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In 2005, the National Library of Australia (NLA) began a pilot project to selectively digitize back issues of major Australian newspapers to provide free public access to over 60 million digitized newspaper articles, dating from the first years of Australian colonization to the early 1960s. Trove, a faceted search engine maintained by NLA, provides access to this very large collection. Unfortunately, Trove lacked any means to filter by location, which raised the tantalizing possibility of using advanced computational techniques to identify long-term patterns and trends in newspaper reportage of people, events, concepts, and many other historical entities. PaperMiner, which utilizes text mining techniques for extracting metadata information, was developed that enabled the inclusion of geolocations of the places cited in the newspaper articles and supported the searching of articles by location and visualizing the results of searches using both location and time using a map of Australia. Using PaperMiner, researchers could see when and where the anti-Chinese leagues movement started in Australia and how it spread, to better focus their subsequent research. PaperMiner can be used as a digital humanities tool to assist in research by replacing the tedium of a shallow scan through thousands of Trove search results with a more efficient method that draws the researchers’ attention to more significant times and places where their time can be better spent in deeper analysis. In this article, we describe the techniques utilized in creating PaperMiner and discuss its usability testing with a group of leading researchers in Australian history.

Stigmergy is a biological term originally used when discussing insect or swarm behaviour, and describes a model supporting environment-based communication separating artefacts from agents. This phenomenon is demonstrated in the behavior of ants and their food foraging supported by pheromone trails, or similarly termites and their termite nest building process. What is interesting with this mechanism is that highly organized societies are formed without an apparent central management function. We see design features in Web sites that mimic stigmergic mechanisms as part of the User Interface and we have created generalizations of these patterns. Software development and Web site development techniques have evolved significantly over the past 20 years. Recent progress in this area proposes languages to model web applications to facilitate the nuances specific to these developments. These modeling languages provide a suitable framework for building reusable components encapsulating our design patterns of stigmergy. We hypothesize that incorporating stigmergy as a separate feature of a site’s primary function will ultimately lead to enhanced user coordination.

Software development and Web site development techniques have evolved significantly over the past 20 years. The relatively young Web Application development area has borrowed heavily from traditional software development methodologies primarily due to the similarities in areas of data persistence and User Interface (UI) design. Recent developments in this area propose a new Web Modeling Language (WebML) to facilitate the nuances specific to Web development. WebML is one of a number of implementations designed to enable modeling of web site interaction flows while being extendable to accommodate new features in Web site development into the future. Our research aims to extend WebML with a focus on stigmergy which is a biological term originally used to describe coordination between insects. We see design features in existing Web sites that mimic stigmergic mechanisms as part of the UI. We believe that we can synthesize and embed stigmergy in Web 2.0 sites. This paper focuses on the sub-topic of site UI design and stigmergic mechanism designs required to achieve this.

Building Web 2.0 sites does not necessarily ensure the success of the site. We aim to better understand what improves the success of a site by drawing insight from biologically inspired design patterns. Web 2.0 sites provide a mechanism for human interaction enabling powerful intercommunication between massive volumes of users. Early Web 2.0 site providers that were previously dominant are being succeeded by newer sites providing innovative social interaction mechanisms. Understanding what site traits contribute to this success drives research into Web sites mechanics using models to describe the associated social networking behaviour. Some of these models attempt to show how the volume of users provides a self-organising and self-contextualisation of content. One model describing coordinated environments is called stigmergy, a term originally describing coordinated insect behavior. This paper explores how exploiting stigmergy can provide a valuable mechanism for identifying and analysing online user behavior specifically when considering that user freedom of choice is restricted by the provided web site functionality. This will aid our building better collaborative Web sites improving the collaborative processes.

While undertaking the ANDS RDA Gold Standard Record Exemplars project, research data sharing was discussed with many QUT researchers. Our experiences provided rich insight into researcher attitudes towards their data and the sharing of such data. Generally, we found traditional altruistic motivations for research data sharing did not inspire researchers, but an explanation of the more achievement-oriented benefits were more compelling.

Most web service discovery systems use keyword-based search algorithms and, although partially successful, sometimes fail to satisfy some users information needs. This has given rise to several semantics-based approaches that look to go beyond simple attribute matching and try to capture the semantics of services. However, the results reported in the literature vary and in many cases are worse than the results obtained by keyword-based systems. We believe the accuracy of the mechanisms used to extract tokens from the non-natural language sections of WSDL files directly affects the performance of these techniques, because some of them can be more sensitive to noise. In this paper three existing tokenization algorithms are evaluated and a new algorithm that outperforms all the algorithms found in the literature is introduced.

Since its debut in 2001 Wikipedia has attracted the attention of many researchers in different fields. In recent years researchers in the area of ontology learning have realised the huge potential of Wikipedia as a source of semi-structured knowledge and several systems have used it as their main source of knowledge. However, the techniques used to extract semantic information vary greatly, as do the resulting ontologies. This paper introduces a framework to compare ontology learning systems that use Wikipedia as their main source of knowledge. Six prominent systems are compared and contrasted using the framework.

Semantic relatedness is an important part of developing ontology based systems, as it provides the ability to measure the relatedness of two concepts. This is important not only for computational linguistics but also for intelligent querying and data classification. In this paper we present a rule-based calculation for a semantic relatedness score. This metric was specifically developed for Loculus, an ontology we have developed for the Motion Picture Industry. The Metric is evaluated using three axes: the Temporal Axis, the Inheritance Axis and the Linkage Axis. The metric has been tested on pairs of concept; the resulting scores are consistent with human expectations.

Reference station placement is an important problem when deploying a network based real time kinematic system. It directly affects the cost and performance of the system. However, there is lack of a theory or tool to deal with the reference station placement issue. Given a set of potential locations where reference stations can be established and the distribution of users, the reference station placement problem is to select positions among the potential reference station locations such that the total number of reference stations required is minimal subject to the maximum distance constraint between the users to their closest reference station, which is to guarantee the precision of positioning services. This paper presents a graph-theoretic model for the reference station placement problem. Based on the graphtheoretic model, an efficient algorithm for the reference station placement problem is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in Matlab and tested by simulation. In addition, an empirical study of the impact of the maximum distance constraint on the number of reference stations is conducted and the results are presented in this paper.

Declarative approaches to specifying model-model transformation are an attractive approach because they can offer implicit source model traversal, automatic traceability management, implicit target object creation, and implicit rule ordering. However, when proposing such a declarative logic-based transformation language, there are two common objections. One is programmer unfamiliarity with declarative style, and the other is that of perceived performance problems. In this paper we address these issues, discussing the design of specific features of the Tefkat transformation engine intended to facilitate writing and debugging declarative transformation specifications, and describing important implementation techniques used to avoid performance problems.