Finding Earth science data has been a challenging problem given both the quantity of data available and the heterogeneity of the data across a wide variety of domains. Current search engines in most geospatial data portals tend to induce end users to focus on one single data attribute. This approach largely fails to take account of users' multiple…

Information retrieval techniques have been applied to biomedical research for a variety of purposes, such as textual document retrieval and molecular data retrieval. As biomedical research evolves over time, information retrieval is also constantly facing new challenges, including the growing number of available data, the emerging new data types,…

In scoping reviews, boundaries of relevant evidence may be initially fuzzy, with refined conceptual understanding of interventions and their proposed mechanisms of action an intended output of the scoping process rather than its starting point. Electronic searches are therefore sensitive, often retrieving very large record sets that are…

Scientific results are communicated visually in the literature through diagrams, visualizations, and photographs. In this thesis, we developed a figure processing pipeline to classify more than 8 million figures from PubMed Central into different figure types and study the resulting patterns of visual information as they relate to scholarly…

This paper presents two interactive visualization tools for learning management systems (LMS) in order to improve learning and teaching in online courses. The first tool was developed at the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory (IISLab) at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT). The tool is used to analyse students' activity from…

Internet technology has provided people with unprecedented abilities to filter the information they encounter, leading many scholars to fear that people will be exposed to less diversity of perspectives and fragment into homogeneous interest groups. Exposure to a wide range of topics and perspectives about political information in particular is…

With many information retrieval (IR) schemes available, researchers have begun to investigate the benefits of combining results of different IR schemes to improve performance, in the process called "data fusion." This article investigates the predictive power of two variables--similarity of efficacy and dissimilarity of outputs--in simple…

Discusses efforts to locate studies on the older adult second language learner. Notes that one online and three compact disk databases were searched, using search strategies and subject headings appropriate to each particular file. Results reveal that most of the relevant studies were retrieved from the ERIC and the Linguistics and Language…

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign undertook a project to test the efficacy of using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to construct a search and discovery service focused on information resources in the domain of cultural heritage. Provides an overview of the Illinois project, with quantitative data about…

As the number of World Wide Web sites continues to grow at an explosive rate, the need for design guidelines also increases. Although there are a number of resources that provide guidance on structure and content, few address the motivational aspects of Web sites. The Website Motivational Analysis Checklist (WebMAC) was developed to help diagnose…

Examines how people find information online in the context of their other media use and general Internet use patterns, and uses information about demographic background and social support networks. Describes the methodology, and suggests a mix of survey instruments and in-person observations can yield the type of data necessary to understand the…

Describes an investigation of tools, techniques, and methods for the evaluation of interactive library catalogs, with emphasis on diagnostic methods and on use of the catalog in the wider context of user information-seeking behavior. A front-end system (Olive) developed to test various enhancements of traditional transaction lodging as a…

Purpose: The motivation for this investigation is to apply social networking features to a semantic network portal, which supports the efforts in enterprise training units to up-skill the employee in the company, and facilitates the creation and reuse of knowledge in online communities. Design/methodology/approach: The paper provides an overview…

This document contains the three volumes of the technical report for development of the prototype of the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), which is intended to replace the "Dictionary of Occupational Titles.""General Introduction" (Norman G. Peterson) presents an overview of O*NET's purpose, content, and structure.…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…