Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-00-13 Abstract

Using genre to support active participation in learning communities
Techreport ID: kmi-00-13
Date: 2000
Author(s): Trevor Collins, Paul Mulholland and Stuart Watt

Many communities exist that learn and share information either partly or wholly online. These (wholly or partially) on-line communities share messages, documents, and other artefacts that contain useful community knowledge. Members of the community learn through this sharing process, and the growing archive they create forms a valuable learning resource for existing and new members of the community. Two main kinds of approach exist to support community members in accessing resources. The first kind associates each communal artefact with a conceptual structure that represents its meaning. This approach requires high levels of maintenance, especially when the community resource grows at a fast rate. The second uses statistical and text analysis techniques to (semi) automatically derive semantics from the resource. There is increasing evidence that artefacts constructed and shared within a community follow genres revealed in the structure of the artefacts and the terminology used. These implicit genres used in the community are invaluable to members in constructing and interpreting artefacts, but existing tools that support members in locating and classifying resources make little or no use of genre. Our preliminary findings demonstrate the potential of genre-sensitive classification and retrieval tools.

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection