IADIS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON WWW/INTERNET

1-15

Authors: Andrew Wodehouse and Marion Sheridan

With recent technological developments in motion capture there is an opportunity to redefine the physical interactions we have with products, considering human needs in movement at the forefront rather than subservient to the machine. This paper reports on the exploration of emotional reaction to gestural interface design using Laban’s Movement Analysis from the field of dance and drama. After outlining the current status of Gesture Controlled User Interfaces and why the use of Laban is appropriate to help understand the effects of movement, the results of a workshop on new interface design are presented. Teams were asked to re-imagine a number of product experiences that utilised appropriate Laban effort actions and to prototype and present these to the group. Several categories of devices, including direct manipulation, remote control and gesture recognition were identified. In aligning appropriate movements to device functionality, utilising culture and analogy and where necessary increasing complexity, the interfaces embody a number of concepts relating to gestural interface concepts.

34-50

Authors: André Sabino, João Gouveia and Armanda Rodrigues

Recommending new connections to users is an important tool for productive networks, but users are not always clear about how they are connected to the recommended contacts in the network graph. Providing insight about the arguments used to build a recommendation increases the chances of its acceptance by users. This work is focused on recommendations that rely on an information model that enables recommendation systems, using only the relationships between users, items and keywords. These elements define the productive network graph, which this work represents in a visualization and interaction platform whose goal is twofold: to provide a discovery tool for productive networks, through which users can navigate the graph using different visualization contexts; and to provide insight about indirect relationships, representing which direct relationships are relevant for a particular recommendation. The platform is designed to work with any data that complies with this model. The visualization elements and interaction operations have been evaluated through the implementation of a case study, based on a sample of the Flickr network, producing positive results.

68-84

Authors: Hilda Tellioğlu, Alexander von Franqué, Christian Kletzander and Alexander Kögler

Many educational institutions use Learning Management Systems to provide e-learning content to their students. This often includes quizzes that can help students to prepare for exams. However, the content is usually web-optimized and not very usable on mobile devices. In this work a native mobile application (UML-Quiz) that imports quiz content from Moodle and adapts it for a mobile environment has been developed. The result is highly usable and promising. The existing teaching content can be easily used in the new system by offering advantages of mobile applications. In this paper, the design decisions for UML-Quiz and the usability optimizations to the content and to the interaction mechanisms are presented. Within an evolutionary design process we could improve the first version of the quiz and learn about several interaction and user interface design issues. In a second version of the quiz, we managed to integrate users’ feedback to the system and improve its acceptance by the users. We present our evaluation process and the results before concluding the paper.

102-114

Authors: Akihide Bessho, Takayuki Yumoto, Manabu Nii and Kunihiro Sato

Customer reviews are helpful information to decide what to buy in EC sites. However, some customer reviews are not helpful. Therefore, users must choose helpful ones. This is difficult especially for users who do not have enough knowledge about the products. In this paper, we propose methods to classify customer reviews into helpful and unhelpful. To classify them, we focus on content coverage and writing style of reviews. Coverage expresses how many important words are contained by the reviews. Writing style is expressed as “formal” or “informal”, and it is classified by a machine learning technique. We made test data from user votes in Amazon.co.jp, and evaluated our methods. The accuracy of our rule-based method was 0.69. However, the method using coverage does not work well when many reviews have not been written yet. We analyzed the effects of the number of reviews, and confirmed that our rule-based method is less affected and achieves better accuracy than the method using only coverage.

131-148

Authors: Sotiris P. Christodoulou and Andreas B. Gizas

Many JavaScript libraries (JL) have become available in order to facilitate programming of rich client-side interactions in web applications. In some cases these interactions may cause non-negligible overhead on the response time of web applications, esp. on average mobile devices, that negatively influence user experience. An important fraction of this overhead is caused by some JL’s selectors on DOM elements. The aim of this work is to thoroughly study and evaluate the performance of JL’s selectors and categorize them in various performance classes. Towards this purpose, we produced a test-suite of 263 selectors to cover all possible kinds of selectors found in real world cases and evaluate the performance of these selectors on 6 popular JLs, with an enhanced version of slickspeed suite and a large set of jsperf tests. The main result of this work is to introduce a framework (methodology and a set of tools), that can be used by developers to estimate the performance overhead caused by JL DOM selectors in a given web page, discover bad performing selectors and optimize them.

1-16

Authors: Nicola Capuano, Angelo Gaeta, Eleonora Fratesi and Giuseppina Rita Mangione

In March 2011 the Italian Government introduced mandatory pre-trial mediation of civil and commercial cases. The Italian mediation model is capable of sensibly speed-up the settlement of disputes but, on the other end, citizens need to be sensitized to the benefits of mediation and must be trained on how mediation works and how to access it. The purpose of this paper is to describe a learning model based on Storytelling and its application in the context of training for civil mediation helping to build challenging training resources that explain, to common citizens with little or no background about legal topics, concepts related to legal mediation in general and in specific areas like e-commerce and civil liability. The defined model has been contextualized with respect to relevant literature and implemented through the development of two software components that have been integrated in an existing e-learning environment.

35-51

Authors: José Javier Durán and Alberto Fernández

In this article we tackle the problem of developing and accessing to dialogue-based applications that require using Web technologies, such as REST services. In particular, we focus on services that are not executed in one-shot (e.g. pipe process), but that require engaging in a dialogue where several messages are exchanged (with the number of messages not known a priori). We propose a protocol for such service interaction, and offer a framework that assists in their life-cycle: programming, deployment, search, invocation, and feedback management. A running example is used to illustrate our proposal and assess how it improves the experience of service developers.

65-80

Authors: Toshiro Minami and Kensuke Baba

Along with the development of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and popularization of mobile devices, the information environment of our society has radically changed. As a result, the library’s role model also needs to be changed. The most important mission of a library is to collect materials, mainly printed books, and prepare to provide library patrons with them upon request. In order to carry out this mission, classification codes are attached to library materials, and will be shelved according to the code so that searching of specific material becomes easy. In most libraries, Decimal Classification (DC) system is chosen as their classification code. For example in Japan, libraries use NDC (Nippon, or Japan, Decimal Classification) system as their de facto standard classification system. One of the biggest problems of DC is that it is quite hard to adjust the knowledge field code according to the change of important concepts and terms as time goes. For example, computer/information science is a relatively new field for library and it was hard to find an appropriate code for it, and eventually it is assigned to the category code 007 in the third level of categorization of NDC. In this paper, we propose an index for measuring similarity between NDC categories, which reflects how much amount of the books of comparing categories are borrowed by library patrons in common. In this way NDC categorization system can be tuned according to the current status of patrons’ interest tendencies. Also, we demonstrate its usefulness by comparing the interest area profiles between the one using original NDC and the new, or virtual, NDC. By using the virtual NDC, we can recognize the “real” interest area profiles of a patron or a group of patrons from loan record analysis. The studies in this direction will boost up advancing more useful library services toward the future.

94-112

Authors: Nemésio Freitas Duarte Filho, Lucas Bortolini Fronza and Ellen Francine Barbosa

Even providing several benefits and facilities with regard to teaching and learning, mobile learning environments present problems and challenges that must be investigated, especially with respect to the definition and standardization of architectural aspects. Most of these environments are still built in isolation, with particular structures and architectures, hindering aspects such as reuse and interoperability, for instance. On the other hand, several initiatives of using service orientation aspects to support and help the architectural definition of software systems have been investigated. In this paper we discuss the proposition of an architecture for service-oriented mobile learning environments. The architectural requirements that guided the establishment of the proposed architecture were defined by means of a systematic process, being prioritized and complemented with the help of domain specialists. In order to evaluate the proposed architecture, a prototype of a service-oriented mobile learning environment was implemented, showing the viability of practical application of such architecture, especially with regard to service consumption and service implementation, providing interoperability and reuse for educational services.