Showing all 44 Tech Reports linked to Simon Buckingham Shum
Epistemic Networks for Epistemic Commitments
The ways in which people seek and process information are fundamentally epistemic in nature. Existing epistemic cognition research has tended towards characterizing this fundamental relationship as cognitive or belief-based in nature. This paper builds on recent calls for a shift towards activity-oriented perspectives on epistemic cognition and proposes a new theory of ‘epistemic commitments’. An additional contribution of this paper comes from an analytic approach to this recast construct of...read more
ID: kmi-13-03
Date: 2013
Author(s): Simon Knight, Golnaz Arastoopour, David Williamson Shaffer, Simon Buckingham Shum, Karen Littleton
Resources:
Social Learning Analytics
We propose that the design and implementation of effective Social Learning Analytics presents significant challenges and opportunities for both research and enterprise, in three important respects. The first is the challenge of implementing analytics that have pedagogical and ethical integrity, in a context where power and control over data is now of primary importance. The second challenge is that the educational landscape is extraordinarily turbulent at present, in no small part due to...read more
Designing the Ontological Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology: An Interim Report
Research into tools to support both quantitative and qualitative analysis of specialist knowledge domains has been undertaken within the two broadly independent traditions of Bibliometrics and Knowledge Management. The ‘knowledge domain analysis’ (KDA) tools within the first tradition follow a citation-based approach to representing knowledge domains and use citation links as the basis for identifying patterns in the relationships among authors and publications. KDA tools within the second,...read more
ID: kmi-08-02
Date: 2008
Author(s): Neil Benn, Simon Buckingham Shum, John Domingue, Clara Mancini
Resources:
Visualising Discourse Coherence in Non-Linear Documents
To produce coherent linear documents, Natural Language Generation systems have traditionally exploited the structuring role of textual discourse markers such as relational and referential phrases. These coherence markers of the traditional notion of text, however, do not work in non-linear documents: a new set of graphical devices is needed together with formation rules to govern their usage, supported by sound theoretical frameworks. If in linear documents graphical devices such as layout and...read more
Sensemaking on the Pragmatic Web: A Hypermedia Discourse Perspective
Abstract: The complexity of the dilemmas we face on an organizational, societal and global scale forces us into sensemaking activity. We need tools for expressing and contesting perspectives flexible enough for real time use in meetings, structured enough to help manage longer term memory, and powerful enough to filter the complexity of extended deliberation and debate on an organizational or global scale. This has been the motivation for a programme of basic and applied action research into...read more
Modelling Discourse in Contested Domains: A Semiotic and Cognitive Framework
This paper examines the representational requirements for interactive, collaborative systems intended to support sensemaking and argumentation over contested issues. We argue that a perspective supported by semiotic and cognitively oriented discourse analyses offers both theoretical insights and motivates representational requirements for the semantics of tools for contesting meaning. We introduce our semiotic approach, highlighting its implications for discourse representation, before...read more
Co-OPR: Design and Evaluation of Collaborative Sensemaking and Planning Tools for Personnel Recovery
Personnel recovery teams must operate under intense pressure, taking into account not only hard logistics, but 'messy' factors such as the social or political implications of a decision. The Collaborative Operations for Personnel Recovery (Co-OPR) project has developed decision-support for sensemaking in such scenarios, seeking to exploit the complementary strengths of human and machine reasoning. Co-OPR integrates the Compendium sensemaking-support tool for real time information and...read more
ID: KMI-06-07
Date: 2006
Author(s): Austin Tate, Simon Buckingham Shum, Jeff Dalton, Clara Mancini, Albert Selvin
Resources: Memetic: An Infrastructure for Meeting Memory
This paper introduces the Memetic toolkit for recording the normally ephemeral interactions conducted via internet video conferencing, and making these navigable and manipulable in linear and non-linear ways. We introduce two complementary interaction visualizations: argumentation-based concept maps to elucidate the conceptual structure of the discourse using a visual language, and interactive event timelines generated from the meeting metadata. We discuss in detail the affordances of Memetics...read more
ID: KMI-06-02
Date: 2006
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Roger Slack, Michael Daw, Ben Juby, Andrew Rowley, Michelle Bachler, Clara Mancini, Danius Michaelides, Rob Procter, David De Roure, Tim Chown, Terry Hewitt
Resources: Sensemaking Tools for Understanding Research Literatures: Design, Implementation and User Evaluation
This paper describes the work undertaken in the Scholarly Ontologies Project. The aim of the project has been to develop a computational approach to support scholarly sensemaking, through interpretation and argumentation, enabling researchers to make claims: to describe and debate their view of a document's key contributions and relationships to the literature. The project has investigated the technicalities and practicalities of capturing conceptual relations, within and between conventional...read more
ID: kmi-05-09
Date: 2005
Author(s): Victoria Uren, Simon Buckingham Shum, Michelle Bachler, Gangmin Li
Resources: Integrating Scholarly Argumentation, Texts and Community: Towards an Ontology and Services
Abstract - This paper reports work in progress on an ontology-based approach to modelling the argumentative discourse, texts and community in an academic domain in order to support semantic browsing and search. We describe how diverse research into these aspects can be integrated in an ontology, and step through an example of the kind of service that can be provided given such an integrated model of a research field. We also begin to explore mechanisms for enriching the ontology with the...read more
Experiences of Two Task Driven User Studies of Hypermedia Information Systems
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...read more
ID: kmi-05-04
Date: 2005
Author(s): Victoria Uren, Philipp Cimiano, Simon Buckingham Shum, Enrico Motta
Resources: Towards 'Cinematic' Hypertext
This paper proposes the paradigm of 'Cinematic' Hypertext (CH), in which discourse form is represented following principles that underpin the expression of narrative patterns in cinema. Primarily tackling hypertext discourse coherence in the non-linear medium, CH is conceived as a way of thinking the hypertext medium that is consistent with its characteristics. CH envisages the consistent and concurrent use of the medium's formal features, grounded in structuring principles, in order to allow...read more
ClaimSpotter: an Environment to Support Sensemaking with Knowledge Triples
Annotating a document with an interpretation of its contents raises a number of challenges that we are hoping to address via the creation of a supporting environment. We present these challenges and motivate an approach based on the notion of suggestions to support document annotation, hoping these suggestions would act as leads to follow for annotators, therefore reducing some of the difficulties inherent to the task. The environment resulting from this approach, ClaimSpotter, is presented....read more
Semantic Annotation Support in the Absence of Consensus
We are interested in the annotation of knowledge which does not necessarily require a consensus. Scholarly debate is an example of such a category of knowledge where disagreement and contest are widespread and desirable, and unlike many Semantic Web approaches, we are interested in the capture and the compilation of these conflicting viewpoints and perspectives. The Scholarly Ontologies project provides the underlying formalism to represent this meta-knowledge, and we will look at ways to...read more
ID: kmi-04-01
Date: 2004
Author(s): Bertrand Sereno, Victoria Uren, Simon Buckingham Shum, Enrico Motta
Resources: Interfaces for Capturing Interpretations of Research Literature
The ClaiMaker collaborative sense-making and annotation tools allow single users and groups to build and query hypertextual argument maps of research literatures. We describe the discourse ontology used by the system, and four design principles that were followed to make it usable for non-knowledge engineers. We present several generations of capture interfaces showing how they are evolving to make ClaiMaker more accessible for novice users.read more
ID: kmi-03-06
Date: 2003
Author(s): Victoria Uren, Bertrand Sereno, Simon Buckingham Shum, Gangmin Li
Resources: Scholarly Publishing and Argument in Hyperspace
The World Wide Web is opening up access to documents and data for scholars. However it has not yet impacted on one of the primary activities in research: assessing new findings in the light of current knowledge and debating it with colleagues. The ClaiMaker system uses a directed graph model with similarities to hypertext, in which new ideas are published as nodes, which other contributors can build on or challenge in a variety of ways by linking to them. Nodes and links have semantic structure...read more
ID: kmi-03-03
Date: 2003
Author(s): Victoria Uren, Simon Buckingham Shum, Gangmin Li, John Domingue, Enrico Motta
Resources: ClaiMaker:Weaving a Semantic Web of Research Papers
The usability of research papers on the Web would be enhanced by a system that explicitly modelled the rhetorical relations between claims in related papers. We describe ClaiMaker, a system for modelling readers' interpretations of the core content of papers. ClaiMaker provides tools to build a Semantic Web representation of the claims in research papers using an ontology of relations. We demonstrate how the system can be used to make inter-document queries.read more
ID: kmi-03-02
Date: 2003
Author(s): Gangmin Li, Victoria Uren, Enrico Motta, Simon Buckingham Shum, John Domingue
Resources: Facilitated Hypertext for Collective Sensemaking: 15 Years on from gIBIS
Hypertext research in the mid-1980s on representing argumentation for design rationale (DR) foreshadowed what are now dominant concerns in knowledge management: representing, codifying and manipulating semiformal concepts, the use of formalisms to mediate collective sensemaking, and the construction of group memory. With the benefit of 15 years' hindsight, we can see the failure of so many hypertext DR systems to be adopted as symptomatic of the more general problem of fostering 'hypertext...read more
ID: kmi-01-15
Date: 2001
Author(s): Jeff Conklin, Albert Selvin, Simon Buckingham Shum and Maarten Sierhuis
Resources: Cognitive Coherence Relations and Hypertext: From Cinematic Patterns to Scholarly Discourse
In previous work we argued that cinematic language may provide insights into the construction of narrative coherence in hypertext, and we identified in the shot juxtaposition of rhetorical patterns the source of coherence for cinematic discourse. Here we deepen our analysis, to show how the mechanisms that underpin cinematic rhetorical patterns are the same as those providing coherence in written text. We draw on computational and psycholinguistic analyses of texts which have derived a set of...read more
Integration of Information Extraction with an Ontology
This paper describes the integration of an ontology with an information extraction (IE) tool. Our main goal is extract knowledge from text to populate the ontology, and so alleviate the problem of ontology maintenance. The IE tool extracts information using partial parsing and machine learning techniques. Our domain of study is ``KMi Planet'', a Web-based news server that helps to communicate relevant information between members in our institute. Currently our system finds instances of...read more
ID: kmi-01-12
Date: 2001
Author(s): Maria Vargas-Vera, John Domingue, Yannis Kalfoglou, Enrico Motta and Simon Buckingham Shum
Resources: On the integration of technologies for capturing and navigating knowledge with ontology-driven services
"Nowadays, many distinct communities are researching on technologies for knowledge capturing, modelling, and navigation. Moreover, advances in Internet technology makes it possible to perform most of these tasks on heterogeneous and distributed environments such as the Web. These advances though, have raise the need for knowledge services to accommodate the ever increasing number of Web users. To provide such a service one needs to combine key technologies for different aspects of knowledge...read more
ID: kmi-01-11
Date: 2001
Author(s): Yannis Kalfoglou, John Domingue, Leslie Carr, Enrico Motta, Maria Vargas-Vera, Simon Buckingham Shum
Resources: Compendium: Making Meetings into Knowledge Events
In this paper, we describe the Compendium methodology and suite of tools. Compendium is the result of over a decade's research and development at the intersection of collaborative modeling, organizational memory, computer-supported argumentation and meeting facilitation. We claim that Compendium offers innovative strategies for tackling several of the key challenges in managing knowledge: · improving communication between disparate communities tackling ill-structured problems · ...read more
ID: kmi-01-06
Date: 2001
Author(s): Albert Selvin, Simon Buckingham Shum, Maarten Sierhuis, Jeff Conklin, Beatrix Zimmermann, Charles Palus, Wilfred Drath, David Horth, John Domingue, Enrico Motta and Gangmin Li
Resources: Lyceum: Internet Voice Groupware for Distance Learning
This paper describes the design, implementation and deployment of Lyceum, a groupware system providing students and tutors with real time voice conferencing and visual workspace tools, over the standard internet. Lyceum uses a Java client/server architecture to tackle a formidable set of networking requirements: multi-way voice communication with synchronous shared displays, scalable to potentially thousands of simultaneous users, running over normal modem connections via unknown internet...read more
ID: kmi-01-03
Date: 2001
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Samuel Marshall, John Brier and Tony Evans
Resources: JIME: An Interactive Journal for Interactive Media
How can new media positively transform scholarly practices? In this article, we describe the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME: www-jime.open.ac.uk). JIME's peer review process is designed to promote multidisciplinary dialogue through the use of a purpose-designed Web document-discussion interface. This innovative peer review model and the resulting 'enriched' digital documents illustrate some of the possibilities for promoting knowledge construction and preserving intellectual...read more
Structuring Discourse for Collective Interpretation
This paper reflects on three examples of a discourse-oriented approach to supporting collective interpretation. By this, we mean activities involving two or more people who are trying to make sense of an issue. The common theme linking the examples is that each mediates interpretive activity via a software environment which structures discourse: participants construct their interpretation within a representational framework which in return provides computational services. As a by-product, this...read more
Redesigning the Peer Review Process: A Developmental Theory-in-Action
We are looking at how new forms of document interface can be used to support new forms of scholarly discourse, and ultimately, new models of scholarly publishing. Towards this end, we have been using specially designed computer-meditated conferencing technology to realize an innovative peer review model within an academic e-journal - The Journal of Interactive Media in Education. In essence, through re-design of social processes and technical products, we have tried to shift...read more
ID: kmi-00-12
Date: 2000
Author(s): Tamara Sumner, Simon Buckingham Shum, Michael Wright, Nathalie Bonnardel and Aline Chevalier
Resources: Scholarly Discourse as Computable Structure
In their initial proposal for structural computing (SC), NŸrnberg et al. [18] point to hypertext argumentation systems as an example of an application domain in which structure is of first-order importance. In this paper we summarise the goals and implementation of a knowledge based hypertext environment called ScholOnto (for Scholarly Ontologies), which aims to provide researchers with computational support in representing and analysing the structure of scholarly claims, argumentation and...read more
Case Studies in Ontology-Driven Document Enrichment
In this paper we present an approach to document enrichment, which consists of associating formal knowledge models to archives of documents, to provide intelligent knowledge retrieval and (possibly) additional knowledge services, beyond what is available using 'standard' information retrieval and search facilities. The approach is ontology-driven, in the sense that the construction of the knowledge model is carried out in a top-down fashion, by populating a given ontology, rather than in a...read more
Representing Scholarly Claims in Internet Digital Libraries: A Knowledge Modelling Approach
This paper is concerned with tracking and interpreting scholarly documents in distributed research communities. We argue that current approaches to document description, and current technological infrastructures particularly over the World Wide Web, provide poor support for these tasks. We describe the design of a digital library server which will enable authors to submit a summary of the contributions they claim their documents makes, and its relations to the literature. We describe a...read more
Evolving the Web for Scientific Knowledge: First Steps Towards an "HCI Knowledge Web"
In this article, I consider the challenge of building a Web-based infrastructure for scholarly research which moves beyond the basic dissemination and linking of documents, to support more powerful searching and analysis of the cumulative knowledge in the literature1s documents. Taking the HCI research community as an example, the goal would be to enable HCI researchers to search for interesting documents and phenomena, and discover previously unknown but conceptually related research, for...read more
Training Software Engineers in a Novel Usability Evaluation Technique
Novel approaches to designing or analysing systems only become useful when they are usable by practitioners in the field, and not just by their originators. Design techniques often fail to make the transition from research to practice because insufficient attention is paid to understanding and communicating the skills required to use them. This paper reports on work to train software engineering students to use a user-centred language for describing and analysing interface designs called the...read more
ID: kmi-98-09
Date: 1998
Author(s): Ann Blandford, Simon Buckingham Shum and Richard Young
Resources: Managing Persistent Discourse: Organizational Goals and Digital Texts
Prior to digital communications media, texts were primarily judged using hidden but assumed institutional practices (e.g., journal peer review processes, editorial mediation). Increasingly, digital communications media can make these previously invisible discursive practices visible in a persistent medium. Doing so transforms these discourses into texts where they are subject to: (1) a reader's interpretation and judgment and (2) explicit manipulation by writers or publishers seeking to...read more
ID: kmi-98-03
Date: 1998
Author(s): Tamara Sumner, Simeon Yates, Simon Buckingham Shum and Jane Perrone
Resources: Publishing, Interpreting and Negotiating Scholarly Hypertexts: Evolution of an Approach and Toolkit
This paper describes the evolution of our approach to scholarly hypertext publishing, which is developing a social model of document usage that places particular emphasis on supporting the interpretation and negotiation of documents. The first part of the paper describes principles derived from hypertext research that underpin a toolkit called D3E which we use to publish an electronic journal. This provides a Web environment that tightly integrates publications with review discussion. In part...read more
From Documents to Discourse: Shifting Conceptions of Scholarly Publishing
We are looking at how new forms of document interface can be used to support new forms of scholarly discourse, and ultimately, new models of scholarly publishing. The vehicle we use to conduct this research is the Digital Document Discourse Environment (D3E). D3E is an experimental system supporting the publication of web-based documents with integrated discourse facilities and embedded interactive components. We report here on two cases - an e-journal and a 'new form' of conference - where we...read more
Negotiating the Construction and Reconstruction of Organisational Memories
This paper describes an approach to capturing organisational memory, which serves to ground an analysis of human issues that knowledge management (KM) technologies raise. In the approach presented, teams construct graphical webs of the arguments and documents relating to key issues they are facing. This supports collaborative processes which are central to knowledge work, and provides a group memory of this intellectual investment. This approach emphasises the centrality of negotiation in...read more
Graphical Argumentation and Design Cognition
Many efforts have been made to exploit the properties of graphical notations to support argument construction and communication. In the context of design rationale capture, we are interested in graphical argumentation structures as cognitive tools to support individual and collaborative design in real time. This context of use requires a detailed understanding of how a new representational structure integrates into the cognitive and discursive flow of design, that is, whether it provides...read more
ID: kmi-97-05
Date: 1997
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Allan MacLean, Victoria Bellotti and Nick Hammond
Resources: Representing Hard-to-Formalise, Contextualised, Multidisciplinary, Organisational Knowledge
Much organisational knowledge is multidisciplinary, hard to formalise, and generated in discussions with competing viewpoints. Knowledge Management (KM) technologies need to be able to capture and share such knowledge. This short paper begins by characterising 'knowledge work' - are there salient features that we can identify? Next, an approach is described by which teams analyse and discuss problems, building graphical argument spaces as competing ideas are debated. Hypermedia groupware...read more
Balancing Formality with Informality: User-Centred Requirements for Knowledge Management Technologies
Numerous disciplines are now trying to analyse and represent the processes and products of organisational memory, in order to clarify what tangible representations future knowledge managers will work with. This short paper begins by reflecting briefly on the nature of systematic representations, as a reminder of the commitments that are made in any classification process. It is argued that there are important political dimensions to such classification, with implications for knowledge...read more
KMi Stadium: Web-based Audio/Visual Interaction as Reusable Organisational Expertise
KMi Stadium is a Java-implemented medium for hosting distributed events on a very large scale on the Internet (or an Intranet), allowing thousands of simultaneous participants even over 28.8Kbps dial-up modems. Stadium makes available as a reusable resource audio, coordinated visuals, and secondary resources such as relevant documents, demonstrations and Web sites. Client-based desktop computers and set-top boxes with appropriate browsers can download custom applets which enable the client...read more
ID: kmi-96-13
Date: 1996
Author(s): Marc Eisenstadt, Simon Buckingham Shum and Adam Freeman
Resources: Negotiating the Construction of Organisational Memory Using Hypermedia Argument Spaces
This paper describes an approach to capturing organisational memory in which teams use a hypermedia tool to analyse and discuss complex problems. Graphical argument spaces are constructed as competing ideas are debated. Firstly this supports the processes of discussion and negotiation which are central to knowledge work, typically as problems are defined, project constraints shift, and teams reconcile competing agendas. Graphical argumentation provides a shared working memory in meetings by...read more
On the Future of Journals: Digital Publishing and Argumentation
The emergence of the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have profound implications for the dissemination of scholarly work, particularly in the area of submission, review, and publication of journals. However to date, much of the impact of these new technologies has been on digitising the products of journal publication; the scholarly processes involved in reviewing journal publications remain unchanged and unsupported. We are using computer-supported collaborative argumentation (CSCA) tools...read more
ID: kmi-96-04
Date: 1996
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Tamara Sumner and Diana Laurillard
Resources:Multidisciplinary Modelling for User-Centred System Design: An Air-Traffic Control Case Study
This paper reports work investigating how user and system modelling techniques can be integrated to support the design of advanced interactive systems, and how such modelling can be effectively communicated to design practitioners in order to evaluate their potential. We describe a large scale modelling exercise concerning a flight sequencing tool for air-traffic controllers. We outline the kinds of system and user analysis possible with the different modelling techniques, and the approach used...read more
ID: kmi-96-03
Date: 1996
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum, Ann Blandford, David Duke, Jason Good, Jon May, Fabio Paterno' and Richard Young
Resources:Design Argumentation as Design Rationale
A design rationale (DR) is a representation of the reasoning behind the design of an artifact. In recent years, the use of semiformal notations for organising arguments about design decisions has attracted much interest within the software engineering and human-computer interaction communities, leading to the development of a number of DR notations and tool environments. This article begins by reviewing the motivation for expressing DR as design argumentation, and then surveys evidence from...read more
Analysing the Usability of a Design Rationale Notation
Semiformal, argumentation-based notations are one of the main classes of formalism currently being used to represent design rationale (DR). However, our understanding of the demands on designers of using such representations has to date been drawn largely from informal and anecdotal evidence. One way to tackle the fundamental challenge of reducing DR's representational overheads, is to understand the relationship between designing, and the idea structuring tasks introduced by a semiformal DR...read more
