The variety and complexity of potentially-related data resources available for querying--webpages, databases, data warehouses--has been growing ever more rapidly. There is a growing need to pose integrative queries "across" multiple such sources, exploiting foreign keys and other means of interlinking data to merge information from diverse…

The deep semantic understanding necessary for complex natural language processing tasks, such as automatic question-answering or text summarization, would benefit from highly accurate word sense disambiguation (WSD). This dissertation investigates what makes an appropriate and effective sense inventory for WSD. Drawing on theories and…

Historically, managing access to information systems (ISs) required direct interaction with a limited number of users. Increasingly, managing access involves handling an increased numbers of internal and external students, faculty, and staff as well as partners such as workforce development centers, the U.S. Department of Education, and the…

The need, use, benefit and potential of e-portfolios have been analysed and discussed by a substantial body of researchers in the education community. However, the development and implementation approaches of e-portfolios to date have faced with various challenges and limitations. This paper presents a new approach of an e-portfolio system design…

When the Vise Library at Cumberland University set down the path to their digital makeover, they were optimistic that they could completely revolutionize their library's web presence. They tried to keep their goals manageable, but it turns out they did not "quite" achieve 100% success. In this article, the author describes how they have…

Working as systems librarian for the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), a project for the National Solar Observatory (NSO) based in Tucson, Arizona, a large part of the author's responsibilities involve running the web site. She began looking into content management systems (CMSs), specifically ones for website control. A CMS is generally…

An interoperability gap exists between Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Learning Object Repositories (LORs). Learning Objects (LOs) and the associated Learning Object Metadata (LOM) that is stored within LORs adhere to a variety of LOM standards. A common LOM standard found in LORs is the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)…

Online information sources, such as pictures and animations on web pages are frequently used for complementing printed course material in educational contexts. The concurrent use of online and printed information sources by students, however, requires going back and forth between physically separated course material, such as a course book and a…

Larry Johnson has been the CEO of the New Media Consortium (NMC) for nearly a decade, and he has worked in higher education for more than twenty-five years. Before joining NMC, he served in roles that include faculty member, dean, provost, and president. In this interview, he talks about the position of NMC in distance education and the challenges…

HCI is a field which has an increasing popularity by virtue of the spread of the computers and internet and gradually contributes to the production of the user-friendlier software and hardware with the contribution of the scientists from different disciplines. Teacher candidates studying at the computer and instructional technologies department…

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…

Zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs) have received a significant amount of attention in the 18 years since they were introduced. They have enjoyed some success, and elements of ZUIs are widely used in computers today, although the grand vision of a zoomable desktop has not materialised. This paper describes the premise and promise of ZUIs along with…

Purpose: Linking Open Data (LOD) provides a vast amount of well structured semantic information, but many inconsistencies may occur, especially if the data are generated with the help of automated methods. Data cleansing approaches enable detection of inconsistencies and overhauling of affected data sets, but they are difficult to apply…

Academic library home pages are not only access points to the resources and services of a library, they are virtual representations of the library itself. The content placed on the page, where it is placed, and the amount of space allotted are all choices that send a message about the character of the library, the resources a user should start…

This paper describes a competition-style of exercise to teach system and network security and to reinforce themes taught in class. The exercise, called NetSecLab, is conducted on a closed network with student-formed teams, each with their own Linux system to defend and from which to launch attacks. Students are expected to learn how to: 1) install…