ACM Web Science Conference 2021

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Wendy Hall ◽  
Noshir Contractor ◽  
Jie Tang

The 13 th ACM Web Science Conference was hosted online by the University of Southampton from 21--25 June, 2021. The annual event is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating computer and information sciences with a multitude of disciplines including sociology, economics, political science, law, management, language and communication, geography and psychology. It is unique in the way it brings these disciplines together in creative and critical dialogue. It focuses on the full scope of socio-technical relationships that are engaged in the World Wide Web, based on the notion that understanding the Web involves not only an analysis of its architecture and applications, but also insight into the people, organisations, policies, and economics that are affected by and subsumed within it. Since it was first held in Athens in 2009, the conference has been hosted in six countries around the world.

Author(s):  
Mae van der Merwe ◽  
Lorna Uden

University portals are emerging all over the world. Portals have been perceived by many people as the technologies that are designed to enhance work and learning processes at university by making workflows simpler and information more readily available in a form in which it can be processed (Franklin, 2004). There are many benefits for having a portal in a university. First, the portal makes it easy for people to find university information targeted specifically at them. Instead of the user searching the Web for information, a person identifies himself or herself to the portal, and the portal brings all relevant information to that person. Secondly, the portal uses a single consistent Web-based front end to present information from a variety of back-end data sources. Although information about people is stored in many different databases at a university, the role of a portal is to put a consistent face to this information so that visitors do not have to deal with dozens of different Web interfaces to get their information. Usability is an important issue when designing the university portal. Principles from human computer interaction must be included in the design of portals.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Chayes

Dr Chayes’ talk described how, to a discrete mathematician, ‘all the world’s a graph, and all the people and domains merely vertices’. A graph is represented as a set of vertices V and a set of edges E, so that, for instance, in the World Wide Web, V is the set of pages and E the directed hyperlinks; in a social network, V is the people and E the set of relationships; and in the autonomous system Internet, V is the set of autonomous systems (such as AOL, Yahoo! and MSN) and E the set of connections. This means that mathematics can be used to study the Web (and other large graphs in the online world) in the following way: first, we can model online networks as large finite graphs; second, we can sample pieces of these graphs; third, we can understand and then control processes on these graphs; and fourth, we can develop algorithms for these graphs and apply them to improve the online experience.


Author(s):  
Yongjian Fu

With the rapid development of the World Wide Web or the Web, many organizations now put their information on the Web and provide Web-based services such as online shopping, user feedback, technical support, and so on. Understanding Web usage through data mining techniques is recognized as an important area.


Author(s):  
B. M. Subraya

For many years, the World Wide Web (Web) functioned quite well without any concern about the quality of performance. The designers of the Web page, as well as the users were not much worried about the performance attributes. The Web, in the initial stages of development, was primarily meant to be an information provider rather than a medium to transact business, into which it has grown. The expectations from the users were also limited only to seek the information available on the Web. Thanks to the ever growing population of Web surfers (now in the millions), information found on the Web underwent a dimensional change in terms of nature, content, and depth.


Author(s):  
Seyed Morteza Babamir

A software project is developed by collaboration of some expert people. However, the collaboration puts obstacles in the way of software development when the involved people in the project are scattered over the world. Although Internet has provided a collection of scattered islands in which the denizens of the islands are able to communicate with each other, it lacks full requisite qualifications for the collaboration among the denizens. The emerging idea is that a supportive environment should be developed on the Web for providing full requisite qualifications and facilitating collaboration. Towards providing such an environment, this chapter aims to present a framework exploiting Open Hypermedia System (OHS) and a Web-based collaboration protocol. OHS assists in saving and restoring artifacts constructed by the scattered people, and the protocol provides channels to concurrent communication and distributed authoring among the people.


Author(s):  
Aideen J. Stronge ◽  
Wendy A. Rogers ◽  
Arthur D. Fisk

The present study investigated the Web-based problem solving strategies of 16 younger and 16 older experienced Web users. Participants searched for answers to 8 search tasks varying in complexity. Three questions were addressed in this study: (1) Are there age-related differences in success?, (2) If differences in success emerge, are these age-related differences quantitative (e.g., number of strategies)?, or (3) Are these age-related differences qualitative (e.g., type of strategies)?. Overall, younger adults were more successful finding the correct answer to the search tasks. However, this was not due to the number of strategies used, but instead was related to the type of strategy used. Older adults were more likely to use a top-down strategy (i.e., system tool) to find an answer to the search tasks. In general, unsuccessful searchers used significantly more top-down strategies than successful searchers. The implications for these findings are discussed.


2009 ◽  
pp. 2389-2412
Author(s):  
Ying Liang

Web-based information systems (WBIS) aim to support e-business using IT, the World Wide Web, and the Internet. This chapter focuses on the Web site part of WBIS and argues why an easy-to-use and interactive Web site is critical to the success of WBIS. A dialogue act modeling approach is presented for capturing and specifying user needs for easy-to-use Web site of WBIS by WBIS analysis; for example, what users want to see on the computer screen and in which way they want to work with the system interactively. It calls such needs communicational requirements, in addition to functional and nonfunctional requirements, and builds a dialogue act model to specify them. The author hopes that development of the Web site of WBIS will be considered not only an issue in WBIS design but also an issue in WBIS analysis in WBIS development.


Author(s):  
Ina O’Murchu ◽  
Anna V. Zhdanova ◽  
John G. Breslin

Many virtual communities have surfaced and come together on the World Wide Web. Web-based community portals serve as a one-stop place for all information needs serving a group of users that have common interests. As organizations become highly dynamic and the people that join them become more geographically dispersed, the need for improved ways to share and distribute data and information amongst the community or organization members has increased dramatically.


Author(s):  
Michael Lang

Although its conceptual origins can be traced back a few decades (Bush, 1945), it is only recently that hypermedia has become popularized, principally through its ubiquitous incarnation as the World Wide Web (WWW). In its earlier forms, the Web could only properly be regarded a primitive, constrained hypermedia implementation (Bieber & Vitali, 1997). Through the emergence in recent years of standards such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XLink, Document Object Model (DOM), Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) and WebDAV, as well as additional functionality provided by the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Java, plug-ins and middleware applications, the Web is now moving closer to an idealized hypermedia environment. Of course, not all hypermedia systems are Web based, nor can all Web-based systems be classified as hypermedia (see Figure 1). See the terms and definitions at the end of this article for clarification of intended meanings. The focus here shall be on hypermedia systems that are delivered and used via the platform of the WWW; that is, Web-based hypermedia systems.


Author(s):  
Athanasis Karoulis ◽  
Andreas Pombortsis

The rapid establishment of third-generation distance learning environments, the so-called Web-based or tele-teaching environments, is nowadays a fact. The main means for the delivery of this new educational approach is the World Wide Web, and there are some good reasons for its use, such as its easy accessibility by many groups of learners. It also supports multiple representations of educational material and various ways of storing and structuring this information, as well as being powerful and easy to use as a publishing medium. Additionally, it has been widely accepted that the hyper-medial structure of the Web can support learning. Some researchers characterize the Web as an active learning environment that supports creativity. In addition to this, the Web encourages the exploration of knowledge and browsing, behaviors strongly related to learning. The associative organization of information in the Web is similar to that of human memory, and the process of information retrieval from the Web presents similarities to human cognitive activities (Tselios, Avouris, Dimitracopoulou, & Daskalaki, 2001).


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