Martin Stabauer

Towards customised visualisation of ontologies: state of the art and future applications for online polls analysis

Online polling is a popular tool to increase user involvement on all kinds of websites. Consumers are interested in sharing their opinion and so contribute to the websites content. Aggregated opinions, attitudes, and preferences convey a great deal of knowledge which is often unutilised as there exists no efficient method to explore them. An ongoing research project suggests methods, technologies, and processes to extract the knowledge that lies within the questions posed by website publishers and the answers given by users. This knowledge is saved in a triple store and enhanced by reasoning and other methods of the semantic web. One important technique is the visualisation of both the structure (entities and relations) and aggregated information of consumers in the knowledge base. Existing techniques often focus on only one of them although integration of both is required to explore the nature of the content and information about user groups such as size and intersections among them. The research described in this paper surveys current visualisation tools and libraries for the support of identified requirements in a case study. Based on the findings, an implementation of Agile Visualization for a specific polling system in specific and ontologies in general is proposed, which allows for a more customisable and flexible visualisation. A reusable transformation process for the ontologys data is discussed, which makes it possible to use the aforementioned knowledge base as input for the agile visualization approach.

State of the art in knowledge extraction from online polls: a survey of current technologies

The ongoing research and development in the field of Natural Language Processing has lead to a great number of technologies in its context. There have been major benefits when it comes to bringing together the worlds of natural language and semantic technologies, so more and more potential areas of application emerge. One of these is the subject of this paper, in particular the possible ways of knowledge extraction from single-question online polls. With concepts of the Social Web, internet users want to contribute and express their opinion. As a consequence, the popularity of online polls is rapidly increasing; they can be found in news articles of media sites, on blogs etc. It would be desirable to bring intelligence to the application of polls by using technologies of the SemanticWeb and Natural Language Processing as this would allow to build a great knowledge base and to draw conclusions from it. This paper surveys the current landscape of tools and state-of-the-art technologies and analyses them with regard to pre-defined requirements that need to be accomplished, in order to be useful for extracting knowledge from the results generated by online polls.

Converting Opinion into Knowledge

A vast majority of internet users has adopted new ways and possibilities of interaction and information exchange on the social web. Individuals are becoming accustomed to contribute and express their opinion on various platforms and websites. Commercial online polls allow operators of online newspapers, blogs and other forms of media sites to provide such services to their users. Consequently, their popularity is rapidly increasing and more and more potential areas of application emerge. However, in most cases the expressed opinions are stored and displayed without any further actions and the knowledge that lies in the answers is discarded.

Embedding Interuniversity Peer Review in Virtual Learning Groups

Interdisciplinary cooperation in virtual groups has become a reality and challenge for businesses and institutions in the globalised world and thus a main learning objective for business students. This paper reports an inter-university cooperation between a German University of Applied Sciences and an Austrian University, in which students of both institutions work together in virtual learning groups. They collectively develop a research project concerning “ethical issues of digital communication”. The students pass the different stages of a typical research process starting with a relevant research question towards the presentation of the findings at a conference. For this research-based learning scenario a process model is developed based on established theory and including a Peer Review process for students from three courses of both universities. An accompanying study collects qualitative and quantitative data on Peer Review as a learning method in an inter-university context and the role of media for virtual cooperation.

The Impact of UI on Privacy Awareness

Online polls are considered a valuable method of collecting users’ opinions, attitudes and preferences. They also help to increase user engagement, which is a goal of many online publishers, as they seek to understand their target audiences better and therefore want to collect and analyze user data. Gaining access to information from their users’ social network accounts is seen as a significant advance and consequently social login functionality is becoming an increasingly common feature of various web applications. Users appreciate the convenience and benefits of this, but are often unaware of the privacy issues that arise. This study investigated the influence of different types of privacy alert on users’ decisions whether to connect an online polling application to a social network, thereby granting access to their social media data in exchange for seeing their friends’ votes. The method used live data from real polls in German-speaking countries and gives insights into user behavior when confronted with requests for Facebook data. Differences in privacy awareness and user decisions between our research and previous studies in laboratory settings are addressed as well.

Gamification in E-Commerce

Relying on social connections, online recommendation engines and other enabling technologies, consumers have constantly been increasing expectations and seek experiential value in online shopping. Since customers have more places and ways to shop than ever before, retailers – in order to be successful – must find ways to make online shopping pleasant and enjoyable. They have begun to enhance the online customer experience by incorporating game elements into their business processes, making online shopping not just attractive with innovative products and low prices, but also fun. This concept is known as gamification – a trending topic in both academia and business – and generally defined as the use of game thinking and elements in non-game contexts. In our study, we used a state-of-the-art framework (Octalysis) to analyze a sample of retailers from different industries operating on the European market. Based on an octagonal shape, Octalysis comprises 8 core drives that seek to explain the influence of certain gamification techniques on consumer motivation. Our study focused on determining (a) each retailer’s position in the octagon and (b) whether retailers in the same sector target the same core drives. Further, we suggest guidelines for academics and practitioners seeking to convert results into more and better ideas for online shopping.