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The paper develops a behavioral model of Web information seeking that identifies four complementary modes of information seeking: undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, informal search, and formal search. In each mode of viewing or searching, users would adopt distinctive patterns of browser moves: starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, and extracting. The model is applied empirically to analyze the Web information seeking behavior of 24 women in IT professions over a two‐week period. Our results show that participants engaged in all four modes of information seeking on the Web, and that each mode may be characterized by certain browser actions. Overall, the study suggests that a behavioral approach that links information seeking modes (goals and reasons for browsing and searching) to moves (actions used to find and view information) may be helpful in understanding Web‐based information seeking.

This research aims to investigate the integration of real-time monitoring of thermal conditions within confined work environments through wireless sensor network (WSN) technology when integrated with building information modelling (BIM). A prototype system entitled confined space monitoring system (CoSMoS), which provides an opportunity to incorporate sensor data for improved visualization through new add-ins to BIM software, was then developed.

An empirical study was undertaken to compare and contrast between the performances (over a time series) of various database models to find a back-end database storage configuration that best suits the needs of CoSMoS.

Fusing BIM data with information streams derived from wireless sensors challenges traditional approaches to data management. These challenges encountered in the prototype system are reported upon and include issues such as hardware/software selection and optimization. Consequently, various database models are explored and tested to find a database storage that best suits the specific needs of this BIM-wireless sensor technology integration.

This work represents the first tranche of research that seeks to deliver a fully integrated and advanced digital built environment solution for automating the management of health and safety issues on construction sites.

To carry out a practical experiment into the feasibility of service orientation to achieve a dynamic, late‐binding service architecture.

Literature view to provide a foundation in standards and measure anecdotal opinion regarding service orientation. The review informed an architectural design based on real world requirements from a multinational mobile telecommunications organisation moving toward portal‐based services. The architectural implementation took place in a lab‐based setting and tested with third‐party services that were integrated into the architecture dynamically to test the late bound requirements of the infrastructure. The experimental approach also enabled the testing of the opinions formed regarding service orientation.

The main outcome of the study related to the open, standards‐based nature purported to be possible with service orientation. The findings on the study highlighted some major problems in interoperability and operational efficiency of service‐oriented technologies when applied to a complex architecture framework.

Currently this represents the findings of a single study based on a specific set of requirements. In order to generalise, further study is needed and currently ongoing.

The study has high implications for people wishing to approach service orientation as a means to integrate both new and legacy systems. The work raises a lot of questions about the supposed ease of integration.

The work contributes to a growing body of work examining and evaluating the usefulness of service orientation.

This paper reports on a study conducted to develop a framework for evaluating the retrieval features using an applied ethnographic method. Direct observation, interviews, analysis of notes, and informal social interaction were done with ten users on their application of the retrieval features and their difficulties in searching. Retrieval features evaluated were those offered by 12 database providers. Findings revealed that the proposed framework successfully gathered the data needed. Application of the features was related to users' retrieval tasks, preference and style of searching, and understanding of the features. Difficulties were related to identification of the appropriate search terms. Expected retrieval features were related to search terms, i.e. relevance feedback, list of similar terms, and assigning values to search terms. Applied ethnographic method used in this study revealed that users have a substantial amount of knowledge about the retrieval features, and that their comments were related to their subject background.

This article discusses the deficiencies of search engines and the importance of metadata before examining three models of metadata retrieval: distributed; distributed data with a centralised index; and centralised union catalogue. In listing the advantages and disadvantages of the distributed model, the Z39.50 protocol is used as an example. The OAI harvest protocol is the example of the second model. Virtual union catalogues are compared with a real one. A pan‐European model is discussed as a way to combine the best of all three models, with EUCAT as its base.

This chapter presents findings from a recently conducted process for obtaining Accounting Advisory Board (AAB) input related to Master of Accountancy curriculum of one university. Board members represent both large and small public accounting firms as well as corporate offices of Fortune 500 companies and non-profit organizations. AAB input includes perceptions of the relative importance of over 160 candidate topics for the courses making up the program’s infrastructure, as well as written comments noting other potential topics and pedagogical approaches to consider. Comparisons of topic rankings reveal a strong level of consistency among Board member types for the traditional accounting courses with structured content, as opposed to those courses involving more systems-related topics or having a wider range of specialized topics. Furthermore, the authors compare Board perceptions regarding topic necessity to those of faculty and note faculty reactions. Specifically, the authors find that faculty ranking consistency with the Board is weak, illustrating the importance of seeking curricular Board input on an ongoing basis. To “close the loop,” faculty incorporated many curriculum changes, involving both the topics to be covered and the overall approach to the course.

An association — Geomail — has been formed consisting of private electronic mail system operators, designed to provide a full international service.

The Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment (CORE), a five‐year R&D project, was one of the earliest attempts to make a substantial volume of the text and graphics from previously published scholarly journals available to end‐users in electronic form, across a computer network. Since CORE dealt with material that had already gone through traditional print publication, its emphasis was on the process (and limitations) of conversion, the optimization of presentation, and use of the converted contents for readers. This article focuses on the user response to the system.

This paper aims to introduce a transformation engine which can be used to convert an existing institutional repository installation into a Linked Open Data repository.

The authors describe how the data that exist in a DSpace repository can be semantically annotated to serve as a Semantic Web (meta)data repository.

The authors present a non-intrusive, standards-compliant approach that can run alongside with current practices, while incorporating state-of-the art methodologies.

Also, they propose a set of mappings between domain vocabularies that can be (re)used towards this goal, thus offering an approach that covers both the technical and semantic aspects of the procedure.

The paper aims to discuss extensions of SPARQL that use regular expressions to navigate RDF graphs and may be used to answer queries considering RDFS semantics (in particular, nSPARQL and our proposal CPSPARQL).

The paper is based upon a theoretical comparison of the expressiveness and complexity of both nSPARQL and the corresponding fragment of CPSPARQL, that we call cpSPARQL.

The paper shows that nSPARQL and cpSPARQL (the fragment of CPSPARQL) have the same complexity through cpSPARQL, being a proper extension of SPARQL graph patterns, is more expressive than nSPARQL.

It has not been possible to the authors to compare the performance of our CPSPARQL implementation with other proposals. However, the experimentation has allowed to make interesting observations.

The paper includes implications for implementing the SPARQL RDFS entailment regime.

The paper demonstrates the usefulness of cpSPARQL language. In particular, cpSPARQL, which is sufficient for capturing RDFS semantics, admits an efficient evaluation algorithm, while the whole CPSPARQL language is in theory as efficient as SPARQL is. Moreover, using such a path language within the SPARQL structure allows for properly extending SPARQL.