Your Personal, Virtual Librarian

Searching scientific literature is a common and critical activity for research scientists, students, and professionals such as medical clinicians. These search tasks can be time consuming and repetitive, but literature search and management tools are already making the job much easier. This chapter analyses the literature retrieval process, reviews some currently available tools and elaborates on potential future support for the knowledge worker by an intelligent automated assistant. A special focus of this chapter is the automatic retrieval of medical literature and the exploration of the answer space.

Enhancing Video Viewing Experience

In this study, the authors have considered video viewing style to be a type of knowledge medium. Video viewing styles, which are considered to be habitual behaviors during video viewing, are used to externalize one’s viewing skills or know-how about video viewing; they allow users to experience videos through these skills. In order to allow users to experience videos in various viewing styles, the authors have developed a system called the video viewing experience reproducer (VVER), which determines the user’s viewing styles and reuses them. To determine these styles, the system extracts associations between the user’s manipulation of videos and the low-level features of these videos. In this chapter, the authors describe the notion of reusing the video viewing styles and composing them. After discussing examples of utilizing this concept, preliminary user studies have been reported.

Utilisation of Expert Online Retrieval Tools

This chapter focuses on analysing system utilisation patterns, in connection with the use of the “Movement and Training” knowledge management system. Developed with the aim of supporting teaching courses at university level, or more precisely their preparation, realisation and follow-up, this web-based system is free of charge and has been available to a general educational audience since 2005. The authors present an analytic approach, which, in the first instance and from the user’s perspective, illustrates whether the intended utility and added values for instructors and learners have been achieved. A further intention was to identify any potential barriers that would obstruct utilisation of the system. In combination with basic theoretical principles and empirical findings relating to knowledge management, the authors derive implications for modifying the system with the aim of facilitating its future use.

Software Agents for Human Interaction in Social Networks

Social networks like Facebook or MySpace have become very popular in recent years. The number of users visiting these networks on a regular basis is already very high and still increasing. The integration of users into such networks is typically achieved via web interfaces. In addition, modern mobile devices have been developed to support the “reachable everywhere” mentality. They feature up-to-date communication and web interfaces, offering the capacities of small computer systems. By combining these capacities with so-called mobile software agents, a seamless integration of users in on-line communities can be reached. This chapter highlights the potential of software agents for sophisticated interaction in ubiquitous, mobile applications by utilizing the example of social networks as a practical scenario.

BDD-Based Combinatorial Keyword Query Processing under a Taxonomy Model

Digital libraries are one of the key systems for an IT society, and supporting easy access to them is an important technical issue between a human and an intelligent system. Here we consider a publish/subscribe system for digital libraries which continuously evaluates queries over a large repository containing document descriptions. The subscriptions, the query expressions and the document descriptions, all rely on a taxonomy that is a hierarchically organized set of keywords, or terms. The digital library supports insertion, update and removal of a document. Each of these operations is seen as an event that must be notified only to those users whose subscriptions match the document‘s description. In this chapter, the authors present a novel method of processing such keyword queries. Our method is based on Binary Decision Diagram (BDD), an efficient data structure for manipulating large-scale Boolean functions. The authors compile the given keyword queries into a BDD under a taxonomy model. The number of possible keyword sets can be exponentially large, but the compiled BDD gives a compact representation, and enabling a highly efficient matching process. In addition, our method can deal with any Boolean combination of keywords from the taxonomy, while the previous result considered only a conjunctive keyword set. In this chapter, they describe the basic idea of their new method, and then the authors show their preliminary experimental result applying to a document set with large-scale keyword domain under a real-life taxonomy structure.

Towards Next Generation Web

The rapid growth of information demands that new technologies make the right information available to the right user. The more unspecified content published, the more general usability of the World Wide Web is lost. The next generation‘s Web information services will have to be more adaptive to keep the web usable. User demands for knowledge reflecting his or her life case, specific intentions, and therefore a particular quality of content must be served in an understandable way. As a possible solution, the authors present a new technology that matches content against particular life cases, user models and contexts. In a first approach the authors give a quick overview of knowledge, the way it is perceived and an example application dealing with content matching and different views of information required for different kinds of audiences.

A Web-Enabled, Mobile Intelligent Information Technology Architecture for On-Demand and Mass Customized Markets

This chapter presents a web-enabled, intelligent agent-based information system model to support on-demand and mass customized markets. The authors present a distributed, real-time, Java-based, mobile information system that interfaces with firms’ existing IT infrastructures, follows a build-to-order production strategy, and integrates order-entry with supply chain, manufacturing, and product delivery systems. The model provides end-to-end visibility across the entire operation and supply chain, allows for a collaborative and synchronized production system, and supports an event-based manufacturing environment. The system introduces four general purpose intelligent agents to support the entire on-demand and mass customization processes. The adoption of this approach by a semiconductor manufacturing firm resulted in reductions in product lead time (by half), buffer inventory (from five to two weeks), and manual transactions (by 80%). Application of this approach to a leading automotive manufacturer, using simulated data, resulted in a 51% total inventory reduction while increasing plant utilization by 30%. Adoption of this architecture by a pharmaceutical firm resulted in improving accuracy of trial completion estimates from 74% to 82% for clinical trials resulting in reduced trial cost overruns. These results verify that the successful adoption of this system can reduce inventory and logistics costs, improve delivery performance, increase manufacturing facilities utilization, and provide a higher overall profitability.

A Component-Based 3D Geographic Simulation Framework and its Integration with a Legacy GIS

There is an increasing demand for 3D geographic simulation systems. Most systems currently available are closed and based on fixed architectures. Some systems allow us to develop and customize a 3D geographic simulation system, but this usually requires the writing of extensive program code. Especially in 3D geo-disaster simulations, for example, we need to dynamically integrate 2D legacy GIS with 3D geographic simulation systems in order to investigate the details about the damaged areas and the consequences of the disasters. The authors propose a component-based application framework for 3D geographic simulation that can integrate a legacy 2D GIS with geographic simulation systems in a 3D visual environment. Their framework provides a set of 3D visual components required for the development of a new interactive 3D visual geographic simulation. In their framework, component integrators can construct 3D geographic simulation systems by composing the 3D visual components. Moreover, the authors’ integration framework provides two fundamental integration mechanisms, view integration and query integration mechanisms, to integrate it with legacy 2D systems. The view integration function maps the 2D rendering of a legacy 2D GIS onto the surface of the 3D geography used in a 3D visual geographical simulator, and then dispatches every event on the geographic surface to the original 2D GIS. The query integration automatically converts each 3D simulation result that is shown as a set of highlighted regions on the surface of the geography to the corresponding regional query to the 2D GIS. The proposed framework is based on their 3D meme media architecture in which components are represented as meme media objects, and their interoperation is defined by slot connections between them. As a result, their framework enables users to compose 3D geographic simulation systems and to integrate a legacy 2D GIS with a 3D geographic simulation system simply by composing display objects in a 3D visual environment.

Spreadsheet-Based Orchestration for Describing and Automating Web Information Access Processes

A spreadsheet is one of the most widely used applications by office workers. It provides an end user, with a programming environment. In this chapter, the authors propose a spreadsheet-based environment in which end users can orchestrate multiple Web applications. First, the authors provide a method for embedding various Web resources in spreadsheet cells as visual components that can be reused on the spreadsheet. Second, they propose a method by which these embedded components can be accessed by using special functions via the formula language. Third, they present these special functions to describe loop structures. Their approach enables users to define the complex coordination of multiple Web applications on the spreadsheet using its formula language. Further, they describe their prototype implementation, which uses Microsoft Excel and its user interface support to utilize the embedded Web applications.