The World Wide Web enables an easy, instant access to a huge quantity of information. Over the last few decades, a number of improvements have been achieved that helped the web reach its current state. However, the current Internet links documents together without understanding them, and thus, makes the content of web only human-readable rather…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of meta-tags by the leading higher educational institutions (HEIs). It explores the various kinds of messages conveyed by HEIs in the meta-description tags of their website homepage. It further examines that whether the messages conveyed by HEIs are in accordance with the prospective…

This study analyzed digital item metadata and keywords from Internet search engines to learn what metadata elements actually facilitate discovery of digital collections through Internet keyword searching and how significantly each metadata element affects the discovery of items in a digital repository. The study found that keywords from Internet…

Students who search for broad terms on the Internet can be deluged by useless or offensive information. Dave Gladney, project manager for the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP), says what's needed is a commonly agreed-upon vocabulary for describing content for education search. The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) has a…

With the rapid development of Internet technologies, distance education has become a popular educational mode. In this paper, the authors propose an online image automatic annotation distance education system, which could effectively help children learn interrelations between image content and corresponding keywords. Image automatic annotation is…

The concept of learning objects has been applied in the e-learning field to promote the accessibility, reusability, and interoperability of learning content. Learning Object Metadata (LOM) was developed to achieve these goals by describing learning objects in order to provide meaningful metadata. Unfortunately, the conventional LOM lacks the…

Even though the concept of information literacy typically embraces an idea of a complete participation in an information community, its definitions have tended to underline the phases of seeking, searching and evaluation instead of creating information. Shortcomings of information creation can, however, explain many of the difficulties of finding…

Librarians regularly encounter students who struggle to understand and apply information literacy concepts. A qualitative survey administered to information literacy practitioners asked about troublesome content and analyzed results using the threshold concepts pedagogical framework first described by Jan Meyer and Ray Land. A threshold concept…

This paper describes a procedure to manage connotations, so that they may be identified in the document databases of television channels. The system is based on Ranganathan's facets, as this is the best tool to describe actions--i.e. the units analysed in television--which enable the identification of the connoted information by introducing or…

An increasing number of Web sites expose their content via query interfaces, many of them offering the same type of products/services (e.g., flight tickets, car rental/purchasing). They constitute the so-called "Deep Web". Accessing the content on the Deep Web has been a long-standing challenge for the database community. For a user interested in…

Purpose: This paper aims to present the semantic content identifier (SCI), a permanent identifier, computed through a linear-time onion-peeling algorithm that enables the extraction of semantic features from a text, and the integration of this information within the permanent identifier. Design/methodology/approach: The authors employ SCI to…

Multimedia educational resources play an important role in education, particularly for distance learning environments. With the rapid growth of the multimedia web, large numbers of educational video resources are increasingly being created by several different organizations. It is crucial to explore, share, reuse, and link these educational…

Learning objects (LOs) are digital or non-digital entities used for learning, education or training commonly stored in repositories searchable by their associated metadata. Unfortunately, based on the current standards, such metadata is often missing or incorrectly entered making search difficult or impossible. In this paper, we investigate…

With the increasing wealth of information on the Web, information integration is ubiquitous as the same real-world entity may appear in a variety of forms extracted from different sources. This dissertation proposes supervised and unsupervised algorithms that are naturally integrated in a scalable framework to solve the entity resolution problem,…

The paper proposes a framework for building ontology-aware learning object (LO) content. Previously ontologies were exclusively employed for enriching LOs' metadata. Although such an approach is useful, as it improves retrieval of relevant LOs from LO repositories, it does not enable one to reuse components of a LO, nor to incorporate an explicit…