Collaborative tagging in participatory webs : the death of information organisation?

Many organisations, companies and libraries started to use participatory webs to extend their services and engage more users. However, some librarians are still hesitated to implement participatory webs in their libraries, particularly in developing countries. This paper explores the advantages and disadvantages of participatory webs focusing on collaborative tagging. This paper draws from the literature of published articles discussing topics but not limited to participatory webs, participatory libraries, collaborative tagging, folksonomy and taxonomy. The advantages of implementation of the participatory webs in the library outweigh the disadvantages of it. Participatory webs do not necessarily mean the death of information organisation but it can supplement and improves information organisation in the library. This paper may help to broaden knowledge of LIS professionals in the implementation of participatory webs in the library.

High temperatures-related elderly mortality varied greatly from year to year : important information for heat-warning systems

We examined the variation in association between high temperatures and elderly mortality (age ≥ 75 years) from year to year in 83 US cities between 1987 and 2000. We used a Poisson regression model and decomposed the mortality risk for high temperatures into: a “main effect” due to high temperatures using lagged non-linear function, and an “added effect” due to consecutive high temperature days. We pooled yearly effects across both regional and national levels. The high temperature effects (both main and added effects) on elderly mortality varied greatly from year to year. In every city there was at least one year where higher temperatures were associated with lower mortality. Years with relatively high heat-related mortality were often followed by years with relatively low mortality. These year to year changes have important consequences for heat-warning systems and for predictions of heat-related mortality due to climate change.

Predictive modelling : parents’ decision making to use online child health information to increase their understanding and/or diagnose or treat their child’s health

Abstract Background The quantum increases in home Internet access and available online health information with limited control over information quality highlight the necessity of exploring decision making processes in accessing and using online information, specifically in relation to children who do not make their health decisions. Objectives To understand the processes explaining parents’ decisions to use online health information for child health care. Methods Parents (N = 391) completed an initial questionnaire assessing the theory of planned behaviour constructs of attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control, as well as perceived risk, group norm, and additional demographic factors. Two months later, 187 parents completed a follow-up questionnaire assessing their decisions to use online information for their child’s health care, specifically to 1) diagnose and/or treat their child’s suspected medical condition/illness and 2) increase understanding about a diagnosis or treatment recommended by a health professional. Results Hierarchical multiple regression showed that, for both behaviours, attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, (less) perceived risk, group norm, and (non) medical background were the significant predictors of intention. For parents’ use of online child health information, for both behaviours, intention was the sole significant predictor of behaviour. The findings explain 77% of the variance in parents’ intention to treat/diagnose a child health problem and 74% of the variance in their intentions to increase their understanding about child health concerns. Conclusions Understanding parents’ socio-cognitive processes that guide their use of online information for child health care is important given the increase in Internet usage and the sometimes-questionable quality of health information provided online. Findings highlight parents’ thirst for information; there is an urgent need for health professionals to provide parents with evidence-based child health websites in addition to general population education on how to evaluate the quality of online health information.

Overdue choices : how information and role in decision-making influence women's preferences for induction for prolonged pregnancy

Background: Enabling women to make informed decisions is a crucial component of consumer-focused maternity care. Current evidence suggests that health care practitioners’ communication of care options may not facilitate patient involvement in decision-making. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of specific variations in health caregiver communication on women’s preferences for induction of labor for prolonged pregnancy. Methods: A convenience sample of 595 female participants read a hypothetical scenario in which an obstetrician discusses induction of labor with a pregnant woman. Information provided on induction and the degree of encouragement for the woman’s involvement in decision-making was manipulated to create four experimental conditions. Participants indicated preference with respect to induction, their perceptions of the quality of information received, and other potential moderating factors. Results: Participants who received information that was directive in favor of medical intervention were significantly more likely to prefer induction than those given nondirective information. No effect of level of involvement in decision-making was found. Participants’ general trust in doctors moderated the relationship between health caregiver communication and preferences for induction, such that the influence of information provided on preferences for induction differed across levels of involvement in decision-making for women with a low trust in doctors, but not for those with high trust. Many women were not aware of the level of information required to make an informed decision. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the potential value of strategies such as patient decision aids and health care professional education to improve the quality of information available to women and their capacity for informed decision-making during pregnancy and birth. (BIRTH 39:3 September 2012)

Building Information Modelling : an international survey

Building Information Modelling (BIM) appears to be the next evolutionary link in project delivery within the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) Industry. There have been several surveys of implementation at the local level but to date little is known of the international context. This paper is a preliminary report of a large scale electronic survey of the implementation of BIM and the impact on AEC project delivery and project stakeholders in Australia and internationally. National and regional patterns of BIM usage will be identified. These patterns will include disciplinary users, project lifecycle stages, technology integration–including software compatibility—and organisational issues such as human resources and interoperability. Also considered is the current status of the inclusion of BIM within tertiary level curricula and potential for the creation of a new discipline.

Information support for health management in regional Sri Lanka : health managers’ perspectives

Good management, supported by accurate, timely and reliable health information, is vital for increasing the effectiveness of Health Information Systems (HIS). When it comes to managing the under resourced health systems of developing countries, information-based decision making is particularly important. This paper reports findings of a self-report survey that investigated perceptions of local health managers (HMs) of their own regional HIS in Sri Lanka. Data were collected through a validated, pre-tested postal questionnaire, and distributed among a selected group of HMs to elicit their perceptions of the current HIS in relation to information generation, acquisition and use, required reforms to the information system and application of information and communication technology (ICT). Results based on descriptive statistics indicated that the regional HIS was poorly organised and in need of reform; that management support for the system was unsatisfactory in terms of relevance, accuracy, timeliness and accessibility; that political pressure and community and donor requests took precedence over vital health information when management decisions were made; and use of ICT was unsatisfactory. HIS strengths included user-friendly paper formats, a centralised planning system and an efficient disease notification system; weaknesses were lack of comprehensiveness, inaccuracy, and lack of a feedback system. Responses of participants indicated that HIS would be improved by adopting an internationally accepted framework and introducing ICT applications. Perceived barriers to such improvements were high initial cost of educating staff to improve computer literacy, introduction of ICTs, and HIS restructure. We concluded that the regional HIS of Central Province, Sri Lanka had failed to provide much needed information support to HMs. These findings are consistent with similar research in other developing countries and reinforce the need for further research to verify causes of poor performance and to design strategic reforms to improve HIS in regional Sri Lanka.

Cloud computing for healthcare research information sharing

With the widespread application of healthcare Information and Communication Technology (ICT), constructing a stable and sustainable data sharing circumstance has attracted rapidly growing attention in both academic research area and healthcare industry. Cloud computing is one of long dreamed visions of Healthcare Cloud (HC), which matches the need of healthcare information sharing directly to various health providers over the Internet, regardless of their location and the amount of data. In this paper, we discuss important research tool related to health information sharing and integration in HC and investigate the arising challenges and issues. We describe many potential solutions to provide more opportunities to implement EHR cloud. As well, we introduce the development of a HC related collaborative healthcare research example, thus illustrating the prospective of applying Cloud Computing in the health information science research.

Paranoid prizing : mapping Australia’s Eve Pownall Award for information books, 2001-2010

Each year, the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) administers a number of Book of the Year Awards, including the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. The books chosen by the CBCA constitute a contemporary canon of Australian children’s literature, and serve to both shape and reflect current educational policies and practices as well as young Australians’ sense of themselves and their nation. This paper reads a selection of award-winning Australian non-fiction children’s literature in the context of colonialism, curriculum, military myths, and Aboriginal perspectives on national history and identity.

Information practices of teen content creators : the intersection of action and experiences a grounded theory study

What are the information practices of teen content creators? In the United States over two thirds of teens have participated in creating and sharing content in online communities that are developed for the purpose of allowing users to be producers of content. This study investigates how teens participating in digital participatory communities find and use information as well as how they experience the information. From this investigation emerged a model of their information practices while creating and sharing content such as film-making, visual art work, story telling, music, programming, and web site design in digital participatory communities. The research uses grounded theory methodology in a social constructionist framework to investigate the research problem: what are the information practices of teen content creators? Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews and observation of teen’s digital communities. Analysis occurred concurrently with data collection, and the principle of constant comparison was applied in analysis. As findings were constructed from the data, additional data was collected until a substantive theory was constructed and no new information emerged from data collection. The theory that was constructed from the data describes five information practices of teen content creators. The five information practices are learning community, negotiating aesthetic, negotiating control, negotiating capacity, and representing knowledge. In describing the five information practices there are three necessary descriptive components, the community of practice, the experiences of information and the information actions. The experiences of information include information as participation, inspiration, collaboration, process, and artifact. Information actions include activities that occur in the categories of gathering, thinking and creating. The experiences of information and information actions intersect in the information practices, which are situated within the specific community of practice, such as a digital participatory community. Finally, the information practices interact and build upon one another and this is represented in a graphic model and explanation.

Impact of a novel nurse-led prechemotherapy education intervention (ChemoEd) on patient distress, symptom burden, and treatment-related information and support needs : results from a randomised, controlled trial

Background: High levels of distress and need for self-care information by patients commencing chemotherapy suggest that current prechemotherapy education is suboptimal. We conducted a randomised, controlled trial of a prechemotherapy education intervention (ChemoEd) to assess impact on patient distress, treatment-related concerns, and the prevalence and severity of and bother caused by six chemotherapy side-effects. Patients and methods: One hundred and ninety-two breast, gastrointestinal, and haematologic cancer patients were recruited before the trial closing prematurely (original target 352). ChemoEd patients received a DVD, question-prompt list, self-care information, an education consultation ≥24 h before first treatment (intervention 1), telephone follow-up 48 h after first treatment (intervention 2), and a face-to-face review immediately before second treatment (intervention 3). Patient outcomes were measured at baseline (T1: pre-education) and immediately preceding treatment cycles 1 (T2) and 3 (T3). Results: ChemoEd did not significantly reduce patient distress. However, a significant decrease in sensory/psychological (P = 0.027) and procedural (P = 0.03) concerns, as well as prevalence and severity of and bother due to vomiting (all P = 0.001), were observed at T3. In addition, subgroup analysis of patients with elevated distress at T1 indicated a significant decrease (P = 0.035) at T2 but not at T3 (P = 0.055) in ChemoEd patients. Conclusions: ChemoEd holds promise to improve patient treatment-related concerns and some physical/psychological outcomes; however, further research is required on more diverse patient populations to ensure generalisability.

Graph-based concept weighting for medical information retrieval

This paper presents a graph-based method to weight medical concepts in documents for the purposes of information retrieval. Medical concepts are extracted from free-text documents using a state-of-the-art technique that maps n-grams to concepts from the SNOMED CT medical ontology. In our graph-based concept representation, concepts are vertices in a graph built from a document, edges represent associations between concepts. This representation naturally captures dependencies between concepts, an important requirement for interpreting medical text, and a feature lacking in bag-of-words representations. We apply existing graph-based term weighting methods to weight medical concepts. Using concepts rather than terms addresses vocabulary mismatch as well as encapsulates terms belonging to a single medical entity into a single concept. In addition, we further extend previous graph-based approaches by injecting domain knowledge that estimates the importance of a concept within the global medical domain. Retrieval experiments on the TREC Medical Records collection show our method outperforms both term and concept baselines. More generally, this work provides a means of integrating background knowledge contained in medical ontologies into data-driven information retrieval approaches.

Retrieving information from microblog using pattern mining and relevance feedback

Retrieving information from Twitter is always challenging due to its large volume, inconsistent writing and noise. Most existing information retrieval (IR) and text mining methods focus on term-based approach, but suffers from the problems of terms variation such as polysemy and synonymy. This problem deteriorates when such methods are applied on Twitter due to the length limit. Over the years, people have held the hypothesis that pattern-based methods should perform better than term-based methods as it provides more context, but limited studies have been conducted to support such hypothesis especially in Twitter. This paper presents an innovative framework to address the issue of performing IR in microblog. The proposed framework discover patterns in tweets as higher level feature to assign weight for low-level features (i.e. terms) based on their distributions in higher level features. We present the experiment results based on TREC11 microblog dataset and shows that our proposed approach significantly outperforms term-based methods Okapi BM25, TF-IDF and pattern based methods, using precision, recall and F measures.

Embedding information and communication technologies in the early childhood classroom

New technologies and the pace of change in modern society mean changes for classroom teaching and learning. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) feature in everyday life and provide ample opportunities for enhancing classroom programs. This article outlines how ICTs complement curriculum implementation in one year two classroom. It suggests practical strategies demonstrating how teachers can make ICTs work for them and progressively teach children how to make ICTs work for them.

Finding additional semantic entity information for search engines

Entity-oriented search has become an essential component of modern search engines. It focuses on retrieving a list of entities or information about the specific entities instead of documents. In this paper, we study the problem of finding entity related information, referred to as attribute-value pairs, that play a significant role in searching target entities. We propose a novel decomposition framework combining reduced relations and the discriminative model, Conditional Random Field (CRF), for automatically finding entity-related attribute-value pairs from free text documents. This decomposition framework allows us to locate potential text fragments and identify the hidden semantics, in the form of attribute-value pairs for user queries. Empirical analysis shows that the decomposition framework outperforms pattern-based approaches due to its capability of effective integration of syntactic and semantic features.

Phenomenography : opening a new territory for library and information science research

Phenomenography is a research approach devised to allow the investigation of varying ways in which people experience aspects of their world. Whilst growing attention is being paid to interpretative research in LIS, it is not always clear how the outcomes of such research can be used in practice. This article explores the potential contribution of phenomenography in advancing the application of phenomenological and hermeneutic frameworks to LIS theory, research and practice. In phenomenography we find a research toll which in revealing variation, uncovers everyday understandings of phenomena and provides outcomes which are readily applicable to professional practice. THe outcomes may be used in human computer interface design, enhancement, implementation and training, in the design and evaluation of services, and in education and training for both end users and information professionals. A proposed research territory for phenomenography in LIS includes investigating qualitative variation in the experienced meaning of: 1) information and its role in society 2) LIS concepts and principles 3) LIS processes and; 4) LIS elements.