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Tech Report kmi-05-04 Abstract


Experiences of Two Task Driven User Studies of Hypermedia Information Systems
Techreport ID: kmi-05-04
Date: 2005
Author(s): Victoria Uren, Philipp Cimiano, Simon Buckingham Shum, Enrico Motta
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We present two small scale user studies of hypermedia information systems: a hypermedia discourse system designed as an environment for researchers to summarize and share key ideas from research papers as a claim network, and a web browser plug-in which annotates terms related to a selected ontology on the fly. The first study investigated whether a claim network created by one user could help others learn about a domain. The second study investigated whether information extraction techniques for identifying extra domain terms enhanced the system. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these studies and the extent to which they achieved their goals.
 
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Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.