IADIS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON WWW/INTERNET

16-28

Authors: Bahareh Zarei and Martin Gaedke

An increasing number of companies offer their capabilities as Web services and publish them through public registries. Such Web services enable users to access and manipulate online data programmatically. Moreover, they can be deployed in service-based systems (SBS) or composite web applications and mashups to offer value-added services. A crucial step in deploying Web services is the Web service Discovery. Selecting the best Web service candidates to address the needs of service requesters (e.g., SBS designers) is an important task in SBSs and can influence the quality of the resulting composite web application. So far proposed solutions for addressing this challenge, which are mainly categorized into Syntactic-based and Semantic-based, are either too complex for end-users which hinders their large-scale adaptation or suffer from low precision and recall. Considering the recent trend of shifting the development activities more and more towards the end-users, we propose an approach based on chat-bot technology to allow end-users to select a set of best-fitting Web services according to their goals. Conversational Interfaces also known as chatbots aim at providing users a more natural framework to interact with web applications and devices. The advantage of DISCO compared to the state-of-the-art approaches is leveraging the natural language as the communication medium and alleviating the need for end-users to have technical knowledge about the service’s structure and location. We conducted sets of experiments by recruiting 8 test subjects to query the chatbot. The results achieve high precision and recall.

41-56

Authors: Bráulio Alturas and Junior Marimbique

Higher education institutions are characterized by the growth of the student population, the need to align their programs with market demand, and the adoption of new management and service delivery techniques, making it essential to use information technologies. This research project aims to design an information system prototype for a higher education admission management information system and propose open source software engineering tools that can assist its development. This paper presents the main concepts related to information systems, higher education and open source software. The prototype was designed following the object-oriented software development methodology and the software engineering tools were based on the comparison of two tools to three information system software elements namely forms, reports and web portal.

76-88

Authors: Roumen Vragov and Nanda Kumar

Over the last 20 years scientists from many disciplines have proposed mechanisms that allow decision-makers to negotiate directly on common outcomes. The Internet-enabled versions of these mechanisms can allow citizens to practice direct democracy and thus increase participation in governance. This study investigates the information requirements of one of these mechanisms – the Online Compensation Election. More specifically the study tests if the level of detail of the information available to a voter about the preference intensities of other voters affects voting behavior. We find that a decrease in the granularity of the real preference intensity information about others does not affect voting behavior and the referendum’s compensation outcomes We discuss the implications of these results and possible future directions for research.

101-115

Authors: Hideki Okita, Hayato Hoshihara, Norihisa Komoda and Toru Fujiwara

We propose a dynamically prioritized failure management method according to the reliability model that the failure rate of virtual machine varies in its life cycle. When using a combination of server monitoring with ping and network connection check with Ethernet OAM, the system sets higher priorities to the port connected to a long running server, and the port within a certain time after the connection change or virtual machine addition is set. The system then selects the ports from the higher priority port to be monitored by Ethernet OAM. As a result of the evaluation by the simulation, by dynamically selecting the port to be monitored for Ethernet OAM using the proposed method, it was confirmed that more than a third of all failures were detected with Maintenance End Points which number is only a tenth of that of servers in a data center. In the data center for cloud services running many VMs, it is possible to shorten the recovery from VM failure while suppressing the number of objects monitored by Ethernet OAM by using this method.

14

Authors: Joshua Kofi Doe

This study examines the effect of online brand community customer engagements on brand loyalty,through various online customer-to-community relationships, and trust. Data was randomly collected from 720 members of an online brand community page using an online questionnaire and analysed with Structural Equations Modelling (SEM). The study found that online brand community activities influenced customer-product relationships, and not customer-brand nor customer-company relationships. None of the customer relationships mediate the link between online brand community and trust. Trust, however partially mediates between customer-product relationships and brand loyalty, as well as between customer-company relationships and brand loyalty. Trust of the online community was confirmed to lead to loyalty. For industry practitioners, these findings support the need to ensure favourable customer/product related activities, experience and word of mouth within the online community. It also demonstrates the possibility of brand extension and brand trust at lower costs. The paper contributes to industrial and academic knowledge of virtual brand community and its effects.

14

Authors: Mohammed Baidada, Khalifa Mansouri and Franck Poirier

Our research work falls within the context of the use of recommendation systems for the personalization of contents in e-learning environments. We present in this paper the results of a second experiment that was recently conducted to evaluate a hybrid recommendation approach in an online learning environment. The approach consists of combining the two approaches of content-based filtering and collaborative filtering to improve the relevance of the educational resources recommended to learners. A first experiment was carried out in 2019 and gave convincing results, which led us to repeat a second experimentation in order to confirm the results on the one hand, and on the other hand, to modify the way learners evaluate the resources by transforming the "like" by a voting mode from one to five, in order to verify whether this will bring an improvement in the recommendations. This second experiment was also an opportunity to integrate an engine that guides learners' searches by adding criteria relating to their preferences and to check their satisfaction with the use of this engine. The results were globally positive.

18

Authors: Guilherme Alves da Silva and Leonelo Dell Anhol Almeida

The digital divide/digital inclusion concepts have been of interest to policymakers, particularly since the 1990s. However, the social transformation promised with ICTs adoption and diffusion is more complicated than just providing access. Qualitative studies have emphasized the importance of analyzing skills, appropriation, and negotiation. Authors in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies and in the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies also argue that studying technology non-use is also valuable as it broadens the concept of user/non-user beyond a binary look, diving in to understand how people engage or disengage with technologies, besides bringing relevant outputs about why some people do not or cannot become an Internet user. In this paper, we take this approach to analyze national sample surveys carried out in the three most populated countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia). Data from those surveys have directly been used to help formulate public policies in the three countries. We seek to identify indicators related to non-use present in the surveys, analyzing them in order to suggest the broadening of their scope. Besides specific questions about each survey, we find that all of them do not provide data, for example, on people who have stopped using the Internet (as a whole or part of it); do not consider people who access the network indirectly, by other people; and often bring, among motivations for non-use, sentences that do not reveal whether non-use is voluntary or involuntary. At the background of the discussion, we propose that further studies on technology non-use should be done in order to question technology determinism, the idea that everybody should and will become an Internet user.

31

Authors: Johan Stymne

In outdoor learning with mobile technology, students use mobile technology for learning in an outdoor setting, for example in a park or a garden. To understand how mobile technology has been used in outdoor learning, a systematic review was carried out. A number of reviews on mobile learning and on specific sub-areas of mobile learning, such as language learning or computer education have been published in scientific journals and at conferences. So far, however, no systematic review has focused on outdoor learning with mobile technology. To guide the review the following research questions were posed: “Which are the educational subjects and educational levels in outdoor learning with mobile technology?” and “What types of technologies for positioning or navigation, augmentation, and methods for data collection and annotation are used in outdoor learning with mobile technology?”. In total 87 articles, published between 2004 and 2019 were included in this review. Conclusions were that biology was the most common subject, primary or elementary school the most common educational levels, GPS was the major technology used for positioning and navigation, AR was the most common technology used for augmenting the outdoor learning environment, and taking photos and taking notes were the most common methods for data collection in outdoor learning with mobile technology. Building on the conclusions of this review and on previous reviews, suggestions are made for future research.