Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller

Finding Topical Experts in Question a Answer Communities

Question and Answer (Q&A) communities (such as Stackoverflow) have become important places for information exchange and knowledge creation. Their success relies predominantly on two aspects of the feedback generated by their members: quality and speed. Of these, the former reflects on the reputation of the community, whilst the latter is indicative of the efficiency of the Q&A system to correctly answer a given question. In this paper, we present a three phase study for identifying and recommending topical experts in Q&A communities. The first phase investigates the most relevant criteria for identifying reputable members of the community (often experts in a given field), the second phase introduces an approach based on semantic annotations to ascertain their area of specialism, and the last phase presents a method to recommend experts to answer questions in their areas of expertise. Our evaluation (carried out using real-world data from the Biology Stack Exchange Q&A community) shows that the numbers of answers provided by each member can be used as reliable indicators of expertise, and semantic annotations can be successfully used to identify the topics in which they specialize. Furthermore, on average, 74% of the recommendations suggested by our method were successful.

In Collaboration with In Concert: Reflecting a Digital Library as Linked Data for Performance Ephemera

Diverse datasets in the area of Digital Musicology expose complementary information describing works, composers, performers, and wider historical and cultural contexts. Interlinking across such datasets enables new digital methods of scholarly investigation. Such bridging presents challenges when working with legacy tabular or relational datasets that do not natively facilitate linking and referencing to and from external sources. Here, we present pragmatic approaches in turning such legacy datasets into linked data. InConcert is a research collaboration exemplifying these approaches. In this paper, we describe and build on this resource, which is comprised of distinct digital libraries focusing on performance data and on concert ephemera. These datasets were merged with each other and opened up for enrichment from other sources on the Web via conversion to RDF. We outline the main features of the constituent datasets, describe conversion workflows, and perform a comparative analysis. Our findings provide practical recommendations for future efforts focused on exposing legacy datasets as linked data.

Building Prototypes Aggregating Musicological Datasets on the Semantic Web

Abstract Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, and SPARQL can be successfully used to bridge complementary musicological information. In this paper, we describe, compare, and evaluate the datasets and workflows used to create two such aggregator projects: In Collaboration with In Concert, and JazzCats, both of which bring together a cluster of smaller projects containing concert and performance metadata.

A Serious Game Powered by Semantic Web technologies

ISCOOL is an interactive educational platform that helps users develop their skills for objective text analysis and interpretation. The tools incorporated into ISCOOL bridge various disparate sources, including reference datasets for people, and organizations, as well as gazetteers, dictionaries and collections of historical facts. This data serves as the basis for educating learners about the processes of evaluating the implicit and implied content of written material, whilst also providing a wider context in which this information is accessed, interpreted and understood. In the course of gameplay, the user is prompted to choose images that best capture content of a read passage. The interactive features of the game simultaneously test the users existing knowledge, and ability to critically analyse the text. Results can be saved and shared, allowing the players to continue to interact with the data through conversations with their peers, friends, and family members, and to disseminate information throughout their communities. Users will be able to draw connections between the information they encounter in ISCOOL, and their daily realities - participants are empowered, informed and educated.

Knowing the past to Plan for the Future - An In-depth Analysis of the First 10 Editions of the WEBIST Conference

Over the last ten years, members of the WEBIST community have dedicated their time and efforts to face a number of research challenges, making significant advances in Information Systems and pointing to new directions for innovation and learning. After ten successful WEBIST conferences and several scientific publications, an extensive analysis of the WEBIST conferences has been carried out (involving authors, publications, conference impact, topics coverage, community analysis and other aspects) to possibly assist us to further advance Information Systems. Thus, in this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of the last ten WEBIST conferences based on social network analysis, bibliometrics and statistical measures and describe a Web-based application built on top of triplified datasets to interactively explore the findings and possibly assist the Information Systems community to reveal new directions.

A Comprehensive Analysis of the First Ten Editions of the WEBIST Conference

An analysis of the proceedings of the first decade of the WEBIST conference, in terms of social networking and statistical analyses, as well as bibliometrics, unearthed information regarding existing patterns in the prevalent themes and topics of the conference, shedding light on the development of the event and its community as they grew and matured. In addition to the findings of this analysis we present a queriable Web-based application, which draws from a dataset of RDF triples, enabling the recreation of the examined patterns and the further exploration of the proceedings data.

On organising multimedia performance corpora for musicological study using Linked Data

The wide availability of digital technologies has increased the quantity and diversity of information that can be collected from and about a musical performance. Making this data easily accessible for study by musicologists requires the development of supporting methodologies and tools to assist and automate its systematic cataloguing, archiving, and investigation. We report on the curation of a rich digital multimedia dataset captured from a complete performance of Richard Wagners Ring Cycle, supplemented by observations annotated by a musicologist during the course of the event. We describe the application of ontologies to codify the physical and temporal relationships between the events, artefacts, and their creators or annotators; and the method and tools to publish these performance corpora as Linked Data hyperstructures abiding by this schema. Finally we discuss the implications for hosting this data within a Digital Library infrastructure and how it can be used to support musicological investigation.

An Educational Game Based on Images and Semantic Web Technologies

ISCOOL is an interactive educational game for text analysis and interpretation. It draws from several reference datasets, providing users with information about people, organisations and locations, as well as word definitions and historical facts that serve as the basis for reading comprehension and provide a wider context for information to be accessed, interpreted and understood. In game-play, users choose images to best illustrate a read text. The interactivity of the game encourages users to test their knowledge, and critically analyse what was read. ISCOOL was assessed by students with low literacy levels in English. The results show high levels of acceptance and applicability to genuine learning activities.

BABY ElEPHãT: building an analytical bibliography for a prosopography in early English imprint data

Prosopography of the people involved with publishing and selling of Early English books can be useful for the investigation of diachronic change in that sector. In this study, we developed an analytical bibliography from the metadata available from 25,000 texts published by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), focusing exclusively on information captured in the „Publisher‟ field of the original TEI-XML Header. From there, we extracted the named entities associated with “printed by”, “printed for” and “sold by” relationships to generate and analyze a bibliographical network. We extended the EEBOO ontology to accommodate these relationships and generated RDF from the resulting structured metadata, enriching existing triples capturing other information within the dataset. This work is challenging because of the ambiguity and inconsistency in data and therefore can be of interest for further investigation by those with domain specific knowledge.

Ancient Sumerian online: challenges and opportunities

Far from its beginnings as symbols pressed into clay tablets, Ancient Sumerian is now being digitized and shared through cutting edge semantic web technologies.