Semantic Community Portals

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.

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.


1997 ◽  
pp. 13-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Johnson ◽  
Myke Gluck

This article looks at the access to geographic information through a review of information science theory and its application to the WWW. The two most common retrieval systems are information and data retrieval. A retrieval system has seven elements: retrieval models, indexing, match and retrieval, relevance, order, query languages and query specification. The goal of information retrieval is to match the user's needs to the information that is in the system. Retrieval of geographic information is a combination of both information and data retrieval. Aids to effective retrieval of geographic information are: query languages that employ icons and natural language, automatic indexing of geographic information, and standardization of geographic information. One area that has seen an explosion of geographic information retrieval systems (GIR's) is the World Wide Web (WWW). The final section of this article discusses how seven WWW GIR's solve the the problem of matching the user's information needs to the information in the system.


Web Mining ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 69-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Navigli

Domain ontologies are widely recognized as a key element for the so-called semantic Web, an improved, “semantic aware” version of the World Wide Web. Ontologies define concepts and interrelationships in order to provide a shared vision of a given application domain. Despite the significant amount of work in the field, ontologies are still scarcely used in Web-based applications. One of the main problems is the difficulty in identifying and defining relevant concepts within the domain. In this chapter, we provide an approach to the problem, defining a method and a tool, OntoLearn, aimed at the extraction of knowledge from Websites, and more generally from documents shared among the members of virtual organizations, to support the construction of a domain ontology. Exploiting the idea that a corpus of documents produced by a community is the most representative (although implicit) repository of concepts, the method extracts a terminology, provides a semantic interpretation of relevant terms and populates the domain ontology in an automatic manner. Finally, further manual corrections are required from domain experts in order to achieve a rich and usable knowledge resource.


Author(s):  
Sathiyamoorthi V.

It is generally observed throughout the world that in the last two decades, while the average speed of computers has almost doubled in a span of around eighteen months, the average speed of the network has doubled merely in a span of just eight months! In order to improve the performance, more and more researchers are focusing their research in the field of computers and its related technologies. Internet is one such technology that plays a major role in simplifying the information sharing and retrieval. World Wide Web (WWW) is one such service provided by the Internet. It acts as a medium for sharing of information. As a result, millions of applications run on the Internet and cause increased network traffic and put a great demand on the available network infrastructure.


2011 ◽  
pp. 203-212
Author(s):  
Luis V. Casaló ◽  
Carlos Flavián ◽  
Miguel Guinalíu

Individuals are increasingly turning to computermediated communication in order to get information on which to base their decisions. For instance, many consumers are using newsgroups, chat rooms, forums, e-mail list servers, and other online formats to share ideas, build communities and contact other consumers who are seen as more objective information sources (Kozinets, 2002). These social groups have been traditionally called virtual communities. The virtual community concept is almost as old as the concept of Internet. However, the exponential development of these structures occurred during the nineties (Flavián & Guinalíu, 2004) due to the appearance of the World Wide Web and the spreading of other Internet tools such as e-mail or chats. The justification of this expansion is found in the advantages generated by the virtual communities to both the members and the organizations that create them.


Author(s):  
Giorgos Laskaridis ◽  
Konstantinos Markellos ◽  
Penelope Markellou ◽  
Angeliki Panayiotaki ◽  
Athanasios Tsakalidis

The emergence of semantic Web opens up boundless new opportunities for e-business. According to Tim Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila (2001), “the semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation”. A more formal definition by W3C (2001) refers that, “the semantic Web is the representation of data on the World Wide Web. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the resource description framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) for syntax and uniform resource identifiers (URIs) for naming”. The capability of the semantic Web to add meaning to information, stored in such way that it can be searched and processed as well as recent advances in semantic Web-based technologies provide the mechanisms for semantic knowledge representation, exchange and collaboration of e-business processes and applications.


Author(s):  
Jacqueline A. Gilbert

The World Wide Web (WWW) was initially written as a “point and click hypertext editor” (Berners-Lee, 1998, para. 2). Used as a search device by academia and industry, it has over the years experienced both rapid and explosive growth. Earlier incarnations of the World Wide Web were known as “Web 1.0.” Since its inception however the internet has undergone a rapid transformation into what is now considered a sense of community, a reciprocal sharing among users, and a sense of “cognitive presence” (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000), which has been facilitated by a plethora of software tools that allowed users to widely share their work, in thought (e.g., blogs), in creative endeavors, and in collaborative projects. Siemens’ (2005) theory of “connectivism” encompasses the feeling that sharing promotes and encourages a sense of community that is continually being recreated by its audience. The newest forms of interaction are in the form of virtual worlds, in which avatars can attend class, build their own edifices, sell objects, and meet with other individuals in a global virtual exchange. What was once considered static computing has been transformed into a rich, dynamic environment that is defined by the people who peruse it, as evidenced in the following quotation: “The breaking down of barriers has led to many of the movements and issues we see on today’s internet. File-sharing, for example, evolves not of a sudden criminality among today’s youth, but rather in their pervasive belief that information is something meant to be shared” (Downes, 2006, para. 15). As of 2006, the Web had a billion users worldwide (Williams, 2007). Today’s Web users for the most part are not simply information seekers, but co-creators who wish to collaborate and share information in an electronic environment.


Author(s):  
Melissa B. Holler

The foundation for much of the technology being used in today’s classroom is the Microsoft Office suite. It is fast becoming the integrated software package of choice for many schools and school districts. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access are the staples for many students and teachers. Complimenting these capabilities, Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator are the tools of choice for accessing the World Wide Web. Why not help teachers utilize these same tools to develop text, visual, and Web-based materials for the classroom, and leave the more complex and costly packages to multimedia designers and commercial artists? The success of this philosophy has been borne out by a blistering growth in applications from K-12 classroom teachers, technology coordinators, and corporate trainers.


Author(s):  
Deborah L. Lowther ◽  
Marshall G. Jones ◽  
Robert T. Plants

The potential impact of the World Wide Web (WWW) on our educational system is limitless. However, if our teachers do not possess the appropriate knowledge and skills to use the Web, the impact could be less than positive. It is evident, then, that our teachers need to be prepared to effectively use these powerful on-line resources to prepare our children to thrive in a digital society. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the impact of Web-based education on teacher education programs by addressing the following questions: • How is the World Wide Web impacting education? • Are teacher education programs meeting the challenge of producing certified teachers who are capable of integrating meaningful use of technology into K-12 classrooms? • What is expected of teacher education programs in regards to technology and Web-based education? • What knowledge and skills do preservice teachers need to effectively use Web-based education? • What instructional approaches should be used to prepare preservice teachers to use Web-based education?


Author(s):  
Man-Hua Wu ◽  
Herng-Yow Chen

With the rapid growth of the Internet and the increasing popularity of the World Wide Web, web-based learning systems have become more and more popular. However, in general Web-based learning systems, learners may often get lost in the enormous educational materials (Eirinaki & Vazirgiannis, 2003; Murray, 2002). This kind of situation refers to a disorientation problem. In addition to the disorientation problem, general Web-based learning systems provide every learner with uniform course content and presentation without considering the different knowledge level of learners. Therefore, the course content may be insufficient or unnecessary for learners with different knowledge level. This kind of situation was referred to as cognitive-overhead problem by Murray (2002).


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