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Millions of users on the Internet have fallen into phishing website traps. Detection tools are designed to warn users against such attacks, but often fail to achieve this purpose. One crucial reason behind this is that users rarely have a chance to interact and build a relationship with a detection tool that stealthily runs at the backend. A warning message on a rarely seen interface from such a tool hardly inspires users' trust in its authenticity and accuracy. In this study, we propose an ontology-based intelligent interface personalization (OBIIP) design for the warning interfaces of phishing website detection tools. We first constructed an ontology of warning interface elements (OWIE), which is a comprehensive knowledgebase for warning interface design. We then used OWIE in the design and creation of an OBIIP prototype and assessed it in a laboratory experiment and an online experiment. The results show the significant value of OBIIP in improving users' performance in terms of self-protection against website phishing attacks and building a stronger relationship with the detection tool in terms of trust in and use of the tool. Millions of users on the Internet have fallen into phishing website traps. Detection tools are designed to warn users against such attacks but often fail to achieve this purpose due to usability issues. To address these issues and increase user self-protection against such attacks, we propose an ontology-based intelligent interface personalization (OBIIP) design for the warning interfaces of phishing website detection tools. Our design involves two phases: proof-of-concept and proof-of-value. The proof-of-concept phase consists of developing an ontology of warning interface elements (OWIE) based on the ontology approach in design science, expert feedback, and inputs from multiple populations through three rounds of surveys with 1,297 participants. OWIE is then used in the design and creation of an OBIIP prototype. The proof-of-value phase involves a controlled laboratory experiment (with 596 participants) to assess OBIIP's value in terms of users' self-protection performance as well as a posthoc online data collection (with 191 participants) and analysis to reveal the role of the design element categories in users' trust and perceived personalization in OBIIP. The assessment results show the significant value of OBIIP in improving self-protection performance as well as the pervasive impact of OBIIP in improving users' relationship with the security tool in terms of trust in and use of the tool. This work also identifies categories of design elements that matter in the OBIIP process. History: Suprateek Sarker, Senior Editor; David (Jingjun) Xu, Associate Editor. Funding: This work was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation [Grant CNS-1049497]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0065. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web sites rely on pictures and animation to convey subtle messages that are more effectively communicated nonverbally. We argue that such messages could have strong cultural content, which should be understood in developing Web sites. Hence, this paper explores the cultural content of Web site images and develops a theory for Web-image signifiers. This is done in two phases. Phase I has an interpretive qualitative approach that uses Grounded Theory to identify signifiers and to develop the Web-image signifiers (WIS) theory. Phase II quantitatively tests the WIS theory. Together, these two phases identify and validate signifiers of cultural dimensions in Web site images. More interestingly, the results uncover that cultural dimensions are signified in five categories, of which two, humans and buildings categories, are the most prominent. The contribution of this paper is in developing a comprehensive theory for the cultural content of Web images, identifying 48 signifiers in Web images, discovering new categories of signifiers, and providing insights into the nature of cultural signification by testing the theory. Such knowledge could heighten our sensitivity and awareness of hidden cultural messages in Web site images. The WIS theory could provide a novel approach to the cultural studies of Web images and other artifacts with cultural content. The results of this work have immediate application in the design of Web sites for a multicultural audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent natural disasters have highlighted the need for disaster preparedness, planning, and management. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the usefulness of Web sites in dealing with natural disasters. However, little is known about the necessary contents and structures of Web-based information systems for natural disaster management. In this paper, we focus on developing an ontology structure of elements for Web-based disaster management systems. Web elements are identified, following a grounded-theory approach, from an inventory of 6032 Web pages drawn from 100 disaster management Web sites. Selected semistructured data representation approaches are used to organize the resulting ontology structure, which consists of 2094 Web elements. The ontology structure is further coded into a Web-based system, allowing easy online access. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]