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The ideas behind Linked Data and the Semantic Web have recently gained ground and shown the potential to redefine the world of the web. Linked Data could conceivably create a huge database out of the Internet linked by relationships understandable by both humans and machines. The benefits of Linked Data to libraries and their users are potentially great, but so are the many challenges to its implementation. The BIBFRAME Initiative provides the possible framework that will link library resources with the web, bringing them out of their information silos and making them accessible to all users., INTRODUCTION For many years now the MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) format has been the focus of rampant criticisms across library-related literature, and though an increasing number of diverse metadata formats for [...]

Topical locality on the Web is the notion that pages tend to link to other topically similar pages and that such similarity decays rapidly with link distance. This supports meaningful [...]

Abstract In chapter 2 of Library Technology Reports (vol. 49, no. 5) 'Library Linked Data: Research and Adoption' we explore the world of linked open data (LOD) and linked open [...]

Web 2.0 provides gathering places for Internet users in blogs, forums, and chat rooms. These gathering places leave footprints in the form of colossal amounts of data regarding consumers' thoughts, [...]

The World Wide Web provides an abundant source of medical information. This information can assist people who are not healthcare professionals to better understand health and illness, and to provide them with feasible explanations for symptoms. However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web. We performed a large-scale, longitudinal, log-based study of how people search for medical information online, supported by a survey of 515 individuals' health-related search experiences. We focused on the extent to which common, likely innocuous symptoms can escalate into the review of content on serious, rare conditions that are linked to the common symptoms. Our results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns. We show that escalation is associated with the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user's predisposition to escalate versus to seek more reasonable explanations for ailments. We also demonstrate the persistence of postsession anxiety following escalations and the effect that such anxieties can have on interrupting user's activities across multiple sessions. Our findings underscore the potential costs and challenges of cyberchondria and suggest actionable design implications that hold opportunity for improving the search and navigation experience for people turning to the Web to interpret common symptoms. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval Search process; query formulation General Terms: Human Factors, Experimentation Additional Key Words and Phrases: Cyberchondria ACM Reference Format: White, R. W. and Horvitz, E. 2009. Cyberchondria: Studies of the escalation of medical concerns in Web search. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 27, 4, Article 23 (November 2009), 37 DOI = 10.1145/1629096.1629101 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1629096.1629101

This article questions how professional communication genres already well established in print form have been changing as they are transplanted into digital media like the Web. Whereas some technology-oriented genre research has sought how a new medium provides genres with new technological features, this article argues that a more insightful approach would seek how a new medium, together with its users, provides genres with new rhetorical situations. To operationally define rhetorical situations, I adapt Lloyd Bitzer's three situational dimensions of exigence, audience, and constraints. Then, to illustrate how the new rhetorical situations of the Web can influence a genre, I explore the genre of the resume. Drawing on a survey of 100 Web resume authors and an analysis of their sites, I show that as each of the three dimensions of the resume's traditional rhetorical situation has opened itself to greater diversity on the Web, the Web version of the resume genre has correspondingly reoriented itself. Hence, genres change in response not just to the new medium's technology per se but to the new rhetorical situations that the medium hosts. doi: 10.2190/TW.39.3.d

The Nursing Home Compare report card provides information on the World Wide Web about quality measures for almost every nursing home in the United States. In this research, we first examined whether consumers were using Nursing Home Compare. Second, we examined whether consumers could accurately interpret the quality information given in Nursing Home Compare. Data were collected from 4754 family members of nursing home residents. A comprehension index was used to examine whether the information contained in Nursing Home Compare for each quality measure was understood by family members. We found that 31% of these consumers used the Internet in choosing a nursing home, and 12% recalled using Nursing Home Compare. We also found that, in general, the comprehension index scores were high, indicating good understanding. Simply having the Nursing Home Compare report card available does not mean that it will be used, nor does it mean that it can influence consumers in any meaningful way. The findings show that consumers understand Nursing Home Compare information, and approximately 12% currently access the Web site. KEYWORDS nursing homes, Nursing Home Compare, report cards

The area of web usability has long intrigued researchers. It has been widely accepted that for a website to be successful, the level of usability has to be high. The reason is because of poorly designed website. While many web designers largely fall on their prior experience to tell if a web site design is good or bad, there is a need to be able to provide clear methodology to do so (2), (3). An article by Goldsborough which quoted Nielson, reported that while many web designers think their websites are important, generally it is users who will determine the relevance of these websites. In this paper, we discuss the methodology of usability and the survey conducted for the webpage that we have done. Key words: Web usability, consistency, interactivity, accessibility, content, INTRODUCTION HCI has developed to become an important area of computer science. Generally, HCI refers to a study of communication between human and computer which draws from supporting knowledge on [...]

The article discusses the research implications of the first successful nationwide digital public reference service shared by government information librarians. The need is to organize professional services in order to take advantage of the digital network and improve on it.

Scientific publishing has undergone a number of paradigm shifts triggered by new technologies. The last technology leap, the world wide web, has made possible a new form of publishing called open access (OA), which places scholarly publications freely accessible for anyone on the web, using voluntary work and a variety of revenue models (other than subscription income) for sustaining the publishing activities. OA is eminently in line with the basic openness principles of science and the status of scientific results as a public good, and it is also cost effective for society as a whole. Despite its evident advantages OA publishing is still only in its infancy and has had a big impact in only a few scientific communities, such as high-energy physics. In civil engineering, and in construction information technology (IT) research, OA is still a relatively rare form of publishing. In the European Commission funded SciX project a generic system for scientific OA publishing was developed and was tested for running a number of services intended for the IT in architecture and civil engineering research communities. In addition the barriers for more widespread use of OA were studied. In this paper the different forms of open access: the peer-reviewed electronic journal, subject-specific, and institutional repositories, are first presented. After that the paper presents some of the results from the theoretical part of the project. Finally the paper briefly describes the architecture of the publishing platform and illustrates it with some of the pilots from the construction IT domain. It concludes with a discussion of the experiences obtained in setting up the pilots. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE) 1052-3928(2008) 134:2(165) CE Database subject headings: Publications; Information management; Information retrieval; Internet; Construction management; Information technology (IT).

Web 3.0 is about making tools available to anyone to report on events and engage supporters more creatively and effectively. The article shares information on how Web 3.0 tools such as PledgeBank can be used to organize a community.

Studies are conducted at General Electric's (GE) Global Research Center to see the effect of intervention mode on employees' response to electronic surveys. The implications of the results to professional communicators who design and administer employee surveys are detailed.

With the rapid development of the World Wide Web, people benefit more and more from the sharing of information. However, Web pages with obscene, harmful, or illegal content can be easily accessed. It is important to recognize such unsuitable, offensive, or pornographic Web pages. In this paper, a novel framework for recognizing pornographic Web pages is described. A C4.5 decision tree is used to divide Web pages, according to content representations, into continuous text pages, discrete text pages, and image pages. These three categories of Web pages are handled, respectively, by a continuous text classifier, a discrete text classifier, and an algorithm that fuses the results from the image classifier and the discrete text classifier. In the continuous text classifier, statistical and semantic features are used to recognize pornographic texts. In the discrete text classifier, the naive Bayes rule is used to calculate the probability that a discrete text is pornographic. In the image classifier, the object's contour-based features are extracted to recognize pornographic images. In the text and image fusion algorithm, the Bayes theory is used to combine the recognition results from images and texts. Experimental results demonstrate that the continuous text classifier outperforms the traditional keyword-statistics-based classifier, the contour-based image classifier outperforms the traditional skin-region-based image classifier, the results obtained by our fusion algorithm outperform those by either of the individual classifiers, and our framework can be adapted to different categories of Web pages. Index Terms--Web pages, pornographic texts, pornographic images, data fusion, recognition.

Words and phrases acquire meaning from the way they are used in society, from their relative semantics to other words and phrases. For computers, the equivalent of 'society' is 'database.' and the equivalent of 'use' is 'a way to search the database.' We present a new theory of similarity between words and phrases based on information distance and Kolmogorov complexity. To fix thoughts, we use the World Wide Web (WWW) as the database, and Google as the search engine. The method is also applicable to other search engines and databases. This theory is then applied to construct a method to automatically extract similarity, the Google similarity distance, of words and phrases from the WWW using Google page counts. The WWW is the largest database on earth, and the context information entered by millions of independent users averages out to provide automatic semantics of useful quality. We give applications in hierarchical clustering, classification, and language translation. We give examples to distinguish between colors and numbers, cluster names of paintings by 17th century Dutch masters and names of books by English novelists, the ability to understand emergencies and primes, and we demonstrate the ability to do a simple automatic English-Spanish translation. Finally, we use the WordNet database as an objective baseline against which to judge the performance of our method. We conduct a massive randomized trial in binary classification using support vector machines to learn categories based on our Google distance, resulting in an a mean agreement of 87 percent with the expert crafted WordNet categories. Index Terms--Accuracy comparison with WordNet categories, automatic classification and clustering, automatic meaning discovery using Google, automatic relative semantics, automatic translation, dissimilarity semantic distance, Google search, Google distribution via page hit counts, Google code, Kolmogorov complexity, normalized compression distance (NCD), normalized information distance (NID), normalized Google distance (NGD), meaning of words and phrases extracted from the Web, parameter-free data mining, universal similarity metric.

The utility of the worldwide web for the provision of information services to the nurses providing health care to cancer patients is discussed.

Abstract: E-learning is being increasing viewed as an important activity in the field of distance and continuing education. Web-based courses offer obvious advantages for learners by making access to educational [...]

Various aspects of e-learning and the functionality process of digital libraries are presented.

A study analyzing the significance of the worldwide web for information research is presented. Suggestions have been provided for library and information science practitioners on how to use the worldwide web for knowledge sharing.

Abstract: Techniques which assist in recognizing various access patterns and interests of the Web users are normally referred to as an application of Web usage mining. The application provides useful [...]

Discrete-event simulation is one of the most popular modelling techniques. It has developed significantly since the inception of computer simulation in the 1950s, most of this in line with developments in computing. The progress of simulation from its early days is charted with a particular focus on recent history. Specific developments in the past 15 years include visual interactive modelling, simulation optimization, virtual reality, integration with other software, simulation in the service sector, distributed simulation and the use of the worldwide web. The future is then speculated upon. Potential changes in model development, model use, the domain of application for simulation and integration with other simulation approaches are all discussed. The desirability of continuing to follow developments in computing, without significant developments in the wider methodology of simulation, is questioned. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601864 Keywords: discrete-event simulation; computing

A study of categorization of information on web is discussed with the proposal to take up webliography.

The results of two studies, in which the contents of psychologists' homepages were investigated, are presented. The results of both studies show that information about research activities dominates the contents of psychologists' homepages.

The two critical indicators of health information quality are source credibility and information completeness. The effect of Web use motivation on the relationship between completeness and consumer perceptions of credibility is investigated.

An asynchronous learning network (ALN) uses the World Wide Web and the Internet to deliver courses anytime rather than 'same time', with an emphasis on student-student as well as student teacher interaction. Swift trust, a unique form of collective perception for temporary situations is reviewed and changes in faculty roles as professors go online is examined.

A study on the use of metadata harvesting and ways to search for resources on the web is examined. The Open Archives Initiative is the focus.

A study examines whether or not webliographies are still in use. The webliographies contain a list of hypertext links to scientific information on the Internet.

Applying traditional survey techniques to Web-based arrangements can result in significant shortcomings in data so gathered. An overview is presented of issues encountered in Web-based surveying.