “on the fly”}. The generation of the UI is not carried out until run-time, translating automatically abstract interaction components to concrete ones according to the device, the user’s features and the current context, accordingly reusable in other applications.

Assessing usability problems in Latin-American academic webpages with cognitive walkthroughs and datamining techniques

Qualitative usability evaluation is usually included within the Evaluation Stage in Usability Engineering through a Qualitative Usability Testing process QUT. This QUT process includes the application of methods that have been defined focusing on the evaluation of a particular interactive system, becoming highly expensive when a context of use has to be evaluated (by analyzing a large number of interfaces belonging to that context) in order to detect common usability problems from a qualitative viewpoint. This paper presents the QUTCKDD methodology which incorporate techniques from Knowledge Discovery in Databases, extending the existing QUT process in order to solve the above situation. To illustrate the QUTCKDD methodology, an experimentation related to a particular Latin-American context of use is also discussed.

A hybrid approach for modelling early prototype evaluation under user-centred design through association rules

One of the main activities in User Centred Design (UCD) is prototype evaluation, which is traditionally performed by means of an Evaluation Stage that looks for the redefinition of the prototype requirements, involving quantitative and qualitative usability testing techniques. This paper describes a new approach in which the traditional methodology for performing the Evaluation Stage under UCD is embedded in a framework with capabilities for mining association rules. This allows to minimise the impact of the interpretation bias of the evaluation team when analysing ambiguous user statements in natural language.

User interfaces: a proposal for automatic adaptation

In previous works we have been developing a tourism support prototype that offers a proven solution for aspects of multi-platform, personalisation and spatial-awareness. The aim of this paper is to analyse its drawbacks and limitations, and to propose an architecture that solves these problems relying on the principle of abstraction. It consists of a reflexive architecture based on models, and component-oriented, that allows specifying the user interface independently of the rest of the implementation. Thus, developers only have to focus on modelling the functionality of the application -which resides at a base level-, leaving the interface to a meta level, constructing thereby applications without apparent interface. The generation of the UI is not carried out until run-time, applying an automatic translation from abstract interaction components to concrete ones according to the device and the users features and current state.