Intelligent encoding of concepts in web development retrieval

The main aim of the proposed approach presented in this paper is to improve Web information retrieval effectiveness by overcoming the problems associated with a typical keyword matching retrieval system, through the use of concepts and an intelligent fusion of confidence values. By exploiting the conceptual hierarchy of the WordNet (G. Miller, 1995) knowledge base, we show how to effectively encode the conceptual information in a document using the semantic information implied by the words that appear within it. Rather than treating a word as a string made up of a sequence of characters, we consider a word to represent a concept.

Development of a web-service-agents-based family wealth management system

The roiling financial markets, constantly changing tax law and increasing complexity of planning transaction increase the demand of aggregated family wealth management (FWM) services. However, current trend of developing such advisory systems is mainly focusing on financial or investment side. In addition, these existing systems lack of flexibility and are hard to be integrated with other organizational information systems, such as CRM systems. In this paper, a novel architecture of Web-service-agents-based FWM systems has been proposed. Multiple intelligent agents are wrapped as Web services and can communicate with each other via Web service protocols. On the one hand, these agents can collaborate with each other and provide comprehensive FWM advices. On the other hand, each service can work independently to achieve its own tasks. A prototype system for supporting financial advice is also presented to demonstrate the advances of the proposed Webservice- agents-based FWM system architecture.

Development and evaluation of an automated annotation pipeline and cDNA annotation system

Manual curation has long been held to be the gold standard for functional annotation of DNA sequence. Our experience with the annotation of more than 20,000 full-length cDNA sequences revealed problems with this approach, including inaccurate and inconsistent assignment of gene names, as well as many good assignments that were difficult to reproduce using only computational methods. For the FANTOM2 annotation of more than 60,000 cDNA clones, we developed a number of methods and tools to circumvent some of these problems, including an automated annotation pipeline that provides high-quality preliminary annotation for each sequence by introducing an uninformative filter that eliminates uninformative annotations, controlled vocabularies to accurately reflect both the functional assignments and the evidence supporting them, and a highly refined, Web-based manual annotation tool that allows users to view a wide array of sequence analyses and to assign gene names and putative functions using a consistent nomenclature. The ultimate utility of our approach is reflected in the low rate of reassignment of automated assignments by manual curation. Based on these results, we propose a new standard for large-scale annotation, in which the initial automated annotations are manually investigated and then computational methods are iteratively modified and improved based on the results of manual curation.

An innovative use of the web to build graduate team skills

Successful graduates in today's competitive business environments must possess sound interpersonal skills and the ability to work effectively in team situations within, and across, disciplines. However, developing these skills within the higher education curriculum is fraught with organisational and pedagogical difficulties, with many teachers not having the skills, time or resources to facilitate productive group processes. Furthermore, many students find their teamwork experiences frustrating, demanding, conflict-ridden and unproductive. This paper brings together the perspectives and experiences of an engineer and a social scientist in a cross-disciplinary examination of the characteristics of effective teamwork skills and processes. A focus is the development and operation of 'TeamWorker', an innovative online system that helps students and staff manage their team activities and assessment. TeamWorker was created to enhance team teaching and learning processes and outcomes including team creation, administration, development and evaluation. Importantly, TeamWorker can facilitate the early identification of problematic group dynamics, thereby enabling early intervention.

Reflective web interface agent

Web interface agent is used with web browsers to assist users in searching and interactions with the WWW. It is used for a variety of purposes, such as web-enabled remote control, web interactive visualization, and e-commerce activities. User may be aware or unaware of its existence. The intelligence of interface agent consists in its capability of learning and decision-making in performing interactive functions on behalf of a user. However, since web is an open system environment, the reasoning mechanism in an agent should be able to adapt changes and make decisions on exceptional situations, and therefore use meta knowledge. This paper proposes a framework of Reflective Web Interface Agent (RWIA) that is to provide causal connections between the application interfaces and the knowledge model of the interface agent. A prototype is also implemented for the purpose of demonstration.

A community leadership web site project: Sustainability and other issues

This paper reports on an ongoing partnership between Queensland University of Technology and Volunteering Queensland regarding the development and revision of a website for community leaders. The website, designed in late 2003, was established to provide a range of learning activities for community leaders including a problem based learning activity, case studies of community leaders and a range of resources deemed significant for leaders in the community. To date, anecdotal evidence as well as some more hard evidence (i.e. number of visits to the site), indicates that the site appears to be a valuable resource for community leaders. The purpose of this paper was firstly to investigate the utility of the site and secondly to consider some bigger issues concerning its sustainability. To achieve this, the paper explores the perceptions of (i) a group of community leaders regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the site; and (ii) key stakeholders (from QUT and Volunteering Queensland) who participated in a focus group discussion to consider important issues relating to its management and sustainability. Themes emerging from the two groups are provided and implications for small scale partnership projects such as this one are discussed.

Calculation of target locations for web resources

A location-based search engine must be able to find and assign proper locations to Web resources. Host, content and metadata location information are not sufficient to describe the location of resources as they are ambiguous or unavailable for many documents. We introduce target location as the location of users of Web resources. Target location is content-independent and can be applied to all types of Web resources. A novel method is introduced which uses log files and IN to track the visitors of websites. The experiments show that target location can be calculated for almost all documents on the Web at country level and to the majority of them in state and city levels. It can be assigned to Web resources as a new definition and dimension of location. It can be used separately or with other relevant locations to define the geography of Web resources. This compensates insufficient geographical information on Web resources and would facilitate the design and development of location-based search engines.

Web wrapper validation

Web wrapper extracts data from HTML document. The accuracy and quality of the information extracted by web wrapper relies on the structure of the HTML document. If an HTML document is changed, the web wrapper may or may not function correctly. This paper presents an Adjacency-Weight method to be used in the web wrapper extraction process or in a wrapper self-maintenance mechanism to validate web wrappers. The algorithm and data structures are illustrated by some intuitive examples.

Investigating Concept Mapping and Stimulated Recall to Reveal Academic Teacher Beliefs and how they are enacted through learning designs for the Web

Increasingly, academic teachers are designing their own web sites to add value to or replace other forms of university teaching. These web sites are tangible and dynamic constructions that represent the teachers thinking and decisions derived from an implicit belief system about teaching and learning. The emphasis of this study is to explore the potential of the research techniques of concept-mapping and stimulated recall to locate the implicit pedagogies of academic teachers and investigate how they are enacted through the learning designs of their web sites. The rationale behind such an investigation is that once these implicit belief systems are made visible, then conversations can commence about how these beliefs are transformed into practice, providing a potent departure point for academic development.