Trust-based automated recommendation making

Recommender systems are one of the recent inventions to deal with ever growing information overload in relation to the selection of goods and services in a global economy. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most popular techniques in recommender systems. The CF recommends items to a target user based on the preferences of a set of similar users known as the neighbours, generated from a database made up of the preferences of past users. With sufficient background information of item ratings, its performance is promising enough but research shows that it performs very poorly in a cold start situation where there is not enough previous rating data. As an alternative to ratings, trust between the users could be used to choose the neighbour for recommendation making. Better recommendations can be achieved using an inferred trust network which mimics the real world "friend of a friend" recommendations. To extend the boundaries of the neighbour, an effective trust inference technique is required. This thesis proposes a trust interference technique called Directed Series Parallel Graph (DSPG) which performs better than other popular trust inference algorithms such as TidalTrust and MoleTrust. Another problem is that reliable explicit trust data is not always available. In real life, people trust "word of mouth" recommendations made by people with similar interests. This is often assumed in the recommender system. By conducting a survey, we can confirm that interest similarity has a positive relationship with trust and this can be used to generate a trust network for recommendation. In this research, we also propose a new method called SimTrust for developing trust networks based on user's interest similarity in the absence of explicit trust data. To identify the interest similarity, we use user's personalised tagging information. However, we are interested in what resources the user chooses to tag, rather than the text of the tag applied. The commonalities of the resources being tagged by the users can be used to form the neighbours used in the automated recommender system. Our experimental results show that our proposed tag-similarity based method outperforms the traditional collaborative filtering approach which usually uses rating data.

Processpedia : an ecological environment for BPM stakeholders' collaboration

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to clarify how end-users’ tacit knowledge can be captured and integrated in an overall business process management (BPM) approach. Current approaches to support stakeholders’ collaboration in the modelling of business processes envision an egalitarian environment where stakeholders interact in the same context, using the same languages and sharing the same perspectives on the business process. Therefore, such stakeholders have to collaborate in the context of process modelling using a language that some of them do not master, and have to integrate their various perspectives. Design/methodology/approach: The paper applies the SECI knowledge management process to analyse the problems of traditional top-down BPM approaches and BPM collaborative modelling tools. Besides, the SECI model is also applied to Wikipedia, a successful Web 2.0-based knowledge management environment, to identify how tacit knowledge is captured in a bottom-up approach. Findings – The paper identifies a set of requirements for a hybrid BPM approach, both top-down and bottom-up, and describes a new BPM method based on a stepwise discovery of knowledge. Originality/value: This new approach, Processpedia, enhances collaborative modelling among stakeholders without enforcing egalitarianism. In Processpedia tacit knowledge is captured and standardised into the organisation’s business processes by fostering an ecological participation of all the stakeholders and capitalising on stakeholders’ distinctive characteristics.

Learning Landscapes 2.0: Adaptable educational environments

This project has blended two streams of enquiry: temporary and transportable construction technology, and flexible blended-learning environments. It seeks to develop prototypes for a series of environments suited for the activities of learning (future-proofed schools), as practiced in the twenty first century. The research utilises techniques of: historic survey, case study, first-hand observation, and architectural design (as research). The design comprises three major components: The determinate landscape: in-situ concrete ‘plate’ that is permanent. The indeterminate landscape: a kit of pre-fabricated 2-D panels assembled in a unique manner at each site to suit the client and context; manufactured to the principles of design-for-disassembly. The stations: pre-fabricated packages of highly-serviced space connected through the determinate landscape. This project was submitted to the ‘Future Proofing Schools’ competition (professional category) in October 2011. The competition was part of a research project supported under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Grant funding scheme (project LP0991146).

IT governance in collaborative organizational structures

Organizations today engage in various forms of alliances to manage their existing business processes or to diversify into new processes to sustain their competitive positions. Many of today’s alliances use the IT resources as their backbone. The results of these alliances are collaborative organizational structures with little or no ownership stakes between the parties. The emergence of Web 2.0 tools is having a profound effect on the nature and form of these alliance structures. These alliances heavily depend on and make radical use of the IT resources in a collaborative environment. This situation requires a deeper understanding of the governance of these IT resources to ensure the sustainability of the collaborative organizational structures. This study reports on the first stage of this initiative. It suggest the types of IT governance structures required for collaborative organizational structures. Semi-structured interviews with senior executives who operate in such alliances reveal that co-created IT governance structures are necessary. Such structures include co-created IT-steering committees, cocreated operational committees, and inter-organizational performance management and communication systems. The findings pave the way for the development of a model for understanding approaches to governing IT and evaluating the effectiveness for such governance mechanisms in today’s IT dependent alliances.

Social Media and Tacit Knowledge Sharing: Developing a Conceptual Model

With the advent of social web initiatives, some argued that these new emerging tools might be useful in tacit knowledge sharing through providing interactive and collaborative technologies. However, there is still a poverty of literature to understand how and what might be the contributions of social media in facilitating tacit knowledge sharing. Therefore, this paper is intended to theoretically investigate and map social media concepts and characteristics with tacit knowledge creation and sharing requirements. By conducting a systematic literature review, five major requirements found that need to be present in an environment that involves tacit knowledge sharing. These requirements have been analyzed against social media concepts and characteristics to see how they map together. The results showed that social media have abilities to comply some of the main requirements of tacit knowledge sharing. The relationships have been illustrated in a conceptual framework, suggesting further empirical studies to acknowledge findings of this study.

Wikileaks and the challenge of the “Fifth Estate”

The Time magazine ‘Person of theYear’ award is a venerable institution. Established by Time’s founder Henry Luce in 1927 as ‘Man of the Year’, it is an annual award given to ‘a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that ‘for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year’ (Time 2002, p. 1). In 2010, the award was given to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of the social networking site Facebook.There was, however, a strong campaign for the ‘People’s Choice’ award to be given to Julian Assange, the founder and editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, the online whistleblowing site. Earlier in the year Wikileaks had released more than 250 000 US government diplomatic cables through the internet, and the subsequent controver- sies around the actions of Wikileaks and Assange came to be known worldwide as ‘Cablegate’. The focus of this chapter is not on the implications of ‘Cablegate’ for international diplomacy, which continue to have great significance, but rather upon what the emergence of Wikileaks has meant for journalism, and whether it provides insights into the future of journalism. Both Facebook and Wikileaks, as well as social media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube, and independent media practices such as blogging, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, are manifestations of the rise of social media, or what has also been termed web 2.0.The term ‘web 2.0’ was coined by Tim O’Reilly, and captures the rise of online social media platforms and services, that better realise the collaborative potential of digitally networked media. They do this by moving from the relatively static, top-down notions of interactivity that informed early internet development, towards more open and evolutionary models that better harness collective intelligence by enabling users to become the creators and collaborators in the development of online media content (Musser and O’Reilly 2007; Bruns 2008).

Towards an understanding of the participatory library

Purpose: - The purpose of this paper is to debate the evolving relationship between libraries and users, justify the idea of participatory library and the use of the "participatory library" term. The paper also discusses the development trend of the participatory library and calls for empirical research on this area. Design/methodology/approach - Various sources of literature are collected and examined. Together with the inclusion of personal ideas and experience, a wide range of opinions on the contemporary library is compared and synthesized. Findings - The paper presents changes in the relationship between libraries and users in various periods of library development. It indicates an excessive attention on Library 2.0 while neglecting the participatory nature of the contemporary library. It also suggests that the term "participatory library" should be used as this term reflects the true nature of the contemporary library, and calls for empirical work on participatory library. Originality/value - This discussion is moving forward and challenging our thinking about the participatory library. It provides librarians, library managers, scholars, and the library community with a fresh perspective of contemporary library.

Reconciling community and commerce? Collaboration between produsage communities and commercial operators

Collaborative user-led content creation by online communities, or produsage (Bruns 2008), has generated a variety of useful and important resources and other valuable outcomes, from open source software through the Wikipedia to a variety of smaller-scale, specialist projects. These are often seen as standing in an inherent opposition to commercial interests, and attempts to develop collaborations between community content creators and commercial partners have had mixed success rates to date. However, such tension between community and commerce is not inevitable, and there is substantial potential for more fruitful exchanges and collaboration. This article contributes to the development of this understanding by outlining the key underlying principles of such participatory community processes and exploring the potential tensions which could arise between these communities and their potential external partners. It also sketches out potential approaches to resolving them.

Informed cyberlearning : a case study

This cyberlearning case study demonstrates the application of Web 2.0 in mainstream higher education curriculum, whilst providing an in-practice example of informed learning (Bruce, 2008. The case study features the learning experiences and creative outcomes of postgraduate Cyberlearning students at Queensland University of Technology in 2011. As informed learners, the students learned simultaneously about the theory and practice of Cyberlearning by carrying out a virtual team project. This involved collaboratively researching a topical issue, as well as exploring and applying Web 2.0 media. To support the informed learning of their peers, they created online resources which both convey disciplinary knowledge and showcase the educational potential of Web 2.0.

g4c2c: A model for citizen engagement at arms' length from government

The recognition that Web 2.0 applications and social media sites will strengthen and improve interaction between governments and citizens has resulted in a global push into new e-democracy or Government 2.0 spaces. These typically follow government-to-citizen (g2c) or citizen-to-citizen (c2c) models, but both these approaches are problematic: g2c is often concerned more with service delivery to citizens as clients, or exists to make a show of ‘listening to the public’ rather than to genuinely source citizen ideas for government policy, while c2c often takes place without direct government participation and therefore cannot ensure that the outcomes of citizen deliberations are accepted into the government policy-making process. Building on recent examples of Australian Government 2.0 initiatives, we suggest a new approach based on government support for citizen-to-citizen engagement, or g4c2c, as a workable compromise, and suggest that public service broadcasters should play a key role in facilitating this model of citizen engagement.

Potentials of social media for tacit knowledge sharing amongst physicians : preliminary findings

Tacit knowledge sharing amongst physicians, such as the sharing of clinical experiences, skills, or know-how, or know-whom, is known to have a significant impact on the quality of medical diagnosis and decisions. This paper posits that social media can provide new opportunities for tacit knowledge sharing amongst physicians, and demonstrates this by presenting findings from a review of relevant literature and a survey conducted with physicians. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten physicians from around the world who were active users of social media. Initial thematic analysis revealed eight themes as potential contributions of social web tools to facilitate tacit knowledge flow amongst physicians. The emergent themes are defined, linked to the literature, and supported by instances of interview transcripts. Findings presented here are preliminary, and final results will be reported after accomplishing all phases of data collection and analysis.

Collaboration and competition on a Wiki : the praxis of online social learning to improve academic writing and research in under-graduate students

The number of internet users in Australia has been steadily increasing, with over 10.9 million people currently subscribed to an internet provider (ABS, 2011). Over the past year, the most avid users of the Internet were 15 – 24 year olds, with approximately 95% accessing the internet on a regular basis (ABS, Social Trends, 2011). While the internet, in particularly Web 2.0, has been described as fundamental to higher education students, social and leisure internet tools are also increasingly being used by these students to generate and maintain their social and professional networks and interactions (Duffy & Bruns, 2006). Rapid technological advancements have enabled greater and faster access to information for learning and education (Hemmi et al, 2009; Glassman & Kang, 2011). As such, we sought to integrate interactive, online social media into the assessment profile of a Public Health undergraduate cohort at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The aim of this exercise was to engage undergraduate students to both develop and showcase their research on a range of complex, contemporary health issues within the online forum of Wikispaces for review and critique by their peers. We applied Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (SLT) to analyse the interactive processes from which students developed deeper and more sustained learning, and via which their overall academic writing standards were enriched. This paper outlines the assessment task, and the students’ feedback on their learning outcomes in relation to the Attentional, Retentional, Motor Reproduction, and Motivational Processes outlined by Bandura in SLT. We conceptualise the findings in a theoretical model, and discuss the implications for this approach within the broader tertiary environment.

Exploring the Pro-Am interface between production and produsage

This conference celebrates the passing of 40 years since the establishment of the Internet (dating this, presumably, to the first connection between two nodes on ARPANET in October 1969). For a gathering of media scholars such as this, however, it may be just as important not only to mark the first testing of the core technologies upon which much of our present-day Net continues to build, but also to reflect on another recent milestone: the 20th anniversary of what is today arguably the chief interface through which billions around the world access and experience the Internet – the World Wide Web, launched by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

Personalization in tag ontology learning for recommendation making

Due to the explosive growth of the Web, the domain of Web personalization has gained great momentum both in the research and commercial areas. One of the most popular web personalization systems is recommender systems. In recommender systems choosing user information that can be used to profile users is very crucial for user profiling. In Web 2.0, one facility that can help users organize Web resources of their interest is user tagging systems. Exploring user tagging behavior provides a promising way for understanding users’ information needs since tags are given directly by users. However, free and relatively uncontrolled vocabulary makes the user self-defined tags lack of standardization and semantic ambiguity. Also, the relationships among tags need to be explored since there are rich relationships among tags which could provide valuable information for us to better understand users. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for learning tag ontology based on the widely used lexical database WordNet for capturing the semantics and the structural relationships of tags. We present personalization strategies to disambiguate the semantics of tags by combining the opinion of WordNet lexicographers and users’ tagging behavior together. To personalize further, clustering of users is performed to generate a more accurate ontology for a particular group of users. In order to evaluate the usefulness of the tag ontology, we use the tag ontology in a pilot tag recommendation experiment for improving the recommendation performance by exploiting the semantic information in the tag ontology. The initial result shows that the personalized information has improved the accuracy of the tag recommendation.

Open access to judgments : Creative Commons licences and the Australian courts

Internet technologies have fundamentally changed the way we obtain access to legal documents and information about the law. However, for judgments of courts and tribunals, copyright management and licensing practices have not kept pace with the digital and online technologies which are now ubiquitous in the web 2.0 era. Under the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 and the licensing statements on the Australian courts’ websites, judgments may generally be read online, downloaded, reproduced and printed out for personal, non-commercial use or ”in house” use by an organisation. However, beyond these permitted acts, the extent to which judgments can be copied and distributed in digital form online remains unclear. Open content licences (in particular, the Creative Commons (CC) licences) offer an effective mechanism for managing copyright in judgments in a manner that supports their wide public dissemination and reuse while also protecting their integrity and accuracy.