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Purpose: Away from central public authorities, regional (also called rural) enterprises do not have direct, physical access to all the services that governmental or public agencies offer. Very often, these services are essential for enterprises, mostly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in such areas, in order to perform their business operations. This paper aims to present an example of how such types of information management and use took place in the case of familiarizing rural SMEs with the use of e-government. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is a case study of how a practical application is designed and developed for the blended training of rural SMEs. First of all, an identification of the main information resources that will be stored, annotated, shared and accessed through the system took place. Then, an outline of the general architecture and user roles involved was developed. System analysis and specification using Unified Modeling Language (UML) then took place. This was accompanied by design and specification of the database, based on appropriate metadata schemas for describing the information resources. The whole process was completed by the design and prototype development of the interface, which was put into public operation and testing with a sample set of real users. Findings: Although there are several information management systems focusing on the education and training of rural stakeholders, their learning resources are not directly relevant to SMEs' needs. The main finding of this paper is that it shows a complete case study of designing, developing and evaluating an information technology application for rural businesses. Originality/value: The value of the approach presented here is the combination of training resources in an information system with a blended training approach, so that it better matches the learning needs of SMEs. Through this web-based environment, rural SMEs are able to find information on the e-government services offered in their region, as well as gaining access to e-learning content on how they can use such services. (Contains 14 figures.)

In this paper, we explore how we may give researchers from different disciplines new tools to enrich and use the data that are made discoverable and accessible through Europeana, the digital cultural aggregator of Europe. This paper presents a use case where selected content from Europeana is used as a resource for Social Scientists working in the agriculture and food domain. The process starts with the profiling and the identification of content requirements of the research community of the Greek Agricultural Economics Research Institute (AGRERI) to the enrichment of its library with quality content from Europeana and the development of a discovery microsite for AGRERI, providing access to the aforementioned selected content. The paper presents the connection of this content with AGINFRA, the data infrastructure for European agricultural research. This paper aims to showcase how researchers working in completely different disciplines may discover and exploit data sets of interest to them, from the vast amount of resources available through Europeana. By using these resources, agricultural (and not only) researchers can investigate various topics using different scientific methods and tools, thus making multi-disciplinary agriculture research more useful and meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning analytics is a domain that has been constantly evolving throughout recent years due to the acknowledgement of its importance by those using intelligent data, learner-produced data, and analysis models to discover information and social connections for predicting and advising people's learning [1]. Learning analytics may be applied in a variety of different cases, but their role in understanding the multilingual requirements of users of learning portals is of an outstanding significance. As the adaptation of existing portals in multilingual environments is a cost- and time-consuming aspect of the development of a portal, the outcomes of learning analytics may provide the requirements on which further multilingual services of a portal will be built, ensuring their efficiency. This paper aims to identify and interpret the behavior of users from developing countries in a multilingual learning portal using the log files of the portal by applying the methodology defined in a previous work by Stoitsis et al. [2] The paper also aims to identify the aspects that should be studied by future related works by focusing on specific regions and countries that exhibit special interest for further adaptation of the portal to additional multilingual environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]