Manolis Tzagarakis

Hypermedia: Openness, Structural Awareness, and Adaptivity

The task of information integration challenges software engineers on a daily basis. Software artifacts, produced during software development, contain many implicit and explicit relationships whose sheer numbers quickly overwhelm a software team’s ability to understand, manipulate, and evolve them. We are developing an information integration environment to aid software engineers in tackling this difficult task and are making use of open hypermedia techniques to enable critical characteristics of the environment, such as third-party tool integration, typed links, and a partitioned information space through the use of contexts, traditionally referred to as composites. We describe our prototype implementation of the information integration environment, focusing on how open hypermedia has either influenced the design of the environment, or contributed directly to its functional capabilities.

Tackling Cognitively-Complex Collaboration with CoPe_it!

CoPe_it! is an innovative Web-based tool that complies with collaborative practices to provide members of communities with the appropriate means to manage individual and collective knowledge during a sense-making and/or decision-making session. In this article, we demonstrate its applicability in tackling cognitively-complex collaboration settings, which are characterized by big volumes of interrelated data obtained from diverse sources and knowledge expressed by diverse participants. We focus on issues related to the representation of such settings and propose an approach to make it easier for participants to follow the evolution of collaboration, comprehend it in its entirety, and meaningfully aggregate data to resolve the issue under consideration.

Naming as a fundamental concept of open hypermedia systems

Names play a key role in distributed hypertext systems, for two main reasons: Firstly, because accessing and managing system services require finding and locating the relevant components. Secondly, because managing structures between hypertext resources, such as nodes, anchors and links, requires that these resources are named and addressed. We argue that naming services are endemic to hypertext systems and therefore, form a core part of any hypertext system’s infrastructure. In particular, the current move towards interoperable component-based Open Hypermedia Systems (CB-OHS) demonstrates the need for naming components.

Offering open hypermedia services to the WWW: a step-by-step approach for developers

Hypermedia systems and more specifically open hypermedia systems (OHS) provide a rich set of implementations of different hypertext flavors such as navigational hypertext, spatial hypertext or taxonomic hypertext. Additionally, these systems offer component-based modular architectures and address interoperability between hypertext domains. Despite multiple efforts of integrating Web clients, a widespread adoption of OHS technology by Web developers has not taken place. In this paper it is argued that Web Services - which offer a component model for Web applications - can be integrated in OHSs. An architectural integration is proposed, a step-by-step process is outlined and an example of integration is provided. This very approach is aimed to benefit both worlds: the Web community with new rich hypermedia functionality that extends the current navigational hypermedia, and the OHS community by opening its tools and platforms to the many developer groups of the Web community.

The Callimachus approach to distributed hypermedia

We present the issues and design of the naming architecture of Callitnachus an open distributed hypermedia system.

Web-Based Collaboration and Decision Making Support: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach

Arguing that a varying level of formality needs to be offered in systems supporting argumentative collaboration, this article proposes an incremental formalization approach that has been adopted in the development of CoPe_it!, a Web-based tool that complies with collaborative principles and practices, and provides members of communities engaged in argumentative discussions and decision making processes with the appropriate means to collaborate towards the solution of diverse issues. According to the proposed approach, incremental formalization can be achieved through the consideration of alternative projections of a collaborative workspace.

Supporting incremental formalization in collaborative learning environments

Arguing that a varying level of formality needs to be offered in systems supporting collaborative learning, this paper proposes an incremental formalization approach that has been adopted in the development of CoPe_it!, a web-based tool that complies with collaborative principles and practices to provide members of communities with the appropriate means to manage individual and collective knowledge, and collaborate towards the solution of diverse issues. According to the proposed approach, incremental formalization can be achieved through the consideration of alternative projections of a collaborative workspace, as well as through mechanisms supporting the switching from one projection to another. Related features and functionalities are presented through an illustrative example.

Use of a Morphosyntactic Lexicon as the Basis for the Implementation of the Greek Wordnet

Greek WordNet is a project aiming at developing a database of wordnets for the Greek language, structured along the same lines as the Euro WordNet project. This contribution presents the morphosyntactic lexicon, which will be used as the basis for the development of the whole project. This lexicon was developed within the framework of a spelling correction system. Later on, it was enhanced by adding syntactic information for each lemma and by using a relational database for the storage and management of the data.

Collaborative Mining and Interpretation of Large-Scale Data for Biomedical Research Insights

Biomedical research becomes increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature. Researchers need to efficiently and effectively collaborate and make decisions by meaningfully assembling, mining and analyzing available large-scale volumes of complex multi-faceted data residing in different sources. In line with related research directives revealing that, in spite of the recent advances in data mining and computational analysis, humans can easily detect patterns which computer algorithms may have difficulty in finding, this paper reports on the practical use of an innovative web-based collaboration support platform in a biomedical research context. Arguing that dealing with data-intensive and cognitively complex settings is not a technical problem alone, the proposed platform adopts a hybrid approach that builds on the synergy between machine and human intelligence to facilitate the underlying sense-making and decision making processes. User experience shows that the platform enables more informed and quicker decisions, by displaying the aggregated information according to their needs, while also exploiting the associated human intelligence.

On the Development of Knowledge Management Services for Collaborative Decision Making

Admitting that the quality of a decision depends on the quality of the knowledge used to make it, it is argued that the enhancement of the decision making efficiency and effectiveness is strongly related to the appropriate exploitation of all possible organizational knowledge resources. On the other hand, software is perceived as an encapsulation of knowledge. Especially software tools offering Knowledge Management can become substantial organizational artifacts. Developing such tools should be in absolute compliance with the organizational practices so as to be easily integrated with and augment every day activities. Towards this end, this paper presents a multidisciplinary approach for developing knowledge management services for the capturing the organizational knowledge in order to augment teamwork in terms of knowledge elicitation, sharing and construction, thus enhancing decision making quality. Based on a properly defined ontology model, our approach is supported by a web-based tool that serves as a forum of reciprocal knowledge exchange, conveyed through structured argumentative discourses, the ultimate aim being to support the related decision making process.