Quality of Web-based information on obsessive compulsive disorder.

BACKGROUND: The Internet is increasingly used as a source of information for mental health issues. The burden of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) may lead persons with diagnosed or undiagnosed OCD, and their relatives, to search for good quality information on the Web. This study aimed to evaluate the quality of Web-based information on English-language sites dealing with OCD and to compare the quality of websites found through a general and a medically specialized search engine. METHODS: Keywords related to OCD were entered into Google and OmniMedicalSearch. Websites were assessed on the basis of accountability, interactivity, readability, and content quality. The "Health on the Net" (HON) quality label and the Brief DISCERN scale score were used as possible content quality indicators. Of the 235 links identified, 53 websites were analyzed. RESULTS: The content quality of the OCD websites examined was relatively good. The use of a specialized search engine did not offer an advantage in finding websites with better content quality. A score ≥16 on the Brief DISCERN scale is associated with better content quality. CONCLUSION: This study shows the acceptability of the content quality of OCD websites. There is no advantage in searching for information with a specialized search engine rather than a general one. Practical implications: The Internet offers a number of high quality OCD websites. It remains critical, however, to have a provider-patient talk about the information found on the Web.

Quality of Web-based information on obsessive compulsive disorder.

BACKGROUND: The Internet is increasingly used as a source of information for mental health issues. The burden of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) may lead persons with diagnosed or undiagnosed OCD, and their relatives, to search for good quality information on the Web. This study aimed to evaluate the quality of Web-based information on English-language sites dealing with OCD and to compare the quality of websites found through a general and a medically specialized search engine. METHODS: Keywords related to OCD were entered into Google and OmniMedicalSearch. Websites were assessed on the basis of accountability, interactivity, readability, and content quality. The "Health on the Net" (HON) quality label and the Brief DISCERN scale score were used as possible content quality indicators. Of the 235 links identified, 53 websites were analyzed. RESULTS: The content quality of the OCD websites examined was relatively good. The use of a specialized search engine did not offer an advantage in finding websites with better content quality. A score ≥16 on the Brief DISCERN scale is associated with better content quality. CONCLUSION: This study shows the acceptability of the content quality of OCD websites. There is no advantage in searching for information with a specialized search engine rather than a general one. Practical implications: The Internet offers a number of high quality OCD websites. It remains critical, however, to have a provider-patient talk about the information found on the Web.

Quality of web-based information on bipolar disorder

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate web-based information on bipolar disorder and to assess particular content quality indicators. METHODS: Two keywords, "bipolar disorder" and "manic depressive illness" were entered into popular World Wide Web search engines. Websites were assessed with a standardized proforma designed to rate sites on the basis of accountability, presentation, interactivity, readability and content quality. "Health on the Net" (HON) quality label, and DISCERN scale scores were used to verify their efficiency as quality indicators. RESULTS: Of the 80 websites identified, 34 were included. Based on outcome measures, the content quality of the sites turned-out to be good. Content quality of web sites dealing with bipolar disorder is significantly explained by readability, accountability and interactivity as well as a global score. CONCLUSIONS: The overall content quality of the studied bipolar disorder websites is good.

Backpacker 2.0 - Contemporary backpackers and their use of social media as an information and communication platform

Long-term independent budget travel to countries far away has become increasingly common over the last few decades, and backpacking has now entered the tourism mainstream. Nowadays, backpackers are a very important segment of the global travel market. Backpacking is a type of tourism that involves a lot of information search activities. The Internet has become a major source of information as well as a platform for tourism business transactions. It allows travelers to gain information very effortlessly and to learn about tourist destinations and products directly from other travelers in the form of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). Social media has penetrated and changed the backpacker market, as now modern travelers can stay connected to people at home, read online recommendations, and organize and book their trips very independently. In order to create a wider understanding on modern-day backpackers and their information search and share behavior in the Web 2.0 era, this thesis examined contemporary backpackers and their use of social media as an information and communication platform. In order to achieve this goal, three sub-objectives were identified: 1. to describe contemporary backpacker tourism 2. to examine contemporary backpackers’ travel information search and share behavior 3. to explore the impacts of new information and communications technologies and Web 2.0 on backpacker tourism The empirical data was gathered with an online survey, thus the method of analysis was mainly quantitative, and a qualitative method was used for a brief analysis of open questions. The research included both descriptive and analytical approaches, as the goal was to describe modern-day backpackers, and to examine possible interdependencies between information search and share behavior and background variables. The interdependencies were tested for statistical significance with the help of five research hypotheses. The results suggested that backpackers no longer fall under the original backpacker definitions described some decades ago. Now, they are mainly short-term travelers, whose trips resemble more those of mainstream tourists. They use communication technologies very actively, and particularly social media. Traditional information sources, mainly guide books and recommendations from friends, are of great importance to them but also eWOM sources are widely used in travel decision making. The use of each source varies according to the stage of the trip. All in all, Web 2.0 and new ICTs have transformed the backpacker tourism industry in many ways. Although the experience has become less authentic in some travelers’ eyes, the backpacker culture is still recognizable.

Search engine advertising in web retailing : an efficiency analysis

This study examines the efficiency of search engine advertising strategies employed by firms. The research setting is the online retailing industry, which is characterized by extensive use of Web technologies and high competition for market share and profitability. For Internet retailers, search engines are increasingly serving as an information gateway for many decision-making tasks. In particular, Search engine advertising (SEA) has opened a new marketing channel for retailers to attract new customers and improve their performance. In addition to natural (organic) search marketing strategies, search engine advertisers compete for top advertisement slots provided by search brokers such as Google and Yahoo! through keyword auctions. The rationale being that greater visibility on a search engine during a keyword search will capture customers' interest in a business and its product or service offerings. Search engines account for most online activities today. Compared with the slow growth of traditional marketing channels, online search volumes continue to grow at a steady rate. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, spending on search engine marketing by North American firms in 2008 was estimated at $13.5 billion. Despite the significant role SEA plays in Web retailing, scholarly research on the topic is limited. Prior studies in SEA have focused on search engine auction mechanism design. In contrast, research on the business value of SEA has been limited by the lack of empirical data on search advertising practices. Recent advances in search and retail technologies have created datarich environments that enable new research opportunities at the interface of marketing and information technology. This research uses extensive data from Web retailing and Google-based search advertising and evaluates Web retailers' use of resources, search advertising techniques, and other relevant factors that contribute to business performance across different metrics. The methods used include Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), data mining, and multivariate statistics. This research contributes to empirical research by analyzing several Web retail firms in different industry sectors and product categories. One of the key findings is that the dynamics of sponsored search advertising vary between multi-channel and Web-only retailers. While the key performance metrics for multi-channel retailers include measures such as online sales, conversion rate (CR), c1ick-through-rate (CTR), and impressions, the key performance metrics for Web-only retailers focus on organic and sponsored ad ranks. These results provide a useful contribution to our organizational level understanding of search engine advertising strategies, both for multi-channel and Web-only retailers. These results also contribute to current knowledge in technology-driven marketing strategies and provide managers with a better understanding of sponsored search advertising and its impact on various performance metrics in Web retailing.

Dual retrieval in conceptual information systems

Conceptual Information Systems provide a multi-dimensional conceptually structured view on data stored in relational databases. On restricting the expressiveness of the retrieval language, they allow the visualization of sets of realted queries in conceptual hierarchies, hence supporting the search of something one does not have a precise description, but only a vague idea of. Information Retrieval is considered as the process of finding specific objects (documents etc.) out of a large set of objects which fit to some description. In some data analysis and knowledge discovery applications, the dual task is of interest: The analyst needs to determine, for a subset of objects, a description for this subset. In this paper we discuss how Conceptual Information Systems can be extended to support also the second task.

xhRank: ranking entities on the Semantic Web

In general, ranking entities (resources) on the Semantic Web (SW) is subject to importance, relevance, and query length. Few existing SW search systems cover all of these aspects. Moreover, many existing efforts simply reuse the technologies from conventional Information Retrieval (IR), which are not designed for SW data. This paper proposes a ranking mechanism, which includes all three categories of rankings and are tailored to SW data.

Especificação e implementação de um protótipo de serviço web para buscas baseadas em contextos compartilhados definidos a partir de sintagmas e relacionamentos

The popularization of the Internet has stimulated the appearance of Search Engines that have as their objective aid the users in the Web information research process. However, it s common for users to make queries and receive results which do not satisfy their initial needs. The Information Retrieval in Context (IRiX) technique allows for the information related to a specific theme to be related to the initial user query, enabling, in this way, better results. This study presents a prototype of a search engine based on contexts built from linguistic gatherings and on relationships defined by the user. The context information can be shared with softwares and other tool users with the objective of promoting a socialization of contexts

In search of work. International migration of women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Selected bibliography

Includes bibliography

Structure-semantics interplay in complex networks and its effects on the predictability of similarity in texts

The classification of texts has become a major endeavor with so much electronic material available, for it is an essential task in several applications, including search engines and information retrieval. There are different ways to define similarity for grouping similar texts into clusters, as the concept of similarity may depend on the purpose of the task. For instance, in topic extraction similar texts mean those within the same semantic field, whereas in author recognition stylistic features should be considered. In this study, we introduce ways to classify texts employing concepts of complex networks, which may be able to capture syntactic, semantic and even pragmatic features. The interplay between various metrics of the complex networks is analyzed with three applications, namely identification of machine translation (MT) systems, evaluation of quality of machine translated texts and authorship recognition. We shall show that topological features of the networks representing texts can enhance the ability to identify MT systems in particular cases. For evaluating the quality of MT texts, on the other hand, high correlation was obtained with methods capable of capturing the semantics. This was expected because the golden standards used are themselves based on word co-occurrence. Notwithstanding, the Katz similarity, which involves semantic and structure in the comparison of texts, achieved the highest correlation with the NIST measurement, indicating that in some cases the combination of both approaches can improve the ability to quantify quality in MT. In authorship recognition, again the topological features were relevant in some contexts, though for the books and authors analyzed good results were obtained with semantic features as well. Because hybrid approaches encompassing semantic and topological features have not been extensively used, we believe that the methodology proposed here may be useful to enhance text classification considerably, as it combines well-established strategies. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Infrastructure and Workflow for the Formal Evaluation of Semantic Search Technologies

This paper describes an infrastructure for the automated evaluation of semantic technologies and, in particular, semantic search technologies. For this purpose, we present an evaluation framework which follows a service-oriented approach for evaluating semantic technologies and uses the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to define evaluation workflows that can be executed by process engines. This framework supports a variety of evaluations, from different semantic areas, including search, and is extendible to new evaluations. We show how BPEL addresses this diversity as well as how it is used to solve specific challenges such as heterogeneity, error handling and reuse

Modelado y Comparación de Colecciones en la Web Semántica

En esta tesis se estudia la representación, modelado y comparación de colecciones mediante el uso de ontologías en el ámbito de la Web Semántica. Las colecciones, entendidas como agrupaciones de objetos o elementos con entidad propia, son construcciones que aparecen frecuentemente en prácticamente todos los dominios del mundo real, y por tanto, es imprescindible disponer de conceptualizaciones de estas estructuras abstractas y de representaciones de estas conceptualizaciones en los sistemas informáticos, que definan adecuadamente su semántica. Mientras que en muchos ámbitos de la Informática y la Inteligencia Artificial, como por ejemplo la programación, las bases de datos o la recuperación de información, las colecciones han sido ampliamente estudiadas y se han desarrollado representaciones que responden a multitud de conceptualizaciones, en el ámbito de la Web Semántica, sin embargo, su estudio ha sido bastante limitado. De hecho hasta la fecha existen pocas propuestas de representación de colecciones mediante ontologías, y las que hay sólo cubren algunos tipos de colecciones y presentan importantes limitaciones. Esto impide la representación adecuada de colecciones y dificulta otras tareas comunes como la comparación de colecciones, algo crítico en operaciones habituales como las búsquedas semánticas o el enlazado de datos en la Web Semántica. Para solventar este problema esta tesis hace una propuesta de modelización de colecciones basada en una nueva clasificación de colecciones de acuerdo a sus características estructurales (homogeneidad, unicidad, orden y cardinalidad). Esta clasificación permite definir una taxonomía con hasta 16 tipos de colecciones distintas. Entre otras ventajas, esta nueva clasificación permite aprovechar la semántica de las propiedades estructurales de cada tipo de colección para realizar comparaciones utilizando las funciones de similitud y disimilitud más apropiadas. De este modo, la tesis desarrolla además un nuevo catálogo de funciones de similitud para las distintas colecciones, donde se han recogido las funciones de (di)similitud más conocidas y también algunas nuevas. Esta propuesta se ha implementado mediante dos ontologías paralelas, la ontología E-Collections, que representa los distintos tipos de colecciones de la taxonomía y su axiomática, y la ontología SIMEON (Similarity Measures Ontology) que representa los tipos de funciones de (di)similitud para cada tipo de colección. Gracias a estas ontologías, para comparar dos colecciones, una vez representadas como instancias de la clase más apropiada de la ontología E-Collections, automáticamente se sabe qué funciones de (di)similitud de la ontología SIMEON pueden utilizarse para su comparación. Abstract This thesis studies the representation, modeling and comparison of collections in the Semantic Web using ontologies. Collections, understood as groups of objects or elements with their own identities, are constructions that appear frequently in almost all areas of the real world. Therefore, it is essential to have conceptualizations of these abstract structures and representations of these conceptualizations in computer systems, that define their semantic properly. While in many areas of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, such as Programming, Databases or Information Retrieval, the collections have been extensively studied and there are representations that match many conceptualizations, in the field Semantic Web, however, their study has been quite limited. In fact, there are few representations of collections using ontologies so far, and they only cover some types of collections and have important limitations. This hinders a proper representation of collections and other common tasks like comparing collections, something critical in usual operations such as semantic search or linking data on the Semantic Web. To solve this problem this thesis makes a proposal for modelling collections based on a new classification of collections according to their structural characteristics (homogeneity, uniqueness, order and cardinality). This classification allows to define a taxonomy with up to 16 different types of collections. Among other advantages, this new classification can leverage the semantics of the structural properties of each type of collection to make comparisons using the most appropriate (dis)similarity functions. Thus, the thesis also develops a new catalog of similarity functions for the different types of collections. This catalog contains the most common (dis)similarity functions as well as new ones. This proposal is implemented through two parallel ontologies, the E-Collections ontology that represents the different types of collections in the taxonomy and their axiomatic, and the SIMEON ontology (Similarity Measures Ontology) that represents the types of (dis)similarity functions for each type of collection. Thanks to these ontologies, to compare two collections, once represented as instances of the appropriate class of E-Collections ontology, we can know automatically which (dis)similarity functions of the SIMEON ontology are suitable for the comparison. Finally, the feasibility and usefulness of this modeling and comparison of collections proposal is proved in the field of oenology, applying both E-Collections and SIMEON ontologies to the representation and comparison of wines with the E-Baco ontology.

MEDLINEplus: building and maintaining the National Library of Medicine's consumer health Web service

MEDLINEplus is a Web-based consumer health information resource, made available by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). MEDLINEplus has been designed to provide consumers with a well-organized, selective Web site facilitating access to reliable full-text health information. In addition to full-text resources, MEDLINEplus directs consumers to dictionaries, organizations, directories, libraries, and clearinghouses for answers to health questions. For each health topic, MEDLINEplus includes a preformulated MEDLINE search created by librarians. The site has been designed to match consumer language to medical terminology. NLM has used advances in database and Web technologies to build and maintain MEDLINEplus, allowing health sciences librarians to contribute remotely to the resource. This article describes the development and implementation of MEDLINEplus, its supporting technology, and plans for future development.

A general proposal to multilingual information access based on syntactic-semantic patterns

In the last few years, there has been a wide development in the research on textual information systems. The goal is to improve these systems in order to allow an easy localization, treatment and access to the information stored in digital format (Digital Databases, Documental Databases, and so on). There are lots of applications focused on information access (for example, Web-search systems like Google or Altavista). However, these applications have problems when they must access to cross-language information, or when they need to show information in a language different from the one of the query. This paper explores the use of syntactic-sematic patterns as a method to access to multilingual information, and revise, in the case of Information Retrieval, where it is possible and useful to employ patterns when it comes to the multilingual and interactive aspects. On the one hand, the multilingual aspects that are going to be studied are the ones related to the access to documents in different languages from the one of the query, as well as the automatic translation of the document, i.e. a machine translation system based on patterns. On the other hand, this paper is going to go deep into the interactive aspects related to the reformulation of a query based on the syntactic-semantic pattern of the request.