Search

Navigating the web with its large number of resources can sometimes be hard. Web-based communities form as individuals get together to discuss and exchange information. These communities provide a nexus around which individuals organise and learn. As they grow and accumulate shared resources, they become rich information sources. The usual way to navigate the web is to search, starting from a search page and then browsing to look for adequate resources. However, when looking for information, individuals often turn to others for recommendations or answers. This paper presents a peer-to-peer tool to assist in web navigation and searches by leveraging a community's existing knowledge. Individuals rate websites and share these ratings with the community. Recommendations are made based on these ratings. This enables a community-geared rating, where individuals know they will find ratings that reflect the opinions of the community in which he or she is inserted. This mimics recommendation-seeking behaviour and has the potential to lead to better results as searches become more directed towards a community's context.

Byline: Stefanos Ziovas, Maria Grigoriadou Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) provide the means to connect the members of a community across geographical or institutional boundaries. However, there are relatively few examples that utilise ICT to connect the members of different communities across the boundaries of their practice. This paper provides empirical support to the issues that concern the connections of different communities that are involved in computer science teaching in secondary education. The members of the communities participated in a web-based community and contributed to project development activities regarding the design, implementation and evaluation of ICT-based educational material. The projects served as the mediating objects around which members of the different communities crossed the boundaries of their practices and achieved mutual engagement.

Byline: Licia Calvi The paper will compare the results from two empirical studies which both deal with the idea of personal social networks and the way they evolve into community ties, with the purpose of identifying the means by which such communities can shift from real-life to online and can be supported by an adequate (online) design. The first study, the Architectures for Mobile Community Content Creation (A4MC[sup.3]) project, considers the case of city inhabitants who share information about the city they live in; the second one, the Virtual Individual Network (VIN) project, focuses on the individuals who are members of an association and on the way they perform activities (e.g., share information, organise events, create content, etc.) with the other association members. In this sense, both projects focus on the notion of personal networks as communities, i.e., on the concept of networking, and this mainly from the point of view of an individual who is engaged in social relations, and envisage the possibility for such communities to become virtual and benefit from their being online. The emphasis is, therefore, on the social issues that are involved in the creation and development of online communities, mostly of peers, i.e., on the social needs of individuals while networking.

Steps on how the information services industry can apply and integrate semantic Web services in its practices are described. Longer-term challenges for evolution of semantic Web services are also discussed.

(This is the first in a series about online media in St. Louis) Already under siege, newspapers must confront a fast-changing technological environment which, depending on whom you talk to [...]

The methodology and tool support needed to provide sophisticated problem-solving facilities on the web, which different users can configure for specific applications are developed. The Internet Reasoning Service is a Web-based front end that lets developers prototype knowledge-based applications out of reusable problem-solving resources in distributed libraries.

Developments in computers, microelectronics, and communication technologies have radically changed the library and information environment. Gone are the days of stand-alone libraries, in which a library was judged less by [...]