KMi Seminars
A Walk on the Web
This event took place on Wednesday 30 November 2005 at 12:30

 
Dr. Helen Ashman School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Web research has no real boundaries but many connections between fields of related research. Even its internal categorisations are largely artificial. For example, what we call 'hypertext' has roots in information studies, literature and film, and relies on mathematics for its formalisms. In turn, it forms the basis for many other fields of Web research, including adaptive hypermedia and online learning systems, information visualisation and (at least some of its mathematics) can form the basis for such seemingly unrelated topics such as modelling complexity.

In this talk, we will look at a collection of Web research topics from the Web Technologies Lab (WebTech) in Nottingham, considering the topics' relationships and mutual influence. The talk itself will be a hypertext, so that we can travel the relationships between areas via links.

Related Links:
Online Presentation (slides)

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

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.