Abstract
Since the beginning of the electronic era, public administrations and enterprises have been developing services, through which citizens, businesses and customers can conduct their transactions with the offering entity. Each electronic service contains a substantial amount of knowledge in the form help texts, rules of use or legislation excerpts, examples, validation checks etc. This knowledge has been extracted from domain experts when the services were developed, especially in the phases of analysis and design and was subsequently translated into software. In the latter format though, knowledge cannot be readily used in organizational processes, such as knowledge sharing and development of new services. In this paper, we present an approach for reverse engineering electronic services, in order to create knowledge items of high levels of abstraction, which can be used in knowledge sharing environments as well as in service development platforms. The proposed approach has been implemented and configured to generate artifacts for the SmartGov service development platform. Finally, an evaluation of the proposed approach is presented to assess its efficiency regarding various aspects of the reverse engineering process.

Abstract
Although electronic transaction services are considered to be a necessity for e-government, it has not been possible insofar to unleash their full potential. E-forms are central to the development of e-government, being a basic means for implementing the majority of the public services considered as required for local and central public administration authorities. In this paper, we present an object-oriented model for e-form-based administrative services, which spans the e-service lifecycle, including development, deployment and use by enterprises and citizens, data collection and communication with legacy information systems. The proposed approach encompasses semantic, structural and active aspects of e-forms, providing thus an inclusive framework for modelling electronic services.

Abstract:
With the need for electronic services to be developed and deployed more and more rapidly, it is imperative that concrete models of electronic services are developed, to facilitate systematic work of electronic service stakeholders, concrete semantics and coherent representations across services developed within an organisation. Using the XML language to develop such a model, offers a number of additional advantages, such as rich semantics, facilitation of data interchange, extensibility, high abstraction levels and possibility for mechanical processing. In this paper we present the design aspects of an XML model for electronic services, which has been used for building a repository of interlinked elements representing e-services. A web-based interface for the management of this repository and a tool for automatically compiling e-service descriptions into executable images have been developed alongside. The model has been evaluated by a mixture of electronic service stakeholders, and the results of this evaluation are also presented.

Abstract:
On their route to the electronic era, organisations, release on the web more and more complex form-based services, which require users to enter numerous data items interrelated by business rules. In such a context, it is crucial to provide optimal form layouts, in order to present the service users with interfaces that facilitate their work. This paper presents an integrated environment, which exploits data item interrelations manifested by the business rules (or validation checks) to optimise the layout of the web forms comprising a complex service. The approach is validated through its application on a tax return form e-service.

Abstract:
Transaction services offered by public authorities vary from simple forms with few fields to multi-form compound documents with hundreds of input areas. In the latter case, field placement within forms is of particular importance for facilitating the filling and error correction processes. In this paper we present an approach to improving the form layout by exploiting validation checks that are usually associated with electronic forms, as well as semantic information that may be attached to form fields by designers.

Encyclopedia of E-Commerce, E-Government and Mobile Commerce, 2006

Abstract:
In this work, the usage of ontologies for meeting requirements related to e-service composition, e-service cataloguing, change management and administrative responsibility is examined. An ontology for e-government services is presented, covering various aspects of services, including administrative responsibility, meta-data, involved documents and legislation. Both the development and usage phase of the ontology are covered and directions for further exploitation of the potential offered by the ontological representation are given.

Abstract
Although electronic transaction services are considered to be a necessity for e-government, it has not been possible insofar to unleash their full potential. E-forms are central to the development of e-government, being a basic means for implementing the majority of the public services considered as required for local and central public administration authorities. In this paper, we present an object-oriented model for e-form-based administrative services, which spans the e-service lifecycle, including development, deployment and use by enterprises and citizens, data collection and communication with legacy information systems. The proposed approach encompasses semantic, structural and active aspects of e-forms, providing thus an inclusive framework for modelling electronic services.

Abstract:
Filling and submission of electronic forms is a key issue for e-government, since most electronic services offered in this context include some variant of electronic forms. Insofar, IT experts are placed in the centre of electronic forms services lifecycles, undertaking the analysis, design, implementation and maintenance phases. This practice, however, implies various impediments, such as the need for multitudinous teams with diverse skills. In this paper we present experiences from developing and maintaining a set of electronic services for the Greek Ministry of Finance, and propose an approach to handling electronic services' lifecycle that balances responsibilities between domain experts and IT professionals. This approach enables a more holistic management of the electronic service lifecycle, by employing modelling and representation in high levels of abstraction and incorporating tools for automatically generating operative service instances from these high-level descriptions.

Note:This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Mobile commerce is gaining significant importance in the recent years as an alternative option of e-commerce for the moving user. The mobile applications through which mcommerce takes place operate in highly dynamic environments with diverse characteristics and under varying conditions. The characteristics and conditions of these environments .called context. should be exploited in order to provide adaptive services; services that offer a suitable user experience and deliver innovative and enhanced capabilities that will facilitate user interaction, attract new customers and maintain existing ones. The goal of adaptivity is realized through the adaptation of user interface, functionality and content of applications using the context information. Therefore, context-awareness constitutes an essential aspect . almost a requirement . of mobile services. In order to realize context-aware services, there is a necessity to capture the context information from its sources, process and distribute it to the software components that will use it. In this paper, we propose a software architecture for context information management suitable for m-commerce applications. We describe the functionality and characteristics of its components, as well as the interaction among these different components.

Mobile commerce applications operate in highly dynamic environments with diverse characteristics and interesting challenges. The characteristics and conditions of these environments –called context–, can be exploited to provide adaptive mobile services, in terms of user interface, functionality and content, in order to offer more effective m-commerce. Today, building adaptive mobile services is a complex and time-consuming task due to the lack of standardized methods, tools and architectures for the identification, representation and management of the context. Addressing some of these issues, recent works have provided formal extensions for various stages of the m-commerce application lifecycle, such as extended UML class diagrams for building design models and have used context parameters in order to offer adaptive applications. Using these works as the basis, in this paper we propose a context management architecture, which accommodates the requirements that have been identified for m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture is evaluated in terms of completeness, complexity, performance and utility, and compared against other approaches proposed in the literature regarding its suitability for supporting context-aware m-commerce applications.

Abstract:
In the context of electronic government, e-services are a valuable instrument for offering high quality services to enterprises and individual citizens alike. While developing an e-service, it is usually possible to reuse elements that have already crafted for other e-services, such as personal detail forms or widgets for collecting social security numbers, decreasing thus both development effort and the time for deployment. A more generic framework for supporting reusability in development of e-services includes the identification of reusable objects, the creation and population of a repository containing such components, and the empowerment of developers with tools allowing for location, retrieval and adaptation of components for suiting their specific tasks. In this paper, we conduct an analysis to recognise e-service component that offer reusability opportunities and we present facilities and methods to enable e-service developers to exploit these opportunities while developing electronic services.

Studying consumer behaviour and usage of environmental determinants in the mobile services domain contributes to the identification of context information which is critical for the effective operation of mobile commerce applications. Exploiting this information towards providing enhanced and innovative mobile services offers a competitive advantage within the highly demanding domain of m-commerce applications. However, in order to effectively exploit such context information, there is a need to design the necessary methods, software tools and information systems that will be employed for collecting, processing and disseminating this information. In this paper we develop a theoretical framework which defines the context information necessary for m-commerce applications, taking into account relevant marketing dimensions as well as privacy protection perspectives. Then, this framework is operationalized through the design of an appropriate software architecture which enables the standardization and management of context information.

Abstract:
End-user development (EUD) aims to empower end-users with the necessary tools to implement their own software. In this sense domain expert user development can be viewed as a special case of EUD. Domain experts can be considered to be a special case of end-users who possess the necessary knowledge of how the software should operate, what tasks it has to carry out, which business rules need to be enforced, validation checks to perform, etc. It has to be noted that in some cases domain experts will not use the produced software themselves, this software however will indirectly support their work, e.g. software developed by tax officers (domain experts) to be used by tax payers (actual end-users) simplifies the subsequent work of tax officers through minimization of errors, population of electronic data repositories etc.

Using a user-centred software engineering paradigm domain expert users will work along with software developers to create specifications for the software to be implemented by the latter group. This process is usually iterative. Domain experts will be questioned by developers, developers will design a first prototype, the domain experts will most probably ask for changes, developers will come back with an altered prototype, etc. Since both user groups are usually involved in other assignments as well, this process can be time-consuming. Impedance mismatch problems, i.e. problems in the communication between the domain experts and the IT staff due to different backgrounds, perspectives and terminology result into additional delays within this phase. An alternative to this would be to help domain experts to create the software with a minimum or no involvement of IT personnel. This is the approach adopted in the SmartGov project . In the framework of SmartGov a knowledge-based platform was developed that assists public sector employees with suitable domain expertise to generate online transaction services by simplifying their development, maintenance and integration with installed IT systems.

Article available through the ACM Author-izer service:

Domain expert user development: the smartgov approach

George Lepouras, Costas Vassilakis, Constantin Halatsis, Panagiotis Georgiadis
Communications of the ACM - ACM's plan to go online first, 2007

Abstract
E-forms have a central role in a significant number of e-government services. This paper presents a knowledge-based technical platform aiming to assist public sector employees to generate online transaction services by simplifying their development, maintenance and integration with installed IT systems. At the heart of this platform lies the knowledge and transaction services repository. This repository consists of a number of XML document types that incorporate all necessary details for creating and managing online transaction services. The main underlying idea is to provide a platform with intuitive interfaces that can be used directly by domain experts thus minimising the need for personnel with IT skills. This platform is currently under development within the IST SmartGov project.

Abstract:
Electronic commerce, nowadays, is trying to extend its target audience and elevate the quality of services offered to end-users. Two important directions towards meeting these goals are the embracement of mobile users, whose number grows following the advent of communication technologies, and the inclusion of context-aware features in the delivered services to improve the efficiency of the dialogues between users and systems. The context taken into account may involve characteristics regarding the human user, the geographical location and the time of access, the devices employed to access the service, the network through which the user communicates with the system, the nature of the transaction carried out and so forth. It is clear that the development and successful operation of mobile and context-aware e-commerce introduce new challenges. In order to tackle such challenges, new methodologies, tools, architectures and platforms should be made available to assist analysts, designers, developers and operators in handling the various phases of the Mobile and Context-Aware E-Commerce Services (MCACS) lifecycle.

Abstract:
Reusability is the degree to which a software component or other work can be used in more than one programs or software systems. e-Government is a prosperous area for the application of reusability, since the services offered to citizens from the same administration, or even different administrations, have common portions that can be developed only once and reused wherever appropriate. In this paper we present the design and implementation of an electronic service development environment which offers the potential to reuse components that have already been implemented, for the realization of new services.

Abstract:
Electronic government employs electronic services to facilitate interaction with citizens and enterprises and deliver a rich and high quality spectrum of services. Development of electronic services can be greatly assisted, both in terms of development cost and roll-out time, by exploiting the reusability inherent in them. Reusability may be promoted by identifying reusable objects in the context of electronic service development, building and populating a repository with such components and providing the means for developers to locate, extract and adapt them to suit the task at hand. In this paper we analyse electronic services to recognise reusable components and present means and techniques that empower electronic service developers to build electronic services through reusable components.

Mobile commerce applications adhering to anytime and anywhere paradigm, required to be flexible. They should be able to adapt their interface, services and content towards a certain context. Several proposals for definition of context have been already proposed originating from various areas related to mobile commerce. However, an integrated, formal and methodological approach for the determination and representation of context, adjusted to special characteristics of mobile commerce applications, has not been insofar presented. This is the challenge we address in this paper, through a conceptual model that includes: i) a clear and formal definition of context, ii) the depiction of its specific characteristics as metadata, iii) a methodology for its determination and iv) the presentation of an extension of class diagrams of UML for its representation, all of them tailored to the special nature of mobile commerce applications.

Abstract:
Transactional services are an indispensible part of e-government, since provision of services to citizens and enterprises,as well as the interaction between the government and citizens-enterprises are modelled mainly through such services. Latest quantifications, however, show that the development of such services lags behind as compared both to the expectations of citizens-enterprises and to the efforts made by governments. This can be attributed, amongst other reasons, to the "traditional" approach to electronic service development, which treats each electronic service as an isolated software project. In this paper, we propose an e-service development platform, which covers the whole lifecycle of transactional services and facilitates the analysis, development, deployment and maintenance of these services.

Abstract:
Although form-based transactional services are fundamental to electronic government activities, their widespread does neither meet the citizen's expectations, nor the potential offered by state-of-the-art technologies. Besides any bureaucratic impediments, the primary reason for this is that traditional software engineering approaches cannot satisfactorily handle all the aspects of electronic services lifecycle. In this paper we present experiences from developing and maintaining a set of electronic services for the Greek Ministry of Finance, and propose a new approach for handling electronic service projects. The proposed approach has been successfully employed for developing extensions to the existing services, as well as some new ones.

Abstract:
The tax collection process has been described as a bureaucratic one, that confines citizen involvement to the role of passive fulfillment of administrative and financial obligations. Active citizen participation, in the form of some political say on the allocation of collected taxes which could potentially improve and further legitimize tax collection, is not a part of the traditional taxation model. In this paper we describe a new taxation model which, in the spirit of participatory budgeting approaches, supports active citizens’ participation on decision making regarding tax funds allocation.

Abstract:
E-government initiatives have been proven to deliver significant benefits, both for suppliers of electronic services (public authorities and organisations) and for the public, to whom services are addressed. However, the pace with which electronic services are made available and adopted is lower than planned or expected; governments tend to be slow in releasing new services, and citizens often prefer to conduct business with the government through paper forms and physical presence, rather than using online methods. This indicates that certain barriers exist that hinder the transition to electronic services. In this paper, we present the results of a survey among electronic service stakeholder groups, to identify the most important barriers to electronic service development. Documentation of barriers is considered important, since administrations may take certain measures to overcome them. Hints on how specific barriers may be overcome are also given in this paper.

Abstract:
This paper presents the current model for taxation and distribution of the taxes to government activities, and an alternative model is presented, according to which tax-payers can determine, to some extent, the way that the taxes they pay will be spent. The goal of this proposal is to increase citizen involvement and system transparency. The model proposal comes complete with an architecture that supports the realization of the proposed scheme.

Abstract
Both the business sector and the government are nowadays embracing Internet technologies in order to provide high quality on-line services to their "target groups". In both cases, service providers are trying to transform web surfers, casually visiting their web sites to seek information, to users of their electronic services, i.e. e-consumers and. e-citizens. In this paper, we address the similarities and the differences between the business and the government, when they act as service providers, with respect to the factors for successful service and the issues that must be addressed.

Abstract:
A requirement for electronic government initiatives to succeed is the ability to offer a citizen-centric view of the government model. The most widely adopted paradigm supporting this task is the life event model, which combines basic services offered from multiple public authorities into a single, high-level service that corresponds to an event in a citizen's life. This composition is not always straightforward though, because the constituent services are generally developed in an independent fashion, using incompatible input and output formats; moreover the task of synchronising the documents required and produced by the services is tedious to implement and costly to maintain, since changes to requirements and legislation necessitate continuous updates to this scheme. In this paper, we present a blackboard architecture that can be used to deliver life-event oriented services to the citizens. The blackboard proposed for this architecture is an active one, undertaking the tasks of conversions, where appropriate. The blackboard couples a data flow approach with event-condition-action rules to enable dynamic formulation of life-event services, decentralising their development and maintenance.

Note:This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
Having realised the benefits resulting from delivering on-line public services in the context of electronic government, administrations strive to extend the spectrum of services offered to citizens and enterprises, as well as to engage multiple communication channels in service delivery, in order to increase the target audience and, consequently, the service effectiveness. Insofar, however, only the web channel has been sufficiently used for service delivery, whereas other channels have not been adequately exploited. One of the main reasons of this lag is the cost incurred for the development and maintenance of multiple versions of an electronic service, each version targeted to a different platform. In this paper, we present an approach and the associated tools for developing and maintaining electronic services that allows the automated production of different versions of the electronic service, each targeted to a specific platform.

Abstract:
eConsultations constitute an effective means to inclusive and informed participation of citizens and society in policy, decision and law formulation processes, and an answer to democratic deficit issues. eConsultation platforms need to support all stages of consultation processes including agenda setting and topics raising, legislation proposal publicity, notification of developments, proposal debate and commentary, collection, analysis and synthesis of views. In this paper we present the design of an open platform assisting policy makers and the civil society in the set-up, enactment, management and federation of inclusive and informed digital consultations. The proposed platform employs semantic techniques, such as semantics, content annotation and summarization to support the consultation processes and provide targeted and digested information to participants, and facilitates tailoring of eConsultation procedures by offering basic eConsultation activities as building blocks, which can be combined according to contextual needs. The platform also enables distinct eConsultation processes to be federated, allowing the exchange of information, which may be subject to different semantic annotations and classifications, according to the rules of each eConsultation process.

Abstract:
Firms and organizations are increasingly exploiting electronic channels to reach their customers and create new business opportunities. To this end, electronic shops have been developed, either offering products from a single firm or encompassing multiple individual electronic stores, comprising thus electronic shopping malls. Two main concerns for e-commerce are personalization and enhancement of user experience. Personalization addresses the ability to offer content tailored to the preferences of each user or user group. Preferences may be explicitly declared by the user, or derived by the system through inspecting user interaction; if the system dynamically reacts to changes of visitor behavior, it is termed as adaptive. Enhancement of user experience is another major issue in e-commerce, given that 2D-images and texts on the screen are not sufficient to provide information on products aspects such as physical dimensions, textures and manipulation feedback. Multimedia presentations can also be used as a means for .information acceleration. for promoting "really new" products. This article aims to specify a system that exploits capabilities offered by adaptation and VR technologies to offer e-shoppers personalized and enhanced experiences, while addressing challenges related to the cost, complexity and effort of building and maintaining such a system.

Abstract:
Documents submitted by citizens through electronic services deployed in the context of e-Government must usually undergo processing by some organisational information system, in order to complete the citizens¢ requests and for the reply to be returned to the citizen. The integration, however, of the e-service delivery platform and the organisational information system is often hindered for a number of reasons, including security considerations, platform diversity or idiosyncrasies of legacy information systems. In this paper we present a generic method for providing seamless communication between the two platforms, enabling the full integration of documents submitted through electronic services into the organisational workflow, leveraging thus the quality of services offered to the citizens and facilitating e-service development and operation.

Abstract:
Public transaction services (such as e-forms), although perceived the future of e-government have not yet realised their full potential. E-forms have a significant role in e-government, as they are the basis for realising most of the twenty public services that all European Union member states have to provide to their citizens and businesses. The aim of this paper is to present a knowledge-based platform to assist public sector employees to generate online transaction services by simplifying their development, maintenance and integration with already installed IT systems.

Abstract:
Public transaction services (such as e-forms) although perceived the future of e-government have not yet realised their full potential. E-forms have a significant role in e-government, as they are the basis for implementing most of the twenty public services that all member states have to provide to their citizens and businesses. The aim of the SmartGov project is to specify, develop, deploy and evaluate a knowledge-based platform to assist public sector employees to generate online transaction services by simplifying their development, maintenance and integration with already installed IT systems. This platform will be evaluated in two European countries (in one Ministry and one Local Authority). This paper outlines key issues in the development of the SmartGov system platform.

Abstract:
The ever changing environment information systems model, and in particular e-government ones, intensifies the need for systems that are able to easily, efficiently and transparently adapt to changing environments. Accommodating unanticipated changes implies that systems must be able to adapt to changes occurring in and evolve in step with their changing environment. Adaptation is concerned with monitoring, analysing and understanding the patterns of the user's interaction with the system. Similarly, an information system is said to be evolutionary if it can be purposefully used in a dynamic environment. E-government information systems, in virtue of their nature and function, are driven by the need to adapt and evolve. This suggests that the design and implementation of such systems must provide the necessary infrastructure for evolution and adaptability. In other words, e-government information systems must abide to the Tailorable Information Systems paradigm. In this work we present a case study for the development of a Tailorable e-government information system.

Abstract:
Real-world information, knowledge and procedures after which information systems are modeled are generally of dynamic nature and subject to changes, due to the emergence of new requirements or revisions to initial specifications. E-government information systems (eGIS) present a higher degree of volatility in their environment, since requirement changes may stem from multiple sources, including legislation changes, organizational reforms, end-user needs, interoperability and distribution concerns etc. To this end, the design and implementation of eGIS must adhere to paradigms and practices that facilitate the accommodation of changes to the eGIS as they occur in the real world. In this work, we present a role-based model for designing and implementing eGIS that can dynamically accomodate changes, providing the necessary facilities for modeling multiple aspects of the same real-world entities and delivering context-specific behaviour.

Benou Poulcheria, Vassilakis Costas
Technical report TR-SSDBL-11-001

Abstract
The proposed methodological framework reviews and uses knowledge from the field of cognitive psychology in order to evaluate aspects of educational games. In particular, we concentrate on two components of human cognition that play a central role to learning, namely memory and motivation. After having reviewed theories in the field, we created a questionnaire in order to evaluate educational games. The questionnaire incorporates different experimental findings of cognitive psychology. Especially, we have applied Maslow’s motivation theory, Behavioural findings on reinforcement, experimental findings about attention and memory. We present the results obtained from the evaluation of two games, PAC-MAN and Mega Jump. The results confirmed the user ratings of the two games, showing that there seem to be cognitive reasons for the success/failure of different games. Finally, lists of guidelines for developers and instructors are included.

Abstract:

Abstract:

Abstract:

Abstract:

Abstract:

Abstract:

Abstract:

Abstract:

Abstract:

Abstract:

Digitization efforts and web presentations are currently on-going in many museums, archives, libraries and culture heritage institutions in general, exploiting the advent of WWW and digitization technologies. The main benefits from these efforts are exhibit cataloguing, their effective management, preservation and showcasing, and their presentation to the public through the WWW. However, many museums, especially the smaller ones, cannot afford a commercial product and resort to using simple static web pages for their web presence and exhibit presentation. Content Management Systems (CMS), especially open-source ones which come with practically zero-cost, are more and more frequently adopted by museums to create and maintain their website, since they simplify the creation and editing of the web pages and may be used by non-computer experts. In this work we present a module for the Drupal CMS, which provides functionality for (a) Database schema extension to accommodate museum exhibit and collection information (b) Digital exhibit representation (DER) management. (c) Provision of administration pages through which the museum personnel may enter and manage exhibit and collection information (d) WWW scowcasing and (e) Batch data import/export, to facilitate information exchange with other museums.

Abstract:
In this paper we present a system that facilitates virtual museum development and usage. The system is based on a game engine, ensuring thus minimal cost and good performance, and includes provisions that enable museum curators design the virtual museum without any specialized knowledge. Besides visual and auditory information, museum curators may also provide metadata which provide additional information to the visitor, while they can be also exploited for searching for exhibits with certain properties. A guide is also included in the museum, to present additional information to the visitors and aid them throughout their tour.

The article is available through the ACM author-izer service:

A game-engine based virtual museum authoring and presentation system

Victor Mateevitsi, Michael Sfakianos, George Lepouras, Costas Vassilakis
DIMEA '08 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, 2008

Abstract:

The process of designing systems or products largely depends on a number of decisions, like "who do I design for?", "what should my product do?", "what are the user requirements?" etc. The developing teams usually base their decisions on experience and/or heuristics and this is particularly the case, in the development of online products and especially online exhibitions. The different solutions are frequently case studies of specific museums or institutions that wish to provide online content to actual or possible visitors. In addition, the interdisciplinary nature of the endeavor, involving museology, technology but also education, poses important design problems. In the following sections, we present a generic methodology for the design of online exhibitions, using top-down processes and transferable findings across museum types that wish to assist the designers during the early decision stages.

Abstract:
This chapter presents an architecture for supporting the creation of adaptive virtual reality museums on the web. It argues whether the task of developing adaptive virtual reality museums is a complex one, presenting key challenges, and should thus be facilitated by means of a supporting architecture and relevant tools. The proposed architecture is flexible enough to cater for a variety of user needs, and modular promoting extensibility, maintainability and tailorability. Adoption of this architecture will greatly simplify the development of adaptive virtual reality museums, reducing the needed effort to exhibit digitisation and user profile specification; user profiles are further refined dynamically through the user data recorder and the user modelling engine, which provide input for the virtual environment generator.

Abstract:
The current paper describes an approach to designing and implementing a virtual environment comprising ten different museums. The number of museums as well as the variety of their exhibits lead to the adoption of a generalised strategy that catered for all museum presentation needs and allowed for future expansion. Furthermore, the system architecture supports the delivery of multimedia content either over the Internet or via a local immersive virtual reality installation.

Abstract:
The emergence of the World Wide Web during the past few years has provided a medium for communicating information faster and to more people than before. The technologies used allow for the development of personalised, adaptive to the users’ needs, information systems. So far, the complexity of the design and implementation of Virtual Environments has restricted their usage in locally executed, stand-alone applications. In this paper we propose an architecture that permits and facilitates the dynamic, on-the-fly creation of Virtual Environments on the Web that adapt to the users’ preferences and profiles. We focus on the algorithms available for creating an efficient virtual environment generation engine. We illustrate the proposed architecture with examples from a case study of a Virtual Museum.

Abstract:
Past years have seen the exploitation of multimedia techniques and lately the introduction of virtual reality methods to create new forms of presentation for museums' exhibitions. Virtual Reality can offer a number of advantages to museums, offering a way to overcome some common problems like the lack of space or the need of visitors to interact with the exhibits. A broad categorisation of virtual museums reveals that they vary from fully immersive cave systems to simple multimedia presentations. In our approach to develop a virtual reality museum we have designed a virtual environment (VE) where guests can visit a total of ten different museums. The processes of digitisation, architectural design and exhibit presentation are outlined and points of particular importance are explained. Exhibits from the real world museums have been digitised and integrated in the VE. The system has been implemented in two versions: one fully immersive and one with a stereo display.

Abstract
A virtual environment system installed within a real museum can offer a number of advantages, which are discussed in this paper: overcoming the lack of exhibition space, responding to the need for interaction with certain exhibits, affording easy transfer of exhibitions to remote sites. This paper also presents an approach towards designing and developing a virtual reality museum comprising ten different museums. The processes of digitisation, architectural design and exhibit presentation are outlined and points of particular importance are explained. Exhibits from real world museums have been digitised and integrated in this VE.

Article available through the ACM AUthro-izer service:

Designing a virtual museum within a museum

D. Charitos, G. Lepouras, C. Vassilakis, V. Katifori, A. Charissi, L. Halatsi
VAST '01 Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Virtual reality, archeology, and cultural heritage, 2001

Abstract
The paper presents an environment that enables museum curators to catalogue and publish on the web exhibits in multiple languages and media including 3D, video, images. The system is extendable to accommodate new media types, languages, exhibits, information categories, etc. Visitors have the potential to formulate dynamic personalised exhibit collections using search mechanisms provided by the system.

Abstract:
When creating a virtual environment open to the public a number of challenges have to be addressed. The equipment has to be chosen carefully in order to be be able to withstand hard every-day usage, the application has not only to be robust and easy to use, but has also to be appealing to the user, etc. The current paper presents findings gathered from the creation of a multi-thematic virtual museum environment to be offered to visitors of real world museums. A number of design and implementation aspects are described along with an experiment designed to evaluate alternative approaches for implementing the navigation in a virtual museum environment. The paper is concluded with insights gained from the development of the Virtual Museum and portrays future research plans.

Abstract:
This paper presents an innovative approach based on social-network gaming, which will extract players’ cognitive styles for personalization purposes. Cognitive styles describe the way individuals think, perceive and remember information and can be exploited to personalize user interaction. Questionnaires are usually employed to identify cognitive styles, a tedious process for most users. Our approach relies on a Facebook game for discovering potential visitors’ cognitive styles with an ultimate goal of enhancing the overall visitors' experience in the museum. By hosting such a game on the museum’s webpage and on Facebook, the museum aims to attract new visitors, as well as to support the user profiling process.

Abstract
Museums have started to realise the potential of new technologies for the development of edutainment content and services for their visitors. Virtual reality technologies promise to offer a vivid, enjoyable experience to the museums guests, but the cost in time, effort and resources can prove to be overwhelming. In this paper, we propose the use of 3D game technologies for the purpose of developing affordable, easy to use and pleasing virtual environments. To this end, we present a case study based on an already developed version of a virtual museum and a newly implemented version that uses game technologies. The informal assessment indicates that game technologies can offer a prominent and viable solution to the need for affordable desktop virtual reality systems.

Abstract:
This special issue explores the extent to which virtual reality (VR) is affecting the creation of an electronic society. E-Society is a broad term used to describe a research area covering aspects of digital technologies for large user communities. Recent years have seen the emergence of various electronic services in an attempt to facilitate everyday life and improve the way common tasks are being carried out. Ôhe term e-Society covers a wide range of applications from e-government, e-democracy, and e-business to e-learning and e-health. In order for VR to contribute to the creation and advancement of e-Society, a number of issues have to be tackled. A successful VR system has to find a balance between the hardware requirements, user interaction methods, content presentation and the effort required for development and maintenance. Hardware requirements define to a large degree the extent to which an end-user can afford to execute the VR system at her home. User interaction methods have to cater for the variety of users¢ needs. Overall, design and implementation of a successful and engaging VR system is a rather difficult and complex task which requires increased effort in human power and resources in comparison to typical window based applications. Flexibility in development and subsequently maintenance of such a system can be achieved by adopting techniques already present in rapid application development environments, like abstraction, automatic code generation and reusability.

Abstract:
There is a wide range of meta-data standards for the documentation of museum related information, such as CIDOC-CRM; these standards focus on the description of distinct exhibits. In contrast, there is a lack of standards for the digitization and documentation of the routes followed and information provided by museum guides. In this work we propose the notion of the narrative, which can be used to model a guided museum visit. We provide a formalization for the narrative so that it can be digitally encoded, and thus preserved, shared, re-used, further developed and exploited, and also propose an intuitive visualization approach.

Abstract:
In this short paper we examine the suitability of the Google Cardboard as a means for the delivery of personalized cultural experiences. Specifically, we develop the content and create the application required in order to provide highly personalized visits to the Archaeological Museum in Tripolis, Greece. We also examine the usability issues related to the use of Google Cardboards. Early results are promising, and based on them we also outline the next steps ahead.

Abstract:
The Human-Computer Interaction and Virtual Reality Lab, at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Peloponnese, aims to conduct high quality research in areas related to the analysis, design, develop-ment, and evaluation of HCI and VR systems and applications, and in parallel to support the teaching requirements of the department in the respective field. Over the last years the HCI-VR lab particularly focuses on Cultural Heritage and de-velops technologies primarily for spaces of cultural heritage that cover the diverse needs of heterogeneous audiences providing holistic visitor experience. The HCI-VR lab is actively participating in National and European projects on Cultural Heritage, such as FP7 Experimedia (https://hci-vr.dit.uop.gr/experimedia), H2020 CrossCult (www.crosscult.eu) and multiple projects from the National Strategic Reference Framework.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
The continuing need for more effective information retrieval has lead to the creation of the notions of the semantic web and personalized information management, areas of study that very often employ ontologies to represent the semantic context of a domain. Consequently, the need for effective ontology visualization for design, management and browsing has arisen. There are several ontology visualizations available through the existing ontology management tools, but not as many evaluations to determine their advantages and disadvantages and their suitability for various ontologies and user groups. This work presents the preliminary results of an evaluation of four visualization methods in Protégé.

Note:This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
Digital libraries and historical archives are increasingly employing visualization systems to facilitate the information retrieval and knowledge extraction tasks of their users. Typically, each organization employs a single visualization system, which may not suit best the needs of certain user groups, specific tasks, or properties of document collections to be visualized. In this paper we present a context-based adaptive visualization environment, which embeds a set of visualization methods into a visualization library, from which the most appropriate one is selected for presenting information to the user. Methods are selected by examining parameters related to the user profile, system configuration and the set of data to be visualized, and employing a set of rules to assess the suitability of each method. The presented environment additionally monitors user behavior and preferences to adapt the visualization method selection criteria.

Note:This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract
Hierarchically structured data collections often need to be visualized for the purposes of digital information management and presentation. File browsing, in particular, has an inherent hierarchical structure and plays an important role in the context of Personal Information Management (PIM). A multitude of file browsers are nowadays available, offering different functionalities, while users adopt diverse practices and habits for browsing activities. In this paper, we investigate these aspects to obtain insights into their advantages and disadvantages and suggest solutions in the area of PIM, as well as in other domains employing similar visualization paradigms. The presented study focuses on the two most widespread visualizations used by file browsers, namely the indented list and zoomable interface paradigms, and assesses their effectiveness for various tasks and contexts, both by exploiting results on existing evaluations on hierarchy visualizations and folder hierarchy visualizations in particular, and by conducting an interview-based user study.

Abstract:
Novel and intelligent visualization methods are being developed in order to accommodate user searching and browsing tasks, including new and advanced functionalities. Besides, research in the field of user modeling is progressing in order to personalize these visualization systems, according to its users' individual profiles. However, employing a single visualization system, may not suit best any information seeking activity. In this paper we present a visualization environment, which is based on a visualization library, i.e. is a set of visualization methods, from which the most appropriate one is selected for presenting information to the user. This selection is performed combining information extracted from the context of the user, the system configuration and the data collection. A set of rules inputs such information and assigns a score to all candidate visualization methods. The presented environment additionally monitors user behavior and preferences to adapt the visualization method selection criteria.

Abstract:
The visualization of hierarchies is very important for digital information management and presentation systems. Especially in the context of Personal Information Management, file browsers play a very important role. Currently the most common file browser visualizations are Windows Explorer and the simple zoomable visualization offered by Microsoft Windows. This work explores the issue of file browser visualization through a user study based on interviews and an experiment.

Abstract:
TThe need for effective ontology visualization for design, management and browsing has arisen as a result of the progress in the areas of Semantic Web and Personal Information Management. There are several ontology visualizations available through existing ontology management tools, but not as many evaluations to determine their advantages and disadvantages and their suitability for various ontologies and user groups. This work presents selected results of an evaluation of four visualization methods in Protégé.

Abstract
The on-going progress in the area of digital libraries has lead to the beginning of a digitization effort in Historical Archives, as well. The requirements of historical research, which works with histories of entities and incomplete information, create the need for supplementary tools to support users in handling the digitized content. This work is based on a user study of historian information retrieval methods in order to create a set of tools for the context of historical archives, which will facilitate historical data storage, management and visualization.

Abstract:
Incorporating digital tools in the business and scientific research workflows is at the moment an on-going process, challenging and demanding as every domain has its own needs in terms of data models and information retrieval methods. The information in some domains involves entity evolution, a characteristic that introduces additional tasks, such as finding all evolution stages of an entity, and poses additional requirements for the information retrieval process. In this paper we present a user study aiming to investigate the effectiveness of current ontology browsing and visualization methods for supporting users in tasks involving research on entity evolution.

Note:This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
Hierarchical data structures are one of the most commonly used data structures in computer science, and therefore numerous methods and techniques have been proposed for their visualization. In this paper, we present our findings from a user study, in which a number of folder visualization environments were evaluated to assess (a) how efficiently a number of tasks can be performed within the different environments (b) the extent to which using a particular visualization may help the user acquire an accurate cognitive image of the hierarchy structure and its contents and (c) the overall user experience from using a particular visualization environment. The visualization environments considered are representative of major visualization paradigms (zoomable user interfaces, context+focus and space-filling), while both 2D and 3D environments have been included.

Abstract:
Most ontology development methodologies and tools for ontology management deal with ontology snapshots, i.e. they model and manage only the most recent version of ontologies, which is inadequate for contexts where the history of the ontology is of interest, such as historical archives. This work presents a modeling for entity and relationship timelines in the Protégé tool, complemented with a visualization plug-in, which enables users to examine entity evolution along the timeline.

Abstract:

This paper presents the results of a study on how historians conduct research in a historical archive, and the methodologies they use while searching. Historic research involves finding, using, interpreting and correlating information within primary and secondary sources, in order to understand past events. The collection of historical data is accomplished through methodical and comprehensive research in primary and secondary sources. An important factor in our study was to understand what kind of data and/or information historians are looking for in a library/historical archive, either printed or digitized, and which research methodologies or research models they use while they investigate a historical archive. Since this issue has not been addressed insofar, and therefore there are no methods for elucidating research methodologies or research models that historians employ / use, we formulated a questionnaire comprising of seven information retrieval tasks commonly addressed in the context of historic research. History researchers were asked to describe in detail how they would proceed in searching for the information they need for completing these tasks. Through this procedure we aimed to investigate the different ways a historian can use to tackle a specific question, examine whether there exists a common research methodology, and the historic researchers' expectations and preferences. The insight gained from this investigation can be used for educational purposes, since it could be useful in the creation / development of a methodology for conducting research on historical information. Furthermore, the findings can be exploited in the context of organizing documents within historical source repositories, so as to facilitate the retrieval of documents by historians; finally the presented findings can serve as a preliminary requirement analysis phase for building tools that will enable historians to access more rapidly and fully the information they need.

Abstract:

Ontologies have been proven invaluable tools both for the semantic web and for personal information management. In the context of a historical archive an ontology may provide mean-ingful and efficient support for search tasks as well as be used as a tool for storage and presentation of historical data. The creation however of such an ontology is complex, since the digitized archive documents are not in text format and the concepts that must be captured may vary among different time periods. This work presents a user-centric methodological approach for ex-tracting the ontology of an historical archive focusing on the evaluation issues related to this process. The approach is exemplified through cases from its application in the University of Athens Historical Archive.

Abstract:
User profiling is commonly employed nowadays to enhance usability as well as to support personalization, adaptivity and other user-centric features. Insofar, application designers model user profiles mainly in an ad-hoc manner, hindering thus application interoperability at the user profile level, increasing the amount of work to be done and the possibility of errors or omissions in the profile model. This work aims at creating a user profile ontology that incorporates concepts and properties used to model the user profile. Existing literature, applications and ontologies related to the domain of user context and profiling have been taken into account in order to create a general, comprehensive and extensible user model. This ontology can be used as a reference model, in order to alleviate the aforementioned issues. The model, available for download, is exemplified through its application in two different areas, personal information management and adaptive visualization.

Abstract:
Incorporating digital tools in the business and scientific research workflows is at the moment an on-going process, challenging and demanding as every domain has its own needs in terms of data models and information retrieval methods. The information in some domains involves entity evolution, a characteristic that introduces additional tasks, such as finding all evolution stages of an entity, and poses additional requirements for the information retrieval process. In this paper, we present a user study aiming to investigate how the different aspects of ontology modelling affect the performance and effectiveness of users regarding information retrieval tasks that are carried out using visualization methods. The results of the user study are analyzed and guidelines for ontology design are offered.

Abstract:
Creating stories for exhibitions is a fascinating and in parallel laborious task. As every exhibition is designed to tell a story, museum curators are responsible for analyzing each exhibit in order to extract messages that form a story and position accordingly the objects in correct order within the museum space. In this context, we analyze how the technological advances in the fields of sensors and the Internet of Things can be utilized in order to construct a “smart space”, where exhibits can communicate with the visitors and to each other and can be organized automatically so that they can generate rich, personalized, coherent and highly stimulating experiences. We present the architecture of the system named “exhiSTORY”, that intends to provide the appropriate infrastructure to be used in museums and places where exhibitions are held, in order to support smart exhibits. We discuss and analyze the architecture of the system and the ways of its application in a cultural space.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
This paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring ¡typing¢ of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip!t, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web.

Abstract:
Most ontology development methodologies and tools for ontology management deal with ontology snapshots, i.e. they model and manage only the most recent version of ontologies, which is inadequate for contexts where the history of the ontology is of interest, such as historical archives. This work presents a set of requirements for the modeling and visualization of a temporal ontology used as a tool for the representation of historical information. In accordance to these requirements, a visualization plug-in was designed and implemented, featuring a set of tools that enable users to efficiently examine ontology temporal characteristics such as class and instance evolution along the timeline.

Abstract:

Historic research involves finding, using and correlating information within primary and secondary sources, in order to communicate an understanding of past events. In this process, historians employ their scientific knowledge, experience and intuition to formulate queries (who was involved in an event, when did an event occur etc), and subsequently try to locate the pertinent information from their sources. In this paper, we investigate how historians formulate queries, which query terms are chosen, and how historians proceed in searching for related information in sources. The insight gained from this investigation can be subsequently used for organizing documents within historical source repositories and building tools that will enable historians to access the needed information more rapidly and fully.

Abstract:
Human History, is a huge mesh of interrelated facts and concepts, spanning beyond borders, encompassing global aspects and finally constituting a shared, global experience. This is especially the case regarding European history, which is highly interconnected by nature; however, most History-related experiences that are today offered to the greater public, from schools to museums, are siloed. The CrossCult project aims to provide the means for offering citizens and cultural venue visitors a more holistic view of history, in the light of cross-border interconnections among pieces of cultural heritage, other citizens viewpoints and physical venues. To this end, the CrossCult project will built a comprehensive knowledge base encompassing information and semantic relationships across cultural information elements, and will provide the technological means for delivering the contents of this knowledge base to citizens and venue visitors in a highly personalized manner, creating narratives for the interactive experiences that maximise situational curiosity and serendipitous learning. The CrossCult platform will also exploit the cognitive/emotional profiles of the participants as well as temporal, spatial and miscellaneous features of context, including holidays and anniversaries, social media trending topics and so forth.

Abstract:

Users nowadays need to manage large amounts of information, including documents, e-mails, contacts, and multimedia content. To facilitate the tasks of organisation, maintenance, and retrieval of personal information, a number of semantics-based methods have emerged; these methods employ (personal) ontologies as an underlying infrastructure for organising and querying the personal information space. In this paper we present OntoFM, a novel personal information management tool that offers a mindmap-inspired interface to facilitate user interactions with the information base. Besides serving as an information retrieval aid, OntoFM allows the user to specify and update the semantic links between information items, constituting thus a complete personal information management tool.

Abstract:

OntoFM is a novel file manager that bases its interactivity on the user¢s personal ontology, offering semantic browsing and searching mechanisms for locating files, a mind map inspired ontology visualization, and simple-to-use intuitive functionality that encourages less experienced users. The implementation of OntoFM is based on Protege, an extensible open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework. The file manager is implemented as a Protege tab widget, retrieving information from your personal ontology. Ontology visualization is based upon the OntoGraf plug-in which has been extended to comply with the mind map paradigm. Currently the ontology visualization pane permits only navigational functions, while other ontology management functions have been hidden to ease the complexity of the user interface.

Demo material:http://www.uop.gr/~trifon/OntoFM

Abstract:

Ontologies, as knowledge engineering tools, allow information to be modelled in ways resembling to those used by the human brain, and may be very useful in the context of personal information management (PIM) and Task Information Management (TIM). This work proposes the use of ontologies as a long-term knowledge store for PIM-related information, and the use of spreading activation over ontologies in order to provide context inference to tools that support TIM. Details on the ontology creation and content are provided, along with a full description of the spreading activation algorithm and its preliminary evaluation.

Abstract:

Ontologies have been proven invaluable tools in areas like the semantic web and personal information management. There have been many research efforts to create ontologies and supporting tools for Natural Sciences and Biology in particular (e.g. the GO (http://www.geneontology.org/) ontology and supporting tools). However, the domain of History, the science of studying, recording and organizing the knowledge of the past, has yet to benefit from adopting ontologies. In this work, we present our findings in this area, focusing on the aspects of ontology modeling and ontology visualization.

Abstract:

Ontologies, as sets of concepts and their interrelations in a specific domain, have proven to be a useful tool in the areas of digital libraries, the semantic web and personalized information management. As a result, there is a growing need for effective ontology visualization for design, management and browsing. There exist several ontology visualization methods and also a number of techniques used in other contexts that could also be adapted for ontology representation. The purpose of this work is to present these techniques and categorize their characteristics and features in order to assist method selection and promote future research in the area of ontology visualization.

Article available through the ACM Author-izer service:

Ontology visualization methods—a survey

Akrivi Katifori, Constantin Halatsis, George Lepouras, Costas Vassilakis, Eugenia Giannopoulou
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 2007

Abstract:

In the age of digital information more and more digital libraries and historical archives are using information systems in order to facilitate the document retrieval and provide better visualization of the search results and document presentation. Much research has been done in the field of digital libraries, but in the case of historical archives, which have particular needs, this is not the case. To this end, we investigate the use of new tools, which are based on the ontology of the historical archive in order to provide a new and effective method for document retrieval in a dynamic environment which will take into account the collaboration needs of the users.

Abstract:

Ontologies offer a flexible and expressive layer of abstraction, very useful for capturing the semantics of information repositories and facilitating their retrieval either by the user or by the system to support user tasks. This work presents an ontology-based user profiler, in the context of a Personal Interaction Management System (PIMS). The profiler, based on an ontology of the users¢ domain, enables them to create their personal ontology by initially choosing one of the available template ontologies as a starting point, which they subsequently populate and customize. The profiler employs a web interface which allows users to populate their personal ontology through forms, hiding ontology complexities and peculiarities. Forms are dynamically generated through ontology views, which are specified by ontology designers.

Abstract:
Nowadays, more and more cultural venues tend to utilize social media as a main tool for marketing, spreading their messages, engaging public and raising public awareness towards culture. It comes to a point where the massive of content in social media makes it a tedious procedure to contact the appropriate audience, the people that would really be stimulated by cultural information. In this notion, we assume that establishing conversations of high impact can possibly guide the cultural venues to audiences that can benefit more. These conversations usually include the so called influencers, users whose opinion can affect many people on social media; the latter usually referred to as followers. In this research paper we examine the characteristics of the influencers that can affect the procedures of a cultural venue on social media. The research is done within the scope of "CrossCult" EU funded project.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
Wishing to connect cultural heritage, games and social networks, the present work describes games to be used within the framework of a European H2020 project. For the purposes of supporting the museum visit, before, during and after, 5 games were designed for social networks to accomplish user profiling, to promote the museum and the application through social network dissemination, to introduce museum items and themes and to also function as visit souvenirs. The games are also presented in a generic framework for games in cultural heritage, which has been used successfully in the past.

Abstract:
This paper describes methods to allow spreading activation to be used on web-scale information resources. Existing work has shown that spreading activation can be used to model context over small personal ontologies, which can be used to assist in various user activities, for example, in autocompleting web forms. This previous work is extended and methods are developed by which large external repositories, including corporate information and the web, can be linked to the user’s personal ontology and thus allow automated assistance that is able to draw on the entire web of data. The basic idea is augment the personal ontology with cached data from external repositories, where the choice of what data to fetch or discard is related to the level of activation of entities already in the personal ontology or cached data. This relies on the assumption that the working set of highly active entities is relatively small; empirical results are presented, which suggest these assumptions are likely to hold. Implications of the techniques are discussed for user interaction and for the social web. In addition, warm world reasoning is proposed, applying rule-based reasoning over activate entities, potentially merging symbolic and sub-symbolic reasoning over web-scale knowledge bases.

Abstract:
Various forms of spreading activation has been used in a number of web systems, not least in the PageRank algorithm. In our own work we have been using this as a technique for managing context over small and large ontologies, and both our own work and that in LarKC suggests that spreading activation has the potential to aid in reasoning over web-scale data sets including the growing set of linked open data resources. Of particular importance is that spreading activation can be applied locally to a dynamic self-selecting working set of an (practically) unbound linked data collection, as well as globally to the entire collection. However, this potential does not come without problems, some concerning the nature of the algorithm on any large data set, and some more to do with the particular nature of linked open data.

Abstract:
In this paper, we examine how social media can be linked to cultural heritage and in particular how we can incorporate games, social networks, history reflection and culture. More specifically, we explore the following aspects: (a) how social media sites can be integrated into the museum user experience (b) how user interactions within the social media, both within the context of the museum experience and outside it, can be exploited to enhance the quality of recommendations made to the users, (c) how trending topics from social media can be used to link museum exhibits with today’s topics of interest and (d) how multi-level related terms extraction from social media data can lead to proposals for reflections to users. The end goal is to provide increased stimuli for users to study exhibits deeper and reflect on them, as well as to trigger discussion between the users, thus maximizing the impact of a museum visit.

Read the article online via

Abstract:
Social media have gained the majority of attention on the Internet having an extreme number of daily visitors worldwide. The amount of information exchanged is vast, while users have become equally producers and consumers of data. Words like “trending”, “influencers”, “likes” and “viral” are in the daily agenda of data analyzers, as they are associated with factors that play an important role in the influence of social media content to its audience. These aspects are nowadays strongly taken into account by organizations that want to draw the public’s attention to the content they deliver, and in this context cultural institutions have already started to take under great consideration not only their presence in social media, but also the monitoring and exploitation of social media dynamics. In this paper we propose a method that can enable cultural venues to benefit from matches between their own content and ongoing discussions on social media. More specifically we extract trending topics that can be related semantically with the content of a cultural institute and examine how a venue can benefit by exploiting these matches. The proposed approach has been developed in the scope of the “CrossCult” H2020 project, and has been experimentally tested by analyzing the case of Twitter in Greek language.

Abstract:
CrossCult is a newly started project that aims to make reflective history a reality in the European cultural context. In this paper we examine how the project aims to take advantage of advances in semantic technologies in order to achieve its goals. Specifically, we see what the quest for reflection is and, through practical examples from two of the project's flagship pilots, explain how semantics can assist in this direction.

Abstract:

In this paper, we present the vision of an open source learning analytics platform, able to harvest data from different sources, including e-learning platforms and environments, registrar's information systems, alumni systems, etc., so as to provide all stakeholders with the necessary functionality to make decisions on the learning process. The platform's architecture is modular, allowing the introduction of new functionality or connection to new systems to collect needed data. All data can be analyzed and presented though interactive visualizations to find correlations between metrics, to make predictions for students or student groups, to identify best practices for instructors and let them explore 'what-if' scenarios, to offer students personalized recommendations and personalized detailed feedback, etc. Our objective is to inform and empower all stakeholders to improve the learning experience.

Abstract:
CrossCult H2020 is a European project, the aim of which is the reflection of history in a cultural setting. In this paper, we describe how social media can be linked to cultural heritage and in particular how we can incorporate games, social networks, history reflection and culture. The paper presents the case study of one of the project pilots, to show how history reflection can be enhanced with the use of social networks.

Abstract:

Recent research in the domain of Personal Information Management has recognized the need for a paradigm shift towards a more activity-oriented system. Ontologies, as semantic networks with a structure not dissimilar to the one used by the human brain for storing long-term knowledge, may be very useful as the basis of such a system. This work proposes the use of spreading activation over ontologies in order to provide to a task-based system and its associated tools with methods to record semantics related to documents and tasks and to support user context inference.

Abstract:
The recent progress of the World Wide Web has created new needs for information sharing in virtual communities. WhereRU is a multiuser GPS position reporting system that allows users to make their location publicly available as well as associate it with information on places, persons and events that may later also serve as reminders of the their experiences when traveling.

Abstract:
Museum exhibitions are designed to tell a story; this story is woven by curators and in its context a particular aspect of each exhibit, fitting to the message that the story is intended to convey, is highlighted. Adding new exhibits to the story requires curators to identify for each exhibit its aspects that fit to the message of the story and position the exhibit at the right place in the story thread. The availability of rich semantic information for exhibits, allows for exploiting the wealth of meanings that museum exhibits express, enabling the automated or semi-automated generation of practically countless stories that can be told. Personalization algorithms can then be employed to choose from these stories the ones most suitable for each individual user, based on the semantics of the stories and information within the user profile. In this work we examine how opportunities arising from technological advances in the fields of IoT and semantics can be used to develop smart, self-organizing exhibits that cooperate with each other and provide visitors with comprehensible, rich, diverse, personalized and highly stimulating experiences. These notions are included in the design of a system named exhiSTORY, which also exploits previously ignored information and identifies previously unseen semantic links. We present the architecture of the system and discuss its application potential.

Abstract:

This work is an extension of the Protégé tool to accommodate the modeling and presentation of entity history, i.e. past values of properties and/relationships; each such value is timestamped with the period that it was (or will be) valid in the real world. To this end, the presented extension provides:

1. integrated support for data types expressing time quantities - more specifically dates (individual points in time) and periods (anchored segments of the time axis).
2. data types for storing histories of properties of different types (strings, integers, floats, booleans and instances [i.e. relationships]).

The extension can be used in contexts that the modeling of entities' history is important, such as historical archives, museums, etc.

Abstract:
In contemporary internet architectures, including server farms and blog aggregators, web log data may be scattered among multiple cooperating peers. In order to perform content personalization through provision of recommendations on such architectures, it is necessary to employ a recommendation algorithm; however the majority of such algorithms are centralized, necessitating excessive data transfers and exhibiting performance issues when the number of users or the volume of data increase. In this paper we propose an approach where the clickstream information is distributed to a number of peers, which cooperate for discovering frequent patterns and for generating recommendations, introducing (a) architectures that allow the distribution of both the content and the clickstream database to the participating peers and (b) algorithms that allow collaborative decisions on the recommendations to the users, in the presence of scattered log information. The proposed approach may be employed in various domains, including digital libraries, social data, server farms and content distribution networks.

Abstract:
This paper investigates the effect that smart routing and recommendations can have on improving the Quality of Experience of museum visitors. The novelty of our approach consists of taking into account not only user interests but also their visiting styles, as well as modeling the museum not as a sterile space but as a location where crowds meet and interact, impacting each visitor’s Quality of Experience. The investigation is done by an empirical study on data gathered by a custom-made simulator tailored for the museum user routing problem. Results are promising and future potential and directions are discussed.

Note:This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

We introduce a novel knowledge-based recommendation algorithm for leisure time information to be used in social networks, which enhances the state-of-the-art in this algorithm category by taking into account (a) qualitative aspects of the recommended places (restaurants, museums, tourist attractions etc.), such as price, service and atmosphere, (b) influencing factors between social network users, (c) the semantic and geographical distance between locations and (d) the semantic categorization of the places to be recommended. The combination of these features leads to more accurate and better user-targeted leisure time recommendations.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
The most widely used similarity metrics in collaborative filtering, namely the Pearson Correlation and the Adjusted Cosine Similarity, adjust each individual rating by the mean of the ratings entered by the specific user, when computing similarities, due to the fact that users follow different rating practices, in the sense that some are stricter when rating items, while others are more lenient. However, a user’s rating practices change over time, i.e. a user could start as lenient and subsequently become stricter or vice versa; hence by relying on a single mean value per user, we fail to follow such shifts in users’ rating practices, leading to decreased rating prediction accuracy. In this work, we present a novel algorithm for calculating dynamic user averages, i.e. time-in-point averages that follow shifts in users’ rating practices, and exploit them in both user-user and item-item collaborative filtering implementations. The proposed algorithm has been found to introduce significant gains in rating prediction accuracy, and outperforms other dynamic average computation approaches that are presented in the literature.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
The most widely used similarity metrics in collaborative filtering, namely the Pearson Correlation and the Adjusted Cosine Similarity, adjust each individual rating by the mean of the ratings entered by the specific user, when computing similarities, due to the fact that users follow different rating practices, in the sense that some are stricter when rating items, while others are more lenient. However, a user’s rating practices change over time, i.e. a user could start as lenient and subsequently become stricter or vice versa; hence by relying on a single mean value per user, we fail to follow such shifts in users’ rating practices, leading to decreased rating prediction accuracy. In this work, we present a novel algorithm for calculating dynamic user averages, i.e. time-in-point averages that follow shifts in users’ rating practices, and exploit them in both user-user and item-item collaborative filtering implementations. The proposed algorithm has been found to introduce significant gains in rating prediction accuracy, and outperforms other dynamic average computation approaches that are presented in the literature.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Recommender systems are based on information about users' past behavior to formulate recommendations about their future actions. However, as time goes by the interests and likings of people may change: people listen to different singers or even different types of music, watch different types of movies, read different types of books and so on. Due to this type of changes, an amount of inconsistency is introduced in the database since a portion of it does not reflect the current preferences of the user, which is its intended purpose.
In this paper, we present a pruning technique that removes old aged user behavior data from the ratings database, which are bound to correspond to invalidated preferences of the user. Through pruning (1) inconsistencies are removed and data quality is upgraded, (2) better rating prediction generation times are achieved and (3) the ratings database size is reduced. We also propose an algorithm for determining the amount of pruning that should be performed, allowing the tuning and operation of the pruning algorithm in an unsupervised fashion.
The proposed technique is evaluated and compared against seven aging algorithms, which reduce the importance of aged ratings, and a state-of-the-art pruning algorithm, using datasets with varying characteristics. It is also validated using two distinct rating prediction computation strategies, namely collaborative filtering and matrix factorization. The proposed technique needs no extra information concerning the items' characteristics (e.g. categories that they belong to or attributes' values), can be used in all rating databases that include a timestamp and has been proved to be effective in any size of users-items database and under two rating prediction computation strategies.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
In this technical report, we present the experimental findings from applying an algorithm that considers virtual near neighbors (VNNs) in the rating prediction formulation process, in order to increase coverage in the context of sparse datasets.
To this end, the algorithm is applied to seven sparse datasets, which are widely used in recommender system research. Additionally, the algorithm is applied to one dense dataset, in order to gain insight on the performance of the proposed algorithm in this class of datasets, as well.
In short, the algorithm introduces the concept of VNNs i.e. virtual users, which are created from the combination of real ones, in order to be used as candidate NNs in the rating prediction computation process.
In these experiments, the optimal values for the parameters that are used in the algorithm are investigated and more specifically, the thresholds that two individual users can constitute a VNN.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a novel recommendation algorithm, which exploits data sourced from web services provided by the Internet of Things in order to produce more accurate venue recommendations. The proposed algorithm provides added value for the web services offered by the Internet of Things and enhances the state-of-the-art in this algorithm category by taking into account (a) web of things data regarding the contexts of the user and the context of the venues to be recommended (restaurants, movie theatres, etc.), such as the user’s geographical position, road traffic and weather conditions, (b) qualitative aspects of the venues, such as price, atmosphere or service, (c) the semantic similarity of venues and (d) the influencing factors between social network users, derived from user participation in social networks. The combination of these features leads to more accurate and better user-targeted recommendations. We also present a framework which incorporates the above characteristics, and we evaluate the presented algorithm, both in terms of performance and recommendation quality.

Read the article online via

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
One of the major problems that social networks face is the continuous production of successful, user-targeted information in the form of recommendations, which are produced exploiting technology from the field of recommender systems. Recommender systems are based on information about users’ past behavior to formulate recommendations about their future actions. However, as time goes by, social network users may change preferences and likings: they may like different types of clothes, listen to different singers or even different genres of music and so on. This phenomenon has been termed as concept drift. In this paper: (1) we establish that when a social network user abstains from rating submission for a long time, it is a strong indication that concept drift has occurred and (2) we present a technique that exploits the abstention interval concept, to drop from the database ratings that do not reflect the current social network user’s interests, thus improving prediction quality.

Full text

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
Users that populate ratings databases, such as IMDB, follow different marking practices, in the sense that some are stricter, while others are more lenient. This aspect has been captured by the most widely used similarity metrics in collaborative filtering, namely the Pearson Correlation and the Adjusted Cosine Similarity, which adjust each individual rating by the mean of the ratings entered by the specific user, when computing similarities. However, relying on the mean value presumes that the users' marking practices remain constant over time; in practice though, it is possible that a user's marking practices change over time, i.e. a user could start as strict and subsequently become lenient, or vice versa. In this work, we propose an approach to take into account marking practices shifts by (1) introducing the concept of dynamic user rating averages which follow the users' marking practices shifts, (2) presenting two alternative algorithms for computing a user's dynamic averages and (3) performing a comparative evaluation among these two algorithms and the classic static average (unique mean value) that the Pearson Correlation uses.

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce a pruning algorithm which removes aged user ratings from the rating database used by collaborative filtering algorithms, in order to (1) improve prediction quality and (2) minimize the rating database size, as well as the rating prediction generation time. The proposed algorithm needs no extra information concerning the items' characteristics (e.g. categories that they belong to or attributes' values) and can be used with all rating databases that include a timestamp. Furthermore, we propose and validate a method for identifying the most prominent combination of a pruning algorithm and a pruning level for datasets, allowing thus to perform the selection of pruning algorithm and pruning level in an unsupervised fashion.

Abstract:
When rating predictions are computed in user-user collaborative filtering, each individual rating is typically adjusted by the mean of the ratings entered by the specific user. This practice takes into account the fact that users follow different rating practices, in the sense that some are stricter when rating items, while others are more lenient. However, users’ rating practices may also differ in rating variability, in the sense that some user may be entering ratings close to her mean, while another user may be entering more extreme ratings, close to the limits of the rating scale. In this work, we (1) propose an algorithm that considers users’ ratings variability in the rating prediction computation process, aiming to improve rating prediction quality and (2) evaluate the proposed algorithm against seven widely used datasets considering three widely used variability measures and two user similarity metrics. The proposed algorithm, using the “mean absolute deviation around the mean” variability measure, has been found to intro-duce considerable gains in rating prediction accuracy, in every dataset and under both user similarity metrics tested.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract:
Collaborative filtering systems analyze the ratings databases to identify users with similar likings and preferences, termed as near neighbors, and then generate rating predictions for a user by examining the ratings of his near neighbors for items that the user has not yet rated; based on rating predictions, recommenda-tions are then formulated. However, these systems are known to exhibit the “gray sheep” problem, i.e. the situation where no near neighbors can be identified for a number of users, and hence no recommendation can be formulated for them. This problem is more intense in sparse datasets, i.e. datasets with relatively small number of ratings, compared to the number of users and items. In this work, we propose a method for alleviating this problem by exploiting user dissimilarity, under the assumption that if some users have exhibited opposing preferences in the past, they are likely to do so in the future. The proposed method has been eval-uated against seven widely used datasets and has been proven to be particularly effective in increasing the percentage of users for which personalized recommendations can be formulated in the context of sparse datasets, while at the same time maintaining or slightly improving rating prediction quality.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

SoDa Technical report TR-19002v2

Note: this version extends and supersedes the first version of the report, which is available here.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

SoDa Technical report TR-19002

Note: a newer version of this report is available here.