Timothy Wray

Web services and digital ecosystem support using formal concept analysis

This paper describes a Web Services (WS) and distributed systems architecture for Formal Concept Analysis that supports information and content management in a social media system. As well as social tagging, the system includes novel approaches to document browsing and heterogeneous Web information retrieval. The Formal Concept Analysis WS architecture supports a system called the Virtual Museum of the Pacific, a content and knowledge acquisition tool that permits the machine synthesis of formal concepts and provides a Rich Internet Application in which to display and navigate them. The interface also allows the extensible association of digital objects via introducing new attributes and relationships. The WS architecture and user interface form the basis for a novel distributed content management and social media application and is to our knowledge the first implementation of Formal Concept Analysis as WS.

Virtual museums and Web-based digital ecosystems

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific was developed by the authors and launched by the Australian Museum in November 2009. A digital ecosystem implemented as Web 2.0 application, the VMP is an experimental platform with information and knowledge acquisition for the Australian Museums Pacific collection. Importantly, the VMP facilitates a number of social media interfaces that enable content to be added and tagged, the control vocabulary to be extended, user perspectives to be defined and narratives added via wiki. It is therefore extensible. This paper concentrates on technical issues involving several search methods: attribute search based on a control vocabulary, query refinement and query-by-example. In doing so, the paper illustrates the issues involved in abstracting a generic collection management framework that can be re-used for developing other semantic Web digital ecosystems for other collection content.

Location privacy in a digital ecosystem for context-aware applications

Location-based services feature prominently in many digital ecosystem designs. In this paper we present the design of a mobility digital ecosystem for public transportation and campus area networks. We describe four context-aware applications that encourage users to disclose their location: a public transport passenger tracking application; a route-based car-pooling application; an on-campus location-based social networking assistant and a virtual art-gallery tour guide. The location-based service applications offered are intended to drive users into the digital ecosystem and in so doing they share data about their location. This location data can be used to provide value-added services to the users and optimise overall system behaviour. In this paper, we present the architectures of these four applications and address issues concerning privacy, location-identity and uniform standards developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Our applications provide environments that encourage individual interaction and engagement that are self-regulating and self-evolving: these are the key characteristics of a digital ecosystem.

Information Retrieval and Social Tagging for Digital Libraries Using Formal Concept Analysis

This paper reports a novel semantic web application developed to deliver a collaborative tagging system for a digital on-line museum. The key features of our application -- called the Virtual Museum of the Pacific -- concern the browsing and retrieval interface based on Formal Concept Analysis the extensible distributed data model to support collaborative tagging and its web services implementation.

Design, information organisation and the evaluation of the Virtual Museum of the Pacific digital ecosystem

This paper reports on the design, organisation and evaluation of a Semantic Web application designed to deliver a collaborative tagging and navigation system for a digital online museum. The key technical features of our application—called the Virtual Museum of the Pacific—centre on a browsing and retrieval interface based on formal concept analysis, query-extension for text search over a concept lattice, an extensible distributed data model to support collaborative tagging and its Web Services implementation. The objective of the project was to provide a practical demonstrator of an formal concept analysis-based system for browsing museum content, while reporting on its impact to the organisational environment and its relevance among stakeholder groups. This paper presents its key design features, an analysis of our collaboration with the Australian Museum and the results of two independent requirements gathering and usability evaluation sessions.