Online Communities and Social Computing: Third International Conference, OCSC 2009, Held as Part of HCI International 2009, San Diego, CA, USA, July ... Applications, incl. Internet Web, and HCI)

Lecture Notes in Computer Science Commenced Publication in 1973 Founding and Former Series Editors: Gerhard Goos, Juris Hartmanis, and Jan van Leeuwen

Editorial Board David Hutchison Lancaster University, UK Takeo Kanade Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Josef Kittler University of Surrey, Guildford, UK Jon M. Kleinberg Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Alfred Kobsa University of California, Irvine, CA, USA Friedemann Mattern ETH Zurich, Switzerland John C. Mitchell Stanford University, CA, USA Moni Naor Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel Oscar Nierstrasz University of Bern, Switzerland C. Pandu Rangan Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India Bernhard Steffen University of Dortmund, Germany Madhu Sudan Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA Demetri Terzopoulos University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Doug Tygar University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Gerhard Weikum Max-Planck Institute of Computer Science, Saarbruecken, Germany

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A. Ant Ozok Panayiotis Zaphiris (Eds.)

Online Communities and Social Computing Third International Conference, OCSC 2009 Held as Part of HCI International 2009 San Diego, CA, USA, July 19-24, 2009 Proceedings

13

Volume Editors A. Ant Ozok UMBC, Department of Information Systems 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA E-mail: [email protected] Panayiotis Zaphiris Cyprus University of Technology Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts 3036 Lemesos, Cyprus E-mail: [email protected]

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009928838 CR Subject Classification (1998): K.4-6, K.8, C.2, H.5, H.4, H.3, J.1, J.3 LNCS Sublibrary: SL 3 – Information Systems and Application, incl. Internet/Web and HCI ISSN ISBN-10 ISBN-13

0302-9743 3-642-02773-3 Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York 978-3-642-02773-4 Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. springer.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 Printed in Germany Typesetting: Camera-ready by author, data conversion by Scientific Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed on acid-free paper SPIN: 12708697 06/3180 543210

Foreword

The 13th International Conference on Human–Computer Interaction, HCI International 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19–24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction, the Third International Conference on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internationalization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Modeling, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and governmental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human–computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. This volume, edited by A. Ant Ozok and Panayiotis Zaphiris, contains papers in the thematic area of Online Communities and Social Computing, addressing the following major topics: • • • • •

Designing and Developing Online Communities Social Behavior of Humans and Artificial Agents in Online Communities Web 2.0: Emerging Challenges Learning, Education and Culture Online Games Online Communities and Society

The remaining volumes of the HCI International 2009 proceedings are: • • • • •

Volume 1, LNCS 5610, Human–Computer Interaction––New Trends (Part I), edited by Julie A. Jacko Volume 2, LNCS 5611, Human–Computer Interaction––Novel Interaction Methods and Techniques (Part II), edited by Julie A. Jacko Volume 3, LNCS 5612, Human–Computer Interaction––Ambient, Ubiquitous and Intelligent Interaction (Part III), edited by Julie A. Jacko Volume 4, LNCS 5613, Human–Computer Interaction––Interacting in Various Application Domains (Part IV), edited by Julie A. Jacko Volume 5, LNCS 5614, Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction––Addressing Diversity (Part I), edited by Constantine Stephanidis

VI

Foreword

• • • • • • • • • • •

Volume 6, LNCS 5615, Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction––Intelligent and Ubiquitous Interaction Environments (Part II), edited by Constantine Stephanidis Volume 7, LNCS 5616, Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction––Applications and Services (Part III), edited by Constantine Stephanidis Volume 8, LNCS 5617, Human Interface and the Management of Information––Designing Information Environments (Part I), edited by Michael J. Smith and Gavriel Salvendy Volume 9, LNCS 5618, Human Interface and the Management of Information––Information and Interaction (Part II), edited by Gavriel Salvendy and Michael J. Smith Volume 10, LNCS 5619, Human Centered Design, edited by Masaaki Kurosu Volume 11, LNCS 5620, Digital Human Modeling, edited by Vincent G. Duffy Volume 13, LNCS 5622, Virtual and Mixed Reality, edited by Randall Shumaker Volume 14, LNCS 5623, Internationalization, Design and Global Development, edited by Nuray Aykin Volume 15, LNCS 5624, Ergonomics and Health Aspects of Work with Computers, edited by Ben-Tzion Karsh Volume 16, LNAI 5638, The Foundations of Augmented Cognition: Neuroergonomics and Operational Neuroscience, edited by Dylan Schmorrow, Ivy Estabrooke and Marc Grootjen Volume 17, LNAI 5639, Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, edited by Don Harris

I would like to thank the Program Chairs and the members of the Program Boards of all thematic areas, listed below, for their contribution to the highest scientific quality and the overall success of HCI International 2009.

Ergonomics and Health Aspects of Work with Computers Program Chair: Ben-Tzion Karsh Arne Aarås, Norway Pascale Carayon, USA Barbara G.F. Cohen, USA Wolfgang Friesdorf, Germany John Gosbee, USA Martin Helander, Singapore Ed Israelski, USA Waldemar Karwowski, USA Peter Kern, Germany Danuta Koradecka, Poland Kari Lindström, Finland

Holger Luczak, Germany Aura C. Matias, Philippines Kyung (Ken) Park, Korea Michelle M. Robertson, USA Michelle L. Rogers, USA Steven L. Sauter, USA Dominique L. Scapin, France Naomi Swanson, USA Peter Vink, The Netherlands John Wilson, UK Teresa Zayas-Cabán, USA

Foreword

Human Interface and the Management of Information Program Chair: Michael J. Smith Gunilla Bradley, Sweden Hans-Jörg Bullinger, Germany Alan Chan, Hong Kong Klaus-Peter Fähnrich, Germany Michitaka Hirose, Japan Jhilmil Jain, USA Yasufumi Kume, Japan Mark Lehto, USA Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, USA Shogo Nishida, Japan Robert Proctor, USA Youngho Rhee, Korea

Anxo Cereijo Roibás, UK Katsunori Shimohara, Japan Dieter Spath, Germany Tsutomu Tabe, Japan Alvaro D. Taveira, USA Kim-Phuong L. Vu, USA Tomio Watanabe, Japan Sakae Yamamoto, Japan Hidekazu Yoshikawa, Japan Li Zheng, P.R. China Bernhard Zimolong, Germany

Human–Computer Interaction Program Chair: Julie A. Jacko Sebastiano Bagnara, Italy Sherry Y. Chen, UK Marvin J. Dainoff, USA Jianming Dong, USA John Eklund, Australia Xiaowen Fang, USA Ayse Gurses, USA Vicki L. Hanson, UK Sheue-Ling Hwang, Taiwan Wonil Hwang, Korea Yong Gu Ji, Korea Steven Landry, USA

Gitte Lindgaard, Canada Chen Ling, USA Yan Liu, USA Chang S. Nam, USA Celestine A. Ntuen, USA Philippe Palanque, France P.L. Patrick Rau, P.R. China Ling Rothrock, USA Guangfeng Song, USA Steffen Staab, Germany Wan Chul Yoon, Korea Wenli Zhu, P.R. China

Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics Program Chair: Don Harris Guy A. Boy, USA John Huddlestone, UK Kenji Itoh, Japan Hung-Sying Jing, Taiwan Ron Laughery, USA Wen-Chin Li, Taiwan James T. Luxhøj, USA

Nicolas Marmaras, Greece Sundaram Narayanan, USA Mark A. Neerincx, The Netherlands Jan M. Noyes, UK Kjell Ohlsson, Sweden Axel Schulte, Germany Sarah C. Sharples, UK

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Foreword

Neville A. Stanton, UK Xianghong Sun, P.R. China Andrew Thatcher, South Africa

Matthew J.W. Thomas, Australia Mark Young, UK

Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction Program Chair: Constantine Stephanidis Julio Abascal, Spain Ray Adams, UK Elisabeth André, Germany Margherita Antona, Greece Chieko Asakawa, Japan Christian Bühler, Germany Noelle Carbonell, France Jerzy Charytonowicz, Poland Pier Luigi Emiliani, Italy Michael Fairhurst, UK Dimitris Grammenos, Greece Andreas Holzinger, Austria Arthur I. Karshmer, USA Simeon Keates, Denmark Georgios Kouroupetroglou, Greece Sri Kurniawan, USA

Patrick M. Langdon, UK Seongil Lee, Korea Zhengjie Liu, P.R. China Klaus Miesenberger, Austria Helen Petrie, UK Michael Pieper, Germany Anthony Savidis, Greece Andrew Sears, USA Christian Stary, Austria Hirotada Ueda, Japan Jean Vanderdonckt, Belgium Gregg C. Vanderheiden, USA Gerhard Weber, Germany Harald Weber, Germany Toshiki Yamaoka, Japan Panayiotis Zaphiris, UK

Virtual and Mixed Reality Program Chair: Randall Shumaker Pat Banerjee, USA Mark Billinghurst, New Zealand Charles E. Hughes, USA David Kaber, USA Hirokazu Kato, Japan Robert S. Kennedy, USA Young J. Kim, Korea Ben Lawson, USA

Gordon M. Mair, UK Miguel A. Otaduy, Switzerland David Pratt, UK Albert “Skip” Rizzo, USA Lawrence Rosenblum, USA Dieter Schmalstieg, Austria Dylan Schmorrow, USA Mark Wiederhold, USA

Internationalization, Design and Global Development Program Chair: Nuray Aykin Michael L. Best, USA Ram Bishu, USA Alan Chan, Hong Kong Andy M. Dearden, UK

Susan M. Dray, USA Vanessa Evers, The Netherlands Paul Fu, USA Emilie Gould, USA

Foreword

Sung H. Han, Korea Veikko Ikonen, Finland Esin Kiris, USA Masaaki Kurosu, Japan Apala Lahiri Chavan, USA James R. Lewis, USA Ann Light, UK James J.W. Lin, USA Rungtai Lin, Taiwan Zhengjie Liu, P.R. China Aaron Marcus, USA Allen E. Milewski, USA

Elizabeth D. Mynatt, USA Oguzhan Ozcan, Turkey Girish Prabhu, India Kerstin Röse, Germany Eunice Ratna Sari, Indonesia Supriya Singh, Australia Christian Sturm, Spain Adi Tedjasaputra, Singapore Kentaro Toyama, India Alvin W. Yeo, Malaysia Chen Zhao, P.R. China Wei Zhou, P.R. China

Online Communities and Social Computing Program Chairs: A. Ant Ozok, Panayiotis Zaphiris Chadia N. Abras, USA Chee Siang Ang, UK Amy Bruckman, USA Peter Day, UK Fiorella De Cindio, Italy Michael Gurstein, Canada Tom Horan, USA Anita Komlodi, USA Piet A.M. Kommers, The Netherlands Jonathan Lazar, USA Stefanie Lindstaedt, Austria

Gabriele Meiselwitz, USA Hideyuki Nakanishi, Japan Anthony F. Norcio, USA Jennifer Preece, USA Elaine M. Raybourn, USA Douglas Schuler, USA Gilson Schwartz, Brazil Sergei Stafeev, Russia Charalambos Vrasidas, Cyprus Cheng-Yen Wang, Taiwan

Augmented Cognition Program Chair: Dylan D. Schmorrow Andy Bellenkes, USA Andrew Belyavin, UK Joseph Cohn, USA Martha E. Crosby, USA Tjerk de Greef, The Netherlands Blair Dickson, UK Traci Downs, USA Julie Drexler, USA Ivy Estabrooke, USA Cali Fidopiastis, USA Chris Forsythe, USA Wai Tat Fu, USA Henry Girolamo, USA

Marc Grootjen, The Netherlands Taro Kanno, Japan Wilhelm E. Kincses, Germany David Kobus, USA Santosh Mathan, USA Rob Matthews, Australia Dennis McBride, USA Robert McCann, USA Jeff Morrison, USA Eric Muth, USA Mark A. Neerincx, The Netherlands Denise Nicholson, USA Glenn Osga, USA

IX

X

Foreword

Dennis Proffitt, USA Leah Reeves, USA Mike Russo, USA Kay Stanney, USA Roy Stripling, USA Mike Swetnam, USA Rob Taylor, UK

Maria L.Thomas, USA Peter-Paul van Maanen, The Netherlands Karl van Orden, USA Roman Vilimek, Germany Glenn Wilson, USA Thorsten Zander, Germany

Digital Human Modeling Program Chair: Vincent G. Duffy Karim Abdel-Malek, USA Thomas J. Armstrong, USA Norm Badler, USA Kathryn Cormican, Ireland Afzal Godil, USA Ravindra Goonetilleke, Hong Kong Anand Gramopadhye, USA Sung H. Han, Korea Lars Hanson, Sweden Pheng Ann Heng, Hong Kong Tianzi Jiang, P.R. China

Kang Li, USA Zhizhong Li, P.R. China Timo J. Määttä, Finland Woojin Park, USA Matthew Parkinson, USA Jim Potvin, Canada Rajesh Subramanian, USA Xuguang Wang, France John F. Wiechel, USA Jingzhou (James) Yang, USA Xiu-gan Yuan, P.R. China

Human Centered Design Program Chair: Masaaki Kurosu Gerhard Fischer, USA Tom Gross, Germany Naotake Hirasawa, Japan Yasuhiro Horibe, Japan Minna Isomursu, Finland Mitsuhiko Karashima, Japan Tadashi Kobayashi, Japan

Kun-Pyo Lee, Korea Loïc Martínez-Normand, Spain Dominique L. Scapin, France Haruhiko Urokohara, Japan Gerrit C. van der Veer, The Netherlands Kazuhiko Yamazaki, Japan

In addition to the members of the Program Boards above, I also wish to thank the following volunteer external reviewers: Gavin Lew from the USA, Daniel Su from the UK, and Ilia Adami, Ioannis Basdekis, Yannis Georgalis, Panagiotis Karampelas, Iosif Klironomos, Alexandros Mourouzis, and Stavroula Ntoa from Greece. This conference could not have been possible without the continuous support and advice of the Conference Scientific Advisor, Prof. Gavriel Salvendy, as well as the dedicated work and outstanding efforts of the Communications Chair and Editor of HCI International News, Abbas Moallem.

Foreword

XI

I would also like to thank for their contribution toward the organization of the HCI International 2009 conference the members of the Human–Computer Interaction Laboratory of ICS-FORTH, and in particular Margherita Antona, George Paparoulis, Maria Pitsoulaki, Stavroula Ntoa, and Maria Bouhli. Constantine Stephanidis

HCI International 2011

The 14th International Conference on Human–Computer Interaction, HCI International 2011, will be held jointly with the affiliated conferences in the summer of 2011. It will cover a broad spectrum of themes related to human–computer interaction, including theoretical issues, methods, tools, processes and case studies in HCI design, as well as novel interaction techniques, interfaces and applications. The proceedings will be published by Springer. More information about the topics, as well as the venue and dates of the conference, will be announced through the HCI International Conference series website: http://www.hci-international.org/

General Chair Professor Constantine Stephanidis University of Crete and ICS-FORTH Heraklion, Crete, Greece Email: [email protected]

Table of Contents

Part I: Designing and Developing Online Communities A Discussion System for Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative Analysis of Incidents in Nuclear Power Plants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saizo Aoyagi, Hidenori Fujino, Hirotake Ishii, Hiroshi Shimoda, Hiroshi Sakuda, Hidekazu Yoshikawa, and Toshio Sugiman Universal Navigation through Social Networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mahsa Ghafourian, Hassan A. Karimi, and Linda van Roosmalen Collaborative Work in 3D Virtual Environments: A Research Agenda and Operational Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B´eatrice S. Hasler, Thierry Buecheler, and Rolf Pfeifer

3

13

23

Workflow-Based Architecture for Collaborative Video Annotation . . . . . . Cristian Hofmann, Nina Hollender, and Dieter W. Fellner

33

Catalysing the Development of a Conference Workspace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jukka Huhtam¨ aki, Ossi Nyk¨ anen, and Jaakko Salonen

43

Dialogues of Locations: BlueSpot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andr´ as Kangyal and L´ aszl´ o Laufer

53

Instant Online Communities as a Means to Foster Conferences . . . . . . . . . Martin Christof Kindsm¨ uller, Jan Milz, and Johannes Schmidt

62

Mobile Social Service Design for Large-Scale Exhibition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Huanglingzi Liu, Ying Liu, Wei Wang, and Bin Wang

72

Accessibility of Registration Mechanisms in Social Networking Sites . . . . Gabriele Meiselwitz and Jonathan Lazar

82

A Visualization Approach for Group Behaviors, Beliefs and Intentions to Support Critical Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colleen L. Phillips, Norman D. Geddes, and Justin T. Simms Measuring Usability via Biometrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anjali Phukan Structuring the Social Subsystem Components of the Community Based E-Museum Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Suriyati Razali, Nor Laila Md. Noor, and Wan Adilah Wan Adnan

91 101

108

XVI

Table of Contents

Notice Board as Metaphor for Social Media Service in Chemical Factory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sampo Ter¨ as and Petri Mannonen

117

A Study on the Interface for Viewing the Information Menu of a Town from Intersections Using a Digital Compass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Misa Tsuchihashi and Katsuhiko Ogawa

126

Email Accessibility and Social Networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brian Wentz and Jonathan Lazar

134

Part II: Social Behaviour of Humans and Artificial Agents in Online Communities Why People Use Social Networking Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Petter Bae Brandtzæg and Jan Heim Automatic Generation of Non-verbal Behavior for Agents in Virtual Worlds: A System for Supporting Multimodal Conversations of Bots and Avatars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Werner Breitfuss, Helmut Prendinger, and Mitsuru Ishizuka Preliminary Findings from a Cross Cultural Usability Study on the Internationalization of User Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joyram Chakraborty, Linda Hansen, Darren A. Denenberg, and Anthony F. Norcio Credibility On-Line: Quality Metrics for Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Francisco V. Cipolla Ficarra, Ernesto Vivas, and Joaquim Romo

143

153

162

172

A Life-Like Agent Interface System with Second Life Avatars on the OpenSimulator Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hiroshi Dohi and Mitsuru Ishizuka

182

Multi-dimensional Moderation in Online Communities: Experiences with Three Norwegian Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gheorghita Ghinea, Bendik Bygstad, and Christoph Schmitz

191

Modding as Rating Behavior in Virtual Communities: The Case of Rooster Teeth Productions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stefan Haefliger, Philip Reichen, Peter M. J¨ ager, and Georg von Krogh Personalized and Deformed Avatars for Realizing Avatar-Mediated Real Person-to-Person Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Masayuki Heike, Kinya Fujita, and Takahiro Tanaka Ghatcha: GHost Avatar on a Telework CHAir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yutaka Ishii, Kouzi Osaki, and Tomio Watanabe

197

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Distributed Leadership, Trust and Online Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jill Jameson

226

Metacommunication Patterns in Online Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arto Lanam¨ aki and Tero P¨ aiv¨ arinta

236

Collective Content as a Facilitator of Community Interaction: A User Study of Four Close-Knit Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thomas Olsson, Hannu Toivola, Minna W¨ aljas, Kaisa V¨ a¨ an¨ anen-Vainio-Mattila, and Jaakko Lehikoinen Analysis of Information Disclosure on a Social Networking Site . . . . . . . . Katherine Peterson and Katie A. Siek Attribution of Identity in Autonomous Action of Remotely Operated Robot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yugo Takeuchi and Hikaru Nakagami Supporting Acceptable Dialogue Start Based on User Uninterruptibility Estimation for Avatar-Mediated Multi-tasking Online Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Takahiro Tanaka, Kyouhei Matsumura, and Kinya Fujita Developing Believable Interactive Cultural Characters for Cross-Cultural Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Glenn Taylor and Ed Sims

246

256

265

272

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Part III: Web 2.0: Emerging Challenges Weighting Structures: Evolutionary Dynamics of Innovation Networks in Virtual Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vitaliano Barberio and Alessandro Lomi

295

User Reputation Evaluation Using Co-occurrence Feature and Collective Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeong-Won Cha, Hyun-woo Lee, Yo-Sub Han, and Laehyun Kim

305

Innovation Networks: A Report on Creating a Specialist Professional Social Network, Offline and Online, to Foster Innovation in the New Media Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bob Cotton The Innovation Architectures of Facebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susan Shepherd Ferebee and James Davis Improving Personal Tagging Consistency through Visualization of Tag Relevancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Qin Gao, Yusen Dai, and Kai Fu

312 322

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“I Heard It on the Grapevine” – Blogging, Facebook, YouTube, and Student Self-Organization during a Faculty Strike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emilie W. Gould

336

Evaluation of User Reputation on YouTube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yo-Sub Han, Laehyun Kim, and Jeong-Won Cha

346

Critical Success Factors for Web 2.0 – A Reference Framework . . . . . . . . . Pedro Isa´ıas, Paula Miranda, and Sara P´ıfano

354

User Innovation Networks and Research Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Niki Lambropoulos, Pan Kampylis, and Aneesha Bakharia

364

Web Interface for Designing and Sharing Sound Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seiya Matsuda, Shingo Ikeda, and Tomohito Yamamoto

374

Who Are the Web Composers? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evandro Manara Miletto, Marcelo Soares Pimenta, Aurelio Faustino Hoppe, and Luciano Vargas Flores

381

Social Adaptation of ERP Software: Tagging UI Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marcus Nitsche, Martin Christof Kindsm¨ uller, Udo Arend, and Michael Herczeg

391

Propagation Modeling and Analysis of Incidental Topics in Blogosphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Li Zhao, Ruixi Yuan, Xiaohong Guan, and Mingyang Li

401

Part IV: Learning, Education and Culture The Coming Revolution in Competence Development: Using Serious Games to Improve Cross-Cultural Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bjorn Andersen, Manuel Fradinho, Paul Lefrere, and Veli-Pekka Niitamo Learning Computer Science Fundamentals through Virtual Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Braman, Giovanni Vincenti, Ana Maria Arboleda Diaz, and Andrew Jinman A Discussion of Video Capturing to Assist in Distance Learning . . . . . . . Michael Conlon and Vasos Pavlika

413

423

432

The Whole Story: Retrieving Narratives for Cross-Cultural Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alex Davis

442

When Social Worlds Collide: Charting the Intersection of Social Media and Courseware/Course Management Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher A. Egert, Stephen Jacobs, and Susan B. Barnes

452

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The First Two W’s: Fostering Multicultural Awareness in Children . . . . . Noah Falstein and Nicolle Ruetz

462

Creating Community through the Use of a Class Wiki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kirsten A. Johnson and Jamie Bartolino

471

Benefits and Challenges of Using Collaborative Development Environments with Social Software in Higher Computer Science Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel Kadenbach and Carsten Kleiner Virtual Communities Adapted to the EHEA in an Enterprise Distance e-Learning Based Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rafael Pastor, Timothy Read, Salvador Ros, Roberto Hernandez, and Rocael Hern´ andez Evaluating the Social Dimension in Online Learning Communities . . . . . . Francesca Pozzi Heuristics for Implementation of Wiki Technology in Higher Education Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Portia Pusey and Gabriele Meiselwitz Mobile Phone Interfaces for Informal Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J´ ulio Cesar dos Reis, Rodrigo Bonacin, and Maria Cec´ılia Martins A Proposed Movie Recommendation Method Using Emotional Word Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mina Song, Hyun Namgoong, Hong-Gee Kim, and JuHyun Eune Cultural Prescription vs. User Perception of Information Architecture for Culture Centred Website: A Case Study on Muslim Online User . . . . Wan Abdul Rahim Wan Mohd. Isa, Nor Laila Md. Noor, and Shafie Mehad Leveraging Mobile Devices to Develop Intercultural Competency for Digital Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew Willis and Elaine M. Raybourn

479

488

498

507

515

525

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545

Part V: Online Games Game Usability Heuristics (PLAY) for Evaluating and Designing Better Games: The Next Iteration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heather Desurvire and Charlotte Wiberg Cheating Behaviors in Online Gaming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Henry Been-Lirn Duh and Vivian Hsueh Hua Chen

557

567

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Flow Experience in Second Life: The Impact of Telepresence on Human-Computer Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anthony Faiola and Olga Smyslova

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EmoHeart: Automation of Expressive Communication of Emotions in Second Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alena Neviarouskaya, Helmut Prendinger, and Mitsuru Ishizuka

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Antecedents of Attributions in an Educational Game for Social Learning: Who’s to Blame? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Amy Ogan, Vincent Aleven, Julia Kim, and Christopher Jones

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Intercultural Competence Game That Fosters Metacognitive Agility and Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elaine M. Raybourn

603

A Content Analysis of Interviews with Players of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Play Games (MMORPGs): Motivating Factors and the Impact on Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jacqui Taylor and James Taylor Uncanny as Usability Obstacle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Angela Tinwell Gamers’ Implicit Knowledge on the Psychological Influence of Game-Playing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alexander E. Voiskounsky, Olga V. Mitina, and Anastasiya A. Avetisova Intercultural Socializing via Mobile Games for Backpackers . . . . . . . . . . . . Chui Yin Wong, Kimberly Chu, Chee Weng Khong, and Sheila Paul

613 622

632

641

Part VI: Online Communities and Society Designing Inclusive Social Networks: A Participatory Approach . . . . . . . . Leonelo Dell Anhol Almeida, Vˆ ania Paula de Almeida Neris, Leonardo Cunha de Miranda, Elaine Cristina Saito Hayashi, and Maria Cec´ılia Calani Baranauskas

653

City Ragas: Building an Intercultural Dialogue between People . . . . . . . . Lipika Bansal

663

Are Online Communities Good for the Civic Audit of Public Spaces, Services, and Officers? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fiorella De Cindio and Cristian Peraboni

673

Social Features in Online Communities for Healthcare Consumers – A Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Annie Y.S. Lau and Trevor M.Y. Kwok

682

Table of Contents

Usability and User Acceptance for Personal Health Records: A Perspective from Healthcare Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. Ant Ozok, Ayse P. Gurses, Huijuan Wu, Melissa Nelson, David Moen, and June Wei Measuring E-Democracy Opportunities: A Global Perspective . . . . . . . . . Farid Shirazi

XXI

690

700

Ethnographic User Study and Concept Design for Chinese Migrant Workers’ Social Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jie Wang, Wei Wang, Ying Liu, Xia Wang, and Qiuhong Chen

710

Medication Adherence among the Elderly and Technology Aids: Results from an Online Survey Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Huijuan Wu and A. Ant Ozok

719

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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A Discussion System for Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative Analysis of Incidents in Nuclear Power Plants Saizo Aoyagi1, Hidenori Fujino2, Hirotake Ishii1, Hiroshi Shimoda1, Hiroshi Sakuda3, Hidekazu Yoshikawa4, and Toshio Sugiman5 1

Graduate School of Energy Science, Kyoto University, Gokasho, Uji, Kyoto 611-0011, Japan {aoyagi, hirotake, shimoda}@uji.energy.kyoto-u.ac.jp 2 Safety Research Institute, West Japan Railway Company 1-2 -2 Matsuzaki, Abeno, Osaka, Japan [email protected] 3 Institute of Nuclear Safety System, incorporated 64 Sata, Mihama-cho, Mikata-gun, Fukui 919-1205, Japan [email protected] 4 College of Nuclear Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, 150001, China [email protected] 5 Graduate School of Human and Environmental studies, Kyoto University, Yoshida-nihonmatsu-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan [email protected]

Abstract. Incident analysis is an important activity to maintain the safety of nuclear power plants. Much discussion is required to utilize the collected incidents effectively in the incident analysis activity. On-line Computer Mediated Communication(CMC) activity is an appropriate circumstance for geographically dispersed workers in nuclear power plants to discuss about the incident analysis. Some studies, however, indicate that the discussion activity in CMC tends to stagnate after a short period of time. For this study, the authors developed a discussion system for knowledge sharing and collaborative analysis of incidents, and proposed a method to promote discussion among users through introduction of "Active Participant". The Active Participant always behaves actively, and such behaviors are expected to promote the other members' incident analysis in the discussion group. To evaluate the effectiveness of the introduction of the Active Participant and obtain concrete guidance of the Active Participant, an experiment was conducted with nuclear power plant workers who were asked to evaluate the discussion system. The results of the experiment show that Active Participant can promote discussion among group members if enough number of incidents are submitted to the discussion system. Keywords: knowledge sharing, incidents analysis, online discussion and promotion of discussion. A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 3–12, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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1 Introduction Incident analysis activity is a kind of efforts for prevention of accidents in safetycritical domain in which there are many dangers, such as medical workplace, building industries, nuclear power plants. Incident analysis is a procedure for collecting, analyzing and utilizing cases of incidents in which a danger was removed before accident occurs, or there was no damage by chance despite oversight of danger for safety [1], [2], [3]. For effective incident analysis activity, many cases of incidents must be collected. In addition to that, active discussion which triggers utilization of the collected cases is required in order to extract useful lessons for accident prevention by analyzing a case from diverse points of view, and application of these lessons. Japanese electric companies nowadays have made company-wide efforts to collected cases of incidents, and many cases are continuously collected. However, all collected cases are not always discussed sufficiently and utilized effectively. The purpose of this study is to propose a method to promote discussion among workers for effective incident analysis.

2 Proposal of a Method for Promoting Discussion among Workers The authors developed a discussion system for knowledge sharing and collaborative analysis of incidents which provides Asynchronous Computer Mediated Communication(CMC) environment as an effective way of incident analysis activity. Moreover, the authors designed a behavior guideline for active participants who are the special participants expected to activate the discussion among the group workers. 2.1 Discussion System for Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative Analysis of Incidents The discussion system is a Internet-based incident sharing tool which consists of Incident Sharing Page, Incident Registering Page, Electronic Bulletin Board and others. The user can submit incident information on the Incident Registering Page according to a framework of Root Cause Analysis as shown in Fig. 1 [4]. All users can refer the submitted incidents on the Incident Sharing Page. Moreover, the users can discuss about the incident on the Electronic Bulletin Board which is prepared for each submitted incident. 2.2 Active Participant Some studies for education or knowledge management indicate that the discussion activity in CMC tends to stagnate. In particular, because workers in nuclear power plants are very busy, even if the discussion system can solve a problem that the workers are geographically separated, psychological resistance to participation still exists and stagnation of discussion occurs. Some studies of social psychology indicate that human conforms to others' action in group activity when some members of the group show consistent action [5]. Applying

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this conforming behavior, introduction of "Active Participant (AP)" is proposed in this study as a way for promoting CMC discussion of incidents analysis. AP shows consistently active behavior in group incidents analysis, and this behavior indirectly promotes actions of other members of the group through their conforming to the AP. In addition to this indirect way, applying knowledge of educational studies [6] the AP implements direct intervention to discussion of incidents analysis, such as questioning to other members.

3 Experimental Method In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the introduction of AP and obtain more concrete action guideline for AP, an experiment was conducted in which workers in nuclear power plants join incidents analysis activity using the developed discussion system. Thirty workers who are task managers in Japanese nuclear power plants and six APs who are nuclear safety researchers having experience of working at nuclear power plants joined the experiment. The participants were divided into six groups which consist of five normal participants from three different plants and one AP. The division was made based on the machines which they have charge of in their daily work. The participants were explained that the purpose of the experiment is to evaluate the developed discussion system, and were requested to (1) evaluate the discussion

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system in a group of about five workers, (2) access to the discussion system every two days and above, (3) submit at least five incidents which was actually occurred or imaginary cases and (4) actively post messages in bulletin boards of the discussion system to discuss about the incidents with group members. APs were requested to (1) behave actively to show the way to other participant, and (2) activate discussion by asking many questions to other participant with a favorable comment. Before starting the experiment, twenty two incidents were submitted by the experimenter to the discussion system. The experimental period was from January 13th, 2009 to February 6th (25 days). All participants received a gift which worths ten thousand Japanese yen after the experiment. Basic information and psychological factors which probably affect the participant's behavior in the discussion activity were measured using achievement motivation scale and interpersonal orientation scale before the experiment. In the experimental period, action log, submitted incidents, and posted messages were collected. In addition, impressions towards other members' behavior in the group were questioned by web-based questionnaire after the experiment.

4 Results and Discussion 4.1 Activity Trends of Each Group Fig. 2 shows the accumulated total number of cases submitted and opened by all participants of each group(open cases). Fig .3 shows the accumulated total number of messages posted to the bulletin boards by each group. In the first week (from day 1 to day 7), group 1, 2 and 5 submitted several cases and group 1 posted a few messages. In the second week (from day 8 to day 14), group 1 shows few activity, and group 2, 5 and 3 submitted many cases and posted many messages. Group 4 and 6 submitted a few cases. In the third week(from day 15 to day 21), group 2, 3, 4 and 5 increased cases and messages. In the last 4 days(from day 22 to day 25), group 2 and 3 submitted many cases and posted many messages. These figures show that each group activity did not show equivalent patterns. Six groups can be categorized into three patterns of activity. First pattern, which group 1 and 6 show, is a stagnating pattern. In these groups (stagnating groups), few cases had been submitted, and few messages had been posted. Second pattern, which group 2 and 5 show, is an activated pattern. In these groups (activated groups), the activity was very active throughout the experimental period by submitting many cases and posting many messages. The total number of actions of the activated groups was twice as many as that of the stagnating groups. Third pattern, which group 3 and 4 show, is a middle pattern. In these groups (middle groups), a stagnating trend appears at the beginning. Nevertheless, they were activated after the middle of the experimental period and outweigh some groups. 4.2 Activity Trends of Active Participants The result of the experiment shows that the normal participants' activity does not have much correlation with AP's activity. In this experiment, all APs did not submit many cases. APs of group 1, 2, 3, and 5 posted many messages, and APs of group 4 and 6

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didn’t post many messages. However, AP of group 5 posted messages after normal participants had done. Therefore activation of group 5 was caused by the AP at least on the beginning. Consequently, there may be the other factors which activate the groups besides the AP's behavior. Next, detailed results of three patterns are discussed to clarify cause of such difference of activity in the experimental period. 4.3 Activated Groups A comparison of Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 shows that the posted messages increased after the submitted cases increases in the activated groups (group 2 and 5). In the first week, a few cases were submitted but any messages were not posted. In the second week, a few messages were posted which are related to the cases submitted in the first week. Then, many cases were submitted around day 8. After about a week, many messages were posted. 120 se100 g as se 80 m f 60 o re b 40 m u n 20

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These facts indicate that increasing of new cases promote posting messages. The reason of these phenomena will be discussed later. 4.4 Stagnating Groups Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 show accumulated total number of open cases and messages of group 1. The participants were requested to submit at least 5 cases, but two participants in the group 1 submitted no cases. The AP in the group 1 also did not submit any cases. This group shows stagnating trend especially in the middle of the experimental period. During this period, anyone submitted no cases and only one message was posted in day 17 except the messages by the AP, in spite that the AP posted messages continuously. Such stagnation was also observed in group 6. However, differently from the group 6, the messages posted by the AP in the group 6 were not ignored completely. The activity in the group 1 stagnated in spite that there were some replies to the AP's messages and a few messages between two normal participants were exchanged. 18 16 se g 14 as se 12 m 10 f or 8 e b 6 m u 4 n 2 0

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4.5 Middle Groups Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 show accumulated total number of open cases and messages of group 4. The group 4 is one of the middle groups which were activated in the middle of the experiment. Although there were no submitted cases or posted messages at the beginning, a sudden activation was occurred in day 15. Some cases and messages were suddenly inputted in day 15, followed by posting a few messages and submitting some cases during the period between day 16 and 25. Group 3 also experienced a sudden activation during the period between day 8 and day 10. In the group 3, the cases and messages increased continuously and reached at the largest number among all groups at the end. On the other hand, a few cases and messages were inputted at the end of the experiment in the group 4. 4.6 Analysis of Middle Groups’ Activation We pay attention to the sudden activation of group 3 and group 4. Fig. 8 shows action time-line chart of group 4 in day 15. Vertical axis of this chart is time, and each action is arranged by participant. The arrows represents that the end point case is a target of an action such as viewing cases or posting messages. Fig.8 shows that the first action in day 15 was AP's post of fifteen messages. After that, the participant 4 viewed some cases which the AP posted some messages to. Then, the participant 4 submitted three cases and posted one message to case 25, which was submitted by the participant 2 in day 2. This message was replied by the participant 3 in the afternoon. After that, the participant 4 thanked the participant 3 for the reply using "evaluate button" which is a special function of the bulletin board of the discussion system. The last action in day 15 was viewing cases by the participant 1. Although Fig. 8 has no information about participant's intention and causal relationships of actions, the AP probably triggered other members' actions. That is because the other participants hadn't submitted any cases and posted any messages before the AP posted some messages. Similarly, AP triggered other members’ action in other group. Sudden activation of group 3 between day 10 and day 8 seem to be triggered by AP’s posting one message in day 3.

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5 Conclusion The results of the experiment indicate that AP could promote discussion activity through triggering other members' actions in the middle groups. Nevertheless, even if the AP was active as mentioned in 4.2, the activity of group 1 stagnated in the middle of the experimental period. To explain this difference of APs' effectiveness, we pay attention to the difference in number of submitted cases of group 3, group 4 and

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group 1. When the discussion was activated, many cases were submitted by participants in group 3 and group 4. On the contrary, few cases were submitted in group 1. One interpretation of these facts is that submitting new cases is required for activation of discussion in bulletin boards. The fact that posted messages increased after submitted new cases increases in activated groups, as mentioned in 4.4, also supports this interpretation. This is probably because a new case provides a topic for discussion. Moreover, this interpretation implies that cases which the experimenter had submitted before the experiment were inappropriate as a topic of discussion. This is probably because pregnant topics are needed for discussion. These are cases of general incidents in nuclear plants and are not about special domain or machines. Therefore these cases are not so worth because of lack of professional implication. Another probable reason of why new case is needed is responsibility to answer the question. If a participant has a question to a case, he will ask about the case to other participant who submitted the case. This is because the participant who submitted the case should know the background of the case. However, if the case was submitted by the experimenter, any participants don't know all about the case. The only option is asking about the case without specifying who should answer this question. However anyone have no responsibility to answer and could not answer such a question. Therefore, the question will be left without answered. This is the cause of the stagnation of the discussion. Therefore, not experimenter but participants and AP have to submit cases for the promotion of discussion. Therefore, if APs submit many proper cases, and post messages, discussion activity of other members is expected to be activated. The AP of group 1 should have submitted cases of incidents for providing new topics, in the middle of the experimental period. However, in this experiment, the APs were not workers of nuclear power plants, but researchers in the area of safety management. Consequently, because they have much other task to do, and don't have occasion of experience of incidents in nuclear power plants, they could not submit cases frequently. Therefore, AP should be selected from nuclear power plant workers, or someone who has proficient knowledge about incidents. In this article, we proposed a method to promote discussion activity in a discussion system for knowledge sharing and collaborative analysis for incidents analysis which is effective to maintain safety of nuclear power plants, and the evaluation experiment was conducted. However, not all results of the experiment were analyzed. In particular, only qualitative data of the results are analyzed. In the future, contents of cases and messages and ex-post questionnaire will be analyzed in qualitative way in order to verify the implication discussed in this article. Moreover, interview survey will be conducted, to collect evidences which support our hypotheses.

References 1. Reason, J.: Managing the risks of organizational accidents. Ashgate, Aldershot (1997) 2. Nishigaki, S., Vavrin, J., Kano, N., Haga, T., Kunz, J.C., Law, K.: Humanware, Human Error, and Hiyari-Hat: A Template of Unsafe Symptoms. J. Constr. Engrg. Mgmt. 120, 421– 442 (1994)

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3. Barach, P., Small, S.D.: Reporting and preventing medical mishaps: lessons from nonmedical near miss reporting systems, vol. 320, pp. 759–763 (2000), http://www.bmj.com 4. Doggett, A.M.: A Statistical Comparison of Three Root Cause Analysis Tools. Journal of Industrial Technology 20, 1–9 (2004), http://www.nait.org 5. Sherif, M.: A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology 187 (1935) 6. Walker, S.A.: Socratic strategies and devil’s advocacy in synchronous CMC debate. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 20, 172–182 (2004)

Universal Navigation through Social Networking Mahsa Ghafourian1, Hassan A. Karimi1, and Linda van Roosmalen2 1

Geoinformatics Laboratory, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 135 North, Bellefield Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA [email protected], [email protected] 2 Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology, 2310 Jane St Suite 1300, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15203 USA [email protected]

Abstract. In today’s complex metropolitan and aging society, navigation, which is an essential mobility activity, has become increasingly challenging for many individuals. This is particularly true for individuals who are unfamiliar with the area or require special navigation assistance due to visual, physical, or cognitive impairments. While there have been much advancements in navigation systems, they are one-size-fits-all and not universal. In this paper, we present the concept of Universal NAVIgation Technology (UNAVIT), which is a framework providing navigation assistance anywhere, anytime, and for any user through social networking (UNAVIT-SN). We discuss UNAVIT-SN, its components and features, and present key algorithms for providing suitable navigation solutions both indoors and outdoors, at different times and for users with a variety of needs and preferences. Keywords: Universal navigation, social networking, social matching, route recommender, navigation assistance.

1 Introduction Navigation systems assist users with determining their current location and providing directions to desired destinations. While early navigation systems were one-size-fitsall and offered limited functionality, today’s navigation technology offers a wider range of functions that appeal to more users resulting in a higher demand for its use. However, despite much advancement, today’s navigation technology falls short of being universal. By universal we mean a navigation system which provides navigation assistance to users with different needs and with different preferences, anywhere and anytime [1]. To overcome the shortcomings of modern navigation technology, in this paper, we present Universal NAVIgation Technology (UNAVIT) and discuss a new approach in addressing the universality of navigation in UNAVIT [1]. We define navigation as any activity requiring locations and the means to reach them. Examples of navigation that fit this definition include points of interest (POIs), routes, and directions. To address universality of navigation, Ghafourian and Karimi [2] have developed three algorithms, ANYWHERE (indoor-to-outdoor and outdoor-to-indoor seamless transitions), ANYTIME (time-specific navigation), and ANYUSER (personalized navigation). The A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 13–22, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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work presented in this paper is focused on a novel approach which provides navigation assistance through “social connection” and “social matching” using social networks. This is in contrast to the current navigation approach which is purely computational. The premise of the social networking approach in navigation stems from two observations: (a) social networking has become widespread, enabling the possibility of tackling some of the navigation challenges that computation alone could not and (b) developing a computing solution that can address all aspects of universal navigation is a major undertaking and may not even fully be realized due to several technical and non-technical challenges. We believe the social networking approach is viable in that UNAVIT-SN will be able to address the issue of universality through existing and emerging social networks, especially when the element of “trust” is considered and computing is only used when no navigation solutions can be provided by social networks or the solutions need to be augmented. In this paper, we present a technique that searches for navigation information through UNAVIT-SN, which consists of several social sub-networks (SSNs) each supporting a group of individuals with common navigation needs. The structure of this paper is as follows. In Sections 2, social networking and its relevance to navigation are discussed. In Section 3, the concept of UNAVIT-SN, an ontology, and an infrastructure are discussed. In Section 4, our social networking approach to address the requirements of universal navigation is described. Finally, in Section 5, we discuss our future research.

2 Background A social network is a structure that consists of a group of people in which each member is represented by a node and one or more relationships exist among members [5]. The emergence of mobile technologies has changed the ways in which people communicate with one another [6] and share information in such a way that separation of space and time is virtually nonexistent. Research in social psychology shows that people construct a shared reality within social networks, and not only share the information, but also have agreement on them [13]. In a study conducted by Gray et al. [4] it was shown that social participation by individuals with mobility limitations is affected by environmental barriers. Some of these barriers are the inaccessibility and complexity of the man-made environment with busy roads, dangerous intersections, dark alleyways, inaccessible buildings, among others. Other barriers include the inability of people to navigate due to physical, cognitive and sensory limitations, impeding their participation in society. Among numerous existing social networks, each with a different purpose and interest, we focus here on those social networks that are relevant to navigation. Millen and Feinberg [7] have developed a “social tagging” method, using bookmarking, which provides navigation recommendation. MobSoC [8] is an approach which offers a variety of services to users including POIs recommendation based on users’ interest. Wiggle Stick [9] is a technique which enables pedestrians with “media tagging” at specific locations as well as presenting directions. In order to meet the quality of services within a social network, the exchanged information among the members must be based upon “trust”, i.e., receiving recommendations and information from trusted friends who have similar preferences. This

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trust-based approach helps users receive effective and relevant information. To address trust in quality of services and quality navigation recommendations, a variety of techniques have been proposed, such as collaborative filtering [10], a technique for measuring social tie strength offered by [11], and a fuzzy model used by [12].

3 UNAVIT-SN To overcome the shortcomings of existing navigation technology, we propose UNAVIT-SN. UNAVIT is defined as a navigation environment capable of providing a variety of navigation information for any user regardless of their location in any situation with the capability of transparency and adaptability [1]. While a social networking approach can address the universality aspect of navigation, computation can still play a role. It can be used as augmentation and/or verification. By augmentation we mean the possibility of sending a navigation solution found and offered by UNAVITSN to navigation web services to assist the user with real-time navigation (e.g., stepby-step instructions on the recommended route). Verification aims at providing a reliable solution, i.e., if the navigation solution offered by UNAVIT-SN is deemed unreliable, then a solution from navigation web services will be requested, and after comparing the two solutions, the one which closely matches user’s requested Navigation Quality of Service (NavQoS) is chosen as the response to the query. However, the focus of this paper is navigation assistance through social networks. Figure 1 shows the overall concept of UNAVIT-SN, whose main features include AnyUser, AnyWhere, AnyTime, Transparency, and Adaptability [2] through social networking. Users will be able to access UNAVIT-SN’s services using cell phones. A user can either recommend or request navigation information. Recommendations are posted in the user’s SSNs. Upon user’s request for navigation information, UNAVIT-SN searches within the user’s SSNs, and if it cannot find a match, it refers it to other SSNs.

Fig. 1. The concept of UNAVIT-SN

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Fig. 2. UNAVIT ontology

3.1 Ontology We address the universality aspect of navigation by taking a social networking approach. We believe this approach is viable since social networks have been widely accepted and utilized by people across the globe. Therefore, UNAVIT-SN’s infrastructure should allow navigation information through SSNs, where individuals have similar navigation needs. Figure 2 shows an ontology for UNAVIT-SN. It highlights the main concepts of universal navigation through social networking and the relationships among them. In this ontology, user plays a central role by sharing their profiles to other members of the SN. User’s profile consists of special needs (elderly, cognitively impaired, mobility impaired, and visually impaired) and preferences for routes (shortest distance, fastest time, least turns). The user can recommend navigation information and can receive navigation recommendations from other members. A request can be made for a route or for a POI. A recommendation can also be on a route or a POI. 3.2 Infrastructure In this section, we discuss UNAVIT-SN that is based on UNAVIT’s infrastructure [2]. In the following, the architecture of UNAVIT-SN and its components are discussed. NavKiosk: NavKiosk is the major component of UNAVIT-SN’s infrastructure and is responsible for receiving navigation queries from users. NavKiosk for indoors (IndoorNavKiosks) is responsible for indoor navigation queries and NavKiosk for outdoors (Outdoor-NavKiosks) is responsible for outdoor navigation queries. NavKiosk consists of three sub-components: QPE, MetaNav, and NavNet which are described below. Query Processing Engine (QPE): QPE is responsible for analyzing and understanding queries using NavQoSs. Upon analyzing a query and understanding its requirements, QPE will structure the query in a manner compatible with MetaNav, NavNet, and NavWSP.

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MetaNav: MetaNav is a directory of information about UNAVIT-SN and its members, and all other NavKiosks (both indoors and outdoors). Examples of items stored in MetaNav are SSN types, social ties and characteristics within and among SSN members and among SSNs, and the geographic extent covered by each NavKiosk. Navigation Networking (NavNet): UNAVIT-SN will allow users to establish their own social networks as well as accessing existing social networks for the purpose of sharing navigation information. Through NavNet, UNAVIT-SN will facilitate sharing the experience of trusted members and groups with similar needs and preferences. NavNet uses information about trusted members and social networks stored in MetaNav to connect members and groups who have sharable navigation experiences. Navigation Web Service Provider (NavWSP): NavWSPs provide a variety of navigation services, including map data, POIs, and directions, as an augmentation and/or verification to social networking solutions. It uses the Internet and can be accessible directly through cell phones. An example of a NavWSP is Routing NavWSP.

4 Social Matching In order to share navigation experiences among individuals and groups through UNAVIT-SN we make distinctions between five social sub-networks (SSNs): General (G); Mobility-Impaired (M); Cognitively Impaired (C); Elderly (E); Visually Impaired (V). Each of these SSNs provides navigation information specific to their members’ special needs. For instance, a recommended route in M is a route that a wheelchair-seated individual can take as it avoids slopes over a certain degree and avoids inaccessible POIs. Each SSN is connected to one another (i.e., fully connected graph). The graph is weighted and directed. Each node of the graph represents a SSN as a sub-graph, which is also fully connected. The idea behind having a fully connected graph is that once a user becomes a member of a SSN, they can share and access navigation experiences of all members in that SSN. In the following we discuss users’ interactions within SSN, i.e., recommendations and requests. 4.1 POI and Route Recommendation Each member of a SSN can recommend navigation information. While a variety of information is possible, most recommendations are expected to be POIs and/or routes. Upon recommending a POI, the type of POI and the value of recommendation are specified by the user (recommender). We categorized POIs into five types: Restaurant/Fast Food, Gas-Station, Library/Bookstore, Shopping Mall, and Grocery Store. Each recommendation is assigned a value which represents the importance (strength) of the recommendation. We define three recommendation strengths: Low, Medium, or High. For recommendations on a route, we define three criteria for each route: Shortest Distance (SD), Fastest Time (FT), and Least Turns (LT). If the user does not

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specify the criterion for the recommended route, the information from user profiles will be used. A route recommended by a user may indicate a level of importance (weight) on each criterion. The weight for each criterion may range between 0 and 1 and the sum of the weights for the three criteria must be 1. Each recommendation must also have a quality rate, i.e., Low, Medium, or High denoted by 11, 12, and 13, respectively. The algorithm for recommendation is shown in Figure 3.

Input: user recommendation If recommendation = “POI” then T Å Get type of POI; R Å Get recommendation rate; If recommendation = “route” then SD Å Get shortest distance value; FT Å Get fastest time value; LT Å Get least turns value; R Å Get recommendation rate; If SD = null or FT = null or LT= null SD Å SD from user’s profile; FT Å FT from user’s profile; Lt Å LT from user’s profile; Fig. 3. Recommendation Algorithm

4.2 Navigation Information Request Users acquire navigation information by sending request to UNAVIT-SN. It is assumed that users prefer to receive information from trusted members within their SSNs. Therefore, UNAVIT-SN first tries to find a match between users’ request and a trusted member’s recommendation. We define “trust” as the number of referrals/interactions between each pair of members. This referral has a direction, as user A might refer to user B many times, but user B may refer to user C rather than user A for navigation information. Thus, in each SSN, the direction of information between each set of nodes (members) denotes the orientation of the referral by one member to another. NRij indicates the number of referrals by individual i to individual j. Initially, NRij = NRji =1. Over time NR will increase as more referrals are made. UNAVIT-SN must find a trusted member within the SSN whose recommendation meets user’s requested NavQoSs. The probability of referral of i to j, Pij is defined as follows: (1) Also, Pij + Pji =1. Thus, in the initial stage when there are no referrals in the SN, NRij = NRij =1 and Pij = Pji =0.5.

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Input: User “A”, User’s NavQoS, User’s SSN (“S”) 1) For each recommendation within the “S” in UNAVIT-SN Find solutions which are recommended by trusted friends, and which matches NavQoSs. 2) For each found solution recommended by member i Exclude the ones with PAi = 0.5 and NRAi = 1. 3) Among remaining solution, choose the one with the highest value of SM and insert its value into variable SMM. 4) If no solution is left then SMM Å 0 5) If SMM is less than a predefined threshold, then Result Å Referring_SSN(NavQoS, “S”); If Result = “No Result” then Return the solution to the user with low confidence. 6) Otherwise, Increment NRAi; ;

;

Fig. 4. Request Algorithm

The difference between the values of Pij and Pji indicates how much i and j trust one another. The less the difference, the more the trust (thus more chances of referrals), unless NR=1, which means that these members have never referred to each other. Once user i refers to user j, the value of NRij increments by one. The same concept can be applied to the relationship between SSNs. That is, SSN-A is connected to SSN-B through a weight, NR. Initially, NRs value is 1. However, the value of NR will increase as more referrals between SSNs are made. The idea behind having connections between SSNs is that if UNAVIT-SN cannot find a navigation solution or a reliable solution for a request within a SSN, it refers to another SSN to find a reliable solution. Figure 4 shows an algorithm for request. The inputs to the algorithm are user’s query, NavQoSs, and the SSN to which the user belongs. For a recommendation to socially match the user’s request, the value of SM in the algorithm must be greater than or equal a threshold. Figure 5 shows an algorithm (Referring_SSN) which is invoked when there is a need to search of navigation solution in another SSN. In this algorithm, upon a successful referral, NRs between SSNs are updated. The inputs to this algorithm are NavQoSs and the relevant SSN, i.e., “S”.

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Input: user’s NavQoS, User’s SSN (“S”) 1) For each SSN, i, with PSi ≥ 0.5 do Find recommended solutions by majority of members, which match NavQoSs; 2) For each found solution recommended by SSN “i” Exclude the ones with PSi = 0.5 and NRSi = 1; 3) For the remaining solutions Choose the one with the highest value of SM and insert it into SMM; 4) If SMM < δ then Return “No Result”; 5) Else Increment NRSi; ;

;

Fig. 5. Referring_ SSN Algorithm

In order to compute “social matching”, we divide navigation requests into two groups: POIs and Routes. POI There are three variables that define a POI: Type, Recommendation, and Distance. Type consists of five categories: Food, Gas-station, Library/Bookstore, Shopping Mall, and Grocery Store. Each Type category can be initialized by either “match” or “exact match”. For each Recommendation, three values are defined: Low, Medium, and High. Finally, for Distance, which is the distance between user’s current/specified location and a POI, the value can be either entered by user or suggested by the system. Consider user A’s request for an Italian restaurant, which is in the category of Restaurant/Fast Food within 10 miles. User A must indicate whether he/she is interested in an “exact match”, i.e., an Italian restaurant, or a “match”, i.e., any restaurant but preference will be Italian restaurants. Also user A must specify the degree of recommendation by members, i.e., whether the rate of the recommendation is “High”, “Medium”, or “Low”. If user A chooses “exact match” with “Medium” recommendation, QPE analyzes the query and sends it to NavNet to find an Italian restaurant recommended (with “Medium” rate) by trusted members of user’s SSN. To select those restaurants within 10 miles, user’s current location is used by a NavWSP to perform proximity calculation based on actual road distances. For “social matching”, NavQoS is defined as follows: NavQoS = T * R .

(2)

where T and R represent the distinct values for Type and Recommendation, respectively.

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The set of values {1,2,3,4,5} corresponds to POI types, i.e., {Restaurant/Fast Food, Gas-Station, Library/Bookstore, Shopping Mall, Grocery Store}, and {11,12,13} correspond to POI recommendation rate, i.e., {Low, Medium, High}. And “social matching” is defined as follows: .

(3)

where i corresponds to a member of SSN whose recommendation is considered and A corresponds to the requester. The more the value of PiA (i.e., close to 0.5) and the less the value of (i.e., close to zero), the higher the social match, i.e., the recommended POI socially matches user’s request. Route Recommendation Options We consider three criteria for routes, Shortest Distance (SD), Fastest Time (FT), and Least Turns (LT), as the most preferred criteria, among others. Each criterion can be assigned a value between 0 and 1. However, the sum of the values must be equal to 1. Members who recommend routes are encouraged to initialize the recommended route’s criterion and the level of each recommendation, R, i.e., Low, medium, or High. If users do not enter route criteria, those specified in their profiles will be used. There could be two cases when user A requests a route from Origin (O) to Destination (D), with for example SD = 0.5, FT= 0.3, LT=0.2. In the first case, UNAVIT-SN searches user’s SSN for a route from O to D with criteria equal or close to values 0.5, 0.2, and 0.2, respectively. In the second case, UNAVIT-SN is not able to find a route from O to D, but it finds one or more routes that overlap candidate routes between O and D and have equal or close criteria values. If these routes pass through O-D, the one with closest “social match” is returned to the user. In both cases, either finding a path from O to D or a path that passes through O and D, NavQoS is defined as follows: NavQoS = ST * FT * LT* R .

(4)

where again the set of {11, 12, 13} corresponds to the values for R, i.e., {Low, Medium, High}. In order to select an appropriate recommendation among the available ones, social matching score, which is defined as follows, must be greater than or equal a threshold. .

(5)

where i corresponds to the recommendation from member I, A corresponds to the requester, and PAi is the value of trust between A and i. The more the value of PAi (i.e., close to 0.5), and the lower the value of (i.e., close to zero), the higher the social matching score, i.e., the more the recommended route socially matches user’s request.

5 Summary and Future Research In this paper we presented the concept of UNAVIT-SN as a universal navigation technology through social networking which provides navigation solutions to any

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user, anywhere, and at anytime, transparently and adaptively. We then discussed a social networking approach that allows users request navigation information and receive navigation recommendations from members of their social networks. We presented the algorithms for navigation recommendation and navigation request which meet NavQoSs. Future research includes development and validation of a prototype UNAVIT-SN with selected SSNs (e.g., general, elderly, mobility impaired, visually impaired, cognitively impaired) to facilitate navigation recommendation and request through cell phones.

References 1. Karimi, A.H., Ghafourian, M.: Universal Navigation. GIM International (May 2009) 2. Ghafourian, M.: Karimi, H.A.: Universal Navigation Concept and Algorithms. In: World Congress on Computer Science and Information Engineering (CSIE). IEEE Press, LosAngeles/Anahiem (2009) (accepted) 3. Golbeck, J.: Sharing and Using Links in Social Networks. IEEE Intelligent System, 85–86 (2005) 4. Gray, D.B., Hollingsworth, H.H., Susan, S., Kerri, M.A.: A subjective measure of environmental facilitators and barriers to participation for people with mobility limitations. Disability and Rehabilitation, 1–10 (2007) 5. Jamali, M., Abolhassani, H.: Different Aspects of Social Network Analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEWICIACM International Conference (2006) 6. LaRue, E.M., Mitchell, A.M., Karimi, H.A., Kasemsuppakorn, P., Roongpiboonsopit, D.: COMPANION: Social Support Networking Technology For Survivors of Suicide. In: International Conference on Health Informatics (HEALTHINF 2009), Porto, Portugal (2009) 7. Millen, D.R., Feinberg, J.: Using Social Tagging to Improve Social Navigation. In: Workshop on the Social Navigation and Community-Based Adaptation Technologies Conjunction with Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (AH 2006), Dublin, Ireland (2006) 8. Borcea, C., Gupta, A., Kalra, A.: The MobiSoC Middleware for Mobile Social Computing: Challenges, Design, and Early Experiences. In: Mobilware 2008, pp. 1–6 (2008) 9. Jimison, D., Sambasivan, N., Pahwa, S.: Wiggle Stick: An Urban Pedestrian Mobile Social Navigation System. In: Georgia Tech Graduate Symposium, Georgia Tech, Atlanta (2007) 10. Jung, J.J., Kim, K., Lee, H., Park, S.: Are You Satisfied with Your Recommendation Service? Discovering Social Networks for Personalized Mobile Services. In: Nguyen, N.T., Jo, G.S., Howlett, R.J., Jain, L.C. (eds.) KES-AMSTA 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4953, pp. 567–573. Springer, Heidelberg (2008) 11. Adams, B., Phung, D., Venkatesh, S.: Extraction of Social Context and Application to Personal Multimedia Exploration. In: MM 2006, Santa Barbara, California, pp. 3–4 (2006) 12. Korfiatis, N., Sicilia, M.A.: Social Measurement and Flexible Navigation online Contact Networks. In: Fuzzy Systems Conference (2007) 13. Nowak, A., Vallacher, R.R.: Information and Influence in the Construction of Shared Reality. IEEE Intelligent System, 90–93 (2005)

Collaborative Work in 3D Virtual Environments: A Research Agenda and Operational Framework Béatrice S. Hasler, Thierry Buecheler, and Rolf Pfeifer Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland {bhasler, buecheler, pfeifer}@ifi.uzh.ch

Abstract. We propose a conceptual framework based on input-process-output models adapted from traditional group research for the systematic analysis of virtual teamwork. A research agenda contains a list of research questions that will be investigated in a controlled field study in the context of “The ShanghAI Lectures”, a global teaching and international student collaboration project. The research questions are formulated regarding processes and outcomes of global virtual teamwork and focus on usability and sociability issues in collaborative work in 3D virtual environments. An operational framework is provided for collecting the relevant data in a structured manner by using qualitative and quantitative process measures of group behavior. Keywords: Global virtual teams, 3D collaborative virtual environments, group interaction processes, behavioral tracking.

1 Introduction There is a general agreement that getting people to cooperate in geographically dispersed teams is crucial for global organizations in the 21st century [1]. As companies begin to compete globally, virtual teams, which consist of members who work and live in different countries, are becoming increasingly common. They typically do not meet physically but communicate and coordinate their tasks using information technology in order to accomplish their goals [2]. In recent years, 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (3D CVE) have been developed to facilitate the work process of virtual teams. 3D CVE not only make it possible for virtual teams to communicate synchronously via chat or audio channels but also to perform actions simultaneously using various types of shared applications (e.g., text processor, presentation or spreadsheet programs) while being present in the same virtual room embodied as avatars. The main advantage of 3D CVE is that team members can jointly look at and manipulate objects in a shared virtual space [3]. Popular press indicates that organizations are increasingly using such virtual worlds as a new way to enable collaboration among geographically dispersed work teams [4, 5]. Gartner [6] estimates that 70 percent of all organizations will have established their own 3D virtual worlds by 2012 but reports that 90 percent of corporate virtual world projects fail within 18 months due to an insufficient understanding of A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 23–32, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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the mechanics, dynamics, and the right application areas for virtual world technologies. Therefore, it is crucial that we advance our understanding of how the design of 3D CVE influences group processes and why global virtual teams succeed or fail. However, empirical research on the usability and sociability of 3D CVE is still at an early stage [7, 8]. Our aim is to provide a research agenda, which extends the topics that previous virtual team research has been typically concerned with to the context of 3D CVE [2, 9]. Likewise, we will apply the issues discussed in virtual world research to global virtual teamwork following Kahai et al. [10]. Based on a conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of virtual team behavior, several research questions are derived that focus on the specific usability and sociability issues that emerge from synchronous communication, shared visual representations, and avatar embodiment. An operational framework is provided for collecting the relevant data of group interaction processes in a structured manner by using behavioral observation and coding techniques and a behavioral tracking method. 1.1 “The ShanghAI Lectures” - A Controlled Field Study on Virtual Teamwork in 3D CVE The context of this research outline is provided by “The ShanghAI Lectures”1, a higher education initiative using a mixed-reality approach for global teaching and international student collaboration. Its core components are a lecture series on embodied – natural and artificial – intelligence and accompanying multicultural and interdisciplinary task assignments for students. The lectures will be presented by the third author from Jiao Tong University in Shanghai in fall term 2009 and will be broadcast via video-conference to different universities around the globe. Students will collaborate in self-managed global virtual teams on project-based group assignments, view and annotate lectures, and meet with experts, embodied as avatars in a virtual world. In order to comply with the requirements of large-scale global collaboration, a 3D CVE named “UniWorld” is currently being developed at the University of Zurich using Sun Microsystems' Project Wonderland toolkit2 (see Figure 1). This opensource toolkit enables the customized design of the virtual environment, the extension of communication tools (e.g., immersive audio and cameras into the real world [13]) and collaboration features (e.g., virtual team rooms with shared applications), and the implementation of authentication schemes and virtual business cards. “The ShanghAI Lectures” also serve as a research platform to carry out studies that are embedded in a general research agenda for the systematic investigation of collaborative work in 3D CVE. The research project aims to explore various aspects of virtual team behavior in 3D CVE and to generate lessons learned that can guide further research. The educational context makes it possible to carry out a controlled field study with experimental manipulation of context factors (i.e. “input variables”) and to administer online surveys and interviews (e.g., using the online evaluation tool “chataca”3). In addition, a data collection mechanism is implemented in “UniWorld” in order to spatially and temporally track and reconstruct users' in-world behavior. 1

http://shanghailectures.org/ https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/ 3 http://www.chataca.com 2

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Fig. 1. Snapshot of the “UniWorld” environment. A group of students discussing an instructional video on robotics displayed on a screen in “UniWorld” - the 3D CVE that will be used in “The ShanghAI Lectures”. The screen shot is taken from a pilot study with a prototype of the virtual world.

Behavioral tracking offers the opportunity to collect longitudinal data of in-world behavior in an unobtrusive way [12]. Although the advantages of tracking methods have been recognized by virtual world researchers, behavioral tracking is typically difficult to realize as commercial providers of virtual environments do not allow direct access to their databases [12, 13]. Therefore, observational studies of in-world behavior have mostly used screen recorders, which provide qualitative data that are time consuming to analyze [3]. However, recorded team interactions using Project Wonderland's built-in movie recorder provide valuable qualitative information in addition to the quantitative behavioral tracking data. Audio and chat communication data as well as work artifacts (e.g., shared work documents) are stored and can be used for quantitative and qualitative analysis of content.

2 A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Virtual Teamwork in 3D CVE We propose an input - process - output model adapted from traditional group research [14, 15] that serves as a framework for the discussion of a range of issues surrounding virtual teamwork in 3D CVE (see Figure 2). Input variables can be experimentally manipulated in order to study their effect on group interaction processes and outcomes. The processes during group interactions are expected to have consequences on the individual, intra-group, and inter-group level, which may change over time.

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Fig. 2. An input - process - output model of virtual team work in 3D CVE

2.1 Input Variables Input variables refer to the composition characteristics of the virtual team, the design of the task, and the context in which the team operates. Group composition is defined by the number and characteristics of people who are assigned to a team. Team members can differ from one another in their sex, age, cultural backgrounds and associated social norms, technical expertise, or intercultural competences and foreign language skills that are important for global virtual teamwork. In some cases the group structure (e.g., roles or hierarchies) is predefined while in other contexts – as will be the case in “The ShanghAI Lectures” – virtual teams are self-managed with no predefined structure. Task design refers to the type of the task (e.g., idea generation, problem-solving, decision making or contest) [14], training, resources, supervision, requirements (e.g., the level of autonomy or interdependence required for task completion, or the skills required to solve the task), and task goals (e.g., defined by evaluation criteria of deliverables). Environmental factors refer to both the virtual and physical space in which groups operate. In 3D CVE the technical environment is a three-dimensional virtual space in which users are embodied as avatars and offered different communication and collaboration facilities. A factor that has often been neglected in virtual team research is the physical environment from which team members access the virtual environment [8]. They can be located at different physical places (e.g., conducting remote work from home or in a shared office) and at different time zones. Both the physical as well as the technical environment pertain to a socio-cultural context in which interactions among individuals can occur. 2.2 Group Interaction Processes Group interaction processes are characterized by the form and content of communication and coordination between individuals who may belong to the same or a different group. The form of interaction is determined by the communication mode that is used at a given time for a particular purpose. The content of interaction can be task-related (e.g, coordinating task work, seeking information) or socio-emotional (e.g., engaging in personal conversations, providing mutual support). Group interaction processes engender different types of communication and coordination patterns from which

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consequences emerge for individuals regarding their amount of contribution, the extent to which they experience a sense of social presence and identify with their group. Consequences also arise for relations among group members, such as emerging roles, group cohesion and trust, group norms, and conflict resolution strategies. Group research has often focused on these internal group dynamics and little is known about the context outside of a group [16]. Therefore, we also integrate inter-group relations as defined by conflict and competition or cooperation between members of different groups. 2.3 Output Variables The outcome of the group interaction process is typically defined as the dependent variable in virtual team research and refers to team performance and personal success. Team performance can be defined by the effectiveness (i.e. quality) and efficiency of teamwork (i.e. productivity as determined by the resources and time needed to accomplish a task). Personal success can be determined by perceived work satisfaction and the acquisition of knowledge and skills. If feedback is provided to a virtual team based on outcome-related evaluations, this may again influence group processes in terms of a new input variable for the following stage in the group interaction process.

3 Research Agenda The input variables provided in the conceptual framework can be regarded as independent variables to study their effect on group interaction processes and outcomes. For example, we can examine for what types of tasks 3D CVE are most effective or how the group composition influences work satisfaction and team performance by comparing homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. In order to determine factors that contribute to the usability and sociability of 3D CVE we take a closer look at the actual group behavior and team members' subjective experience thereof. The following research questions are non-exhaustive lists of studies that will be conducted in the context of “The ShanghAI Lectures”. 3.1 Behavioral Indicators of High- and Low-Performing Teams A differentiation of high- and low-performing teams based on their outcomes is required in order to determine why virtual teams succeed or fail. Several research questions can be formulated regarding the following levels. • Form and content of team interaction: Can we identify communication and coordination patterns of high- and low-performing teams, and do they differ regarding the amount of socio-emotional and task-related content? • Individual level effects: Do members of high-performing teams show higher motivation and higher levels of identification with their group? Is the individual level contribution balanced in high-performing teams? • Intra-group effects: Can we find differences between high- and low-performing teams regarding emerging roles (e.g., concentrated vs. shared leadership)? What leadership styles are employed by (emerging) leaders of high-performing teams?

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• Inter-group effects: Can we find differences between high- and low-performing teams regarding the number and type of inter-group relationships? Do high-performing teams benefit from “weak ties” to other groups [17]? 3.2 Sociability Factors Sociability is determined by the extent to which a 3D CVE induces a sense of social presence among interacting users and enables team members to interact well with each other – despite the lower “social bandwidth” due to the limited transmission of nonverbal cues (through avatar facial expressions and gestures), which are crucial for the transmission of meaning, conversational management, and the expression of emotional states. Besides analyzing what types of relationships are formed during group interactions, sociability analysis should also focus on how those relationships are performed in shared activities [18]. The following factors are assumed to contribute to the sociability of 3D CVE and appear worthwhile to be investigated: • Perceived presence: How well do users identify with their avatars and do they feel present in the virtual environment? Does perceived social presence facilitate the establishment of group cohesion and trust among team members? • Social conventions: Are there any cultural differences regarding what behaviors in the virtual space are perceived as effective and appropriate? Do social conventions that can be observed in face-to-face interactions (e.g., proxemics) transfer to the virtual environment [13]? • Relationship formation: What types of relationships occur and how do they change over time? Are there any cultural differences in the way relationships develop? • Emerging roles: What roles are emerging during group work? Can we identify a set of behaviors that determines particular emergent roles, such as leadership? 3.3 Usability Factors Usability can be defined as a precondition for team effectiveness and efficiency, and refers to the extent to which the technological environment supports successful team performance and work satisfaction. In order to identify user needs to derive design guidelines for 3D CVE, we need to investigate what virtual teams actually do and how they use the communication and collaboration facilities provided by the 3D CVE [8]. The following research questions provide insights of how users cope with the environment and may highlight possible usability issues: • Communication modes: What communication modes (audio and chat) are being used, how often, by whom, and accompanying which tasks? • Collaboration tools: What collaboration tools are being used, how often, and for what purpose? What problems occur when using these tools? • Support facilities: What types of support (e.g., technical, conflict mediation, task-related) are most requested, by whom, and at what stage of teamwork? • Perceived usability: How does team members' subjective experience of technical and social aspects of 3D CVE interactions relate to observed behavioral patterns of virtual teamwork?

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4 Operational Framework for the Study of Group Interaction Processes in 3D CVE The analysis of group interaction processes requires multiple measurement times or continuous measurement as they are likely to change over time – and these changes are the main objects of interest. For example, the analysis of emerging roles and relationships require either subjective reports by team members or the collection of longitudinal behavioral data and cannot be measured at a single post-process measurement time. In order to observe group interaction processes, the acts and roles of collaborative people have to be made explicit [8], which calls for different types of behavioral observation tools that will be discussed below. Due to space restrictions, we limit our discussion to objective behavioral measures and leave out self-report methods that are typically used in virtual world studies and critically discussed elsewhere [19]. 4.1 Behavioral Coding of Video-Recorded Interactions and Communication Artifacts Some research questions require the analysis of content-related behaviors based on video-recorded interactions or communication artifacts. For example, the content of group interactions is relevant in order to extract information about the frequency of socio-emotional and task-related processes, to identify leadership styles, the kind and frequency of conflicts that occur and what strategies teams employ to resolve them. Bales' Interaction Process Analysis [20], the classic behavioral coding system, provides guidelines for collecting quantitative data from recorded observations, which require manual classification of content-related behavioral units. Specific coding schemes also exist, for example, to identify different leadership styles based on communication artifacts (e.g., the Leaderplex framework adapted to virtual team research [21]). In addition, qualitative analysis of video-recorded fragments of team interactions can be used for detailed description of the group dynamics involving all behavioral aspects of the social interaction within the given context [3]. 4.2 Behavioral Tracking for Automated Quantitative Data Collection When open-source tools, such as Project Wonderland, are being used to build a 3D CVE, temporal and spatial activities of users do not have to be coded manually by investigators but can be automatically tracked by the system and can be exported from the database for sequential analysis of in-world events and shared activities: • Temporal tracking includes the frequency and duration of events or actions that users perform either individually or in cooperation with others. • Spatial tracking captures all aspects of avatars' locomotion (i.e. position and movement), also providing information about visited virtual places. • Event tracking registers the type of activities users engage in (e.g., using shared applications for collaborative writing, drawing, or programming, watching a movie on a screen, annotating video-recorded lectures, reading FAQs for different types of issues, exchanging virtual business cards, etc.)

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It is important to consider that groups do not interact – but individuals do. Therefore, we track and analyze group interaction processes based on the actions that individuals perform. In order to analyze communication and coordination patterns and emerging relationships among individuals, the frequency and duration of (inter)actions can be tracked, which requires meta-data such as time stamps, the number of participants involved, and possibly where the interaction took place. These data can then be analyzed at the dyad or group level, or between groups (see Figure 3). We suggest to generate separate interaction matrices for chat and audio communication, and for coordination of shared actions. For example, the number of messages exchanged within a group of actively participating individuals can be taken as a measure of “interaction intensity” between the members of that conversational group. At the individual level, the number of messages sent or amount of speech can be used as an indicator for the individual's level of contribution. The interaction intensity between any two users can be tracked over time and statistically aggregated to estimate the strength of intra-group or inter-group relations. The analysis can be carried out for different time spans, for example, for multiple team meetings in order to observe changes in communication intensity among team members over time. However, it has to be taken into consideration that the quality and quantity of a team's output can be expected to higher than the aggregated individual contributions. In order to study inter-group relations in 3D CVE, the design of the virtual world has to be taken into account, which determines how much access users have to one another and how different virtual spaces foster the density of networks [22]. We also have to differentiate between focused collaboration (i.e. active participation) and unfocused collaboration (i.e. monitoring of group activities without getting involved) [8]. Furthermore, the duration of an interaction does not necessarily imply higher effectiveness but can be an indicator for misunderstandings between team members, possibly due to language barriers. Therefore, quantitative tracking data and qualitative analysis of group interactions should be used in complementary fashion in order to gain a better understanding of how virtual teams work in 3D CVE as both methods have their limitations.

Fig. 3. Interaction matrix based on communication and coordination intensity calculation

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5 Conclusions The conceptual framework and the illustrations of the ways in which it can be used to derive relevant research questions show the importance of a theoretical foundation for research on collaborative work in 3D CVE. We believe that the automated behavioral tracking approach is an important step towards the systematic analysis of group interaction processes. However, there are still open issues to be resolved on how to best combine and statistically analyze the large amounts of behavioral data in order to derive guidelines on how to effectively plan, structure, and support the work of globally distributed teams in 3D CVE.

References 1. Boudreau, M.-C., Loch, K.D., Robey, D., Straub, D.: Going Global: Using Information Technology to Advance the Competitiveness of the Virtual Transnational Organization. Academy of Management Executive 12, 120–128 (1998) 2. Powell, A., Piccoli, G., Ives, B.: Virtual Teams: A Review of Current Literature and Directions for Future Research. The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems 35, 6–36 (2004) 3. Schroeder, R., Heldal, I., Tromp, J.: The Usability of Collaborative Virtual Environments and Methods for the Analysis of Interaction. Presence 15, 655–667 (2006) 4. Kharif, O.: The Virtual Meeting Room. BusinessWeek (April 16, 2007), http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2007/ tc20070416_445840.htm 5. King, R.: The (Virtual) Global Office. BusinessWeek (May 2, 2008), http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2007/ tc20070416_445840.htm 6. Gartner Press Release (May 18, 2008), http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=670507 7. Schroeder, R., Axelsson, A.-S. (eds.): Avatars at Work and Play. Collaboration and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments. Springer, Dordrecht (2006) 8. Tromp, J.G., Steed, A., Wilson, J.R.: Systematic Usability Evaluation and Design Issues for Collaborative Virtual Environments. Presence 12, 241–267 (2003) 9. Furst, S., Blackburn, R., Rosen, B.: Virtual Team Effectiveness: A Proposed Research Agenda. Information Systems Journal 9, 249–269 (1999) 10. Kahai, S.S., Carroll, E., Jestice, R.: Team Collaboration in Virtual Worlds. The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems 38, 61–68 (2007) 11. Gardner, M., Scott, J., Horan, B.: Reflections on the Use of Project Wonderland as a Mixed-Reality Environment for Teaching and Learning. In: ReLIVE 2009 Conference, Open University, UK (2008) 12. Yee, N., Bailenson, J.N.: A Method for Longitudinal Behavioral Data Collection in Second Life. Presence 17, 594–596 (2008) 13. Friedman, D., Steed, A., Slater, M.: Spatial Social Behavior in Second Life. In: Pelachaud, C., Martin, J.-C., André, E., Chollet, G., Karpouzis, K., Pelé, D. (eds.) IVA 2007. LNCS, vol. 4722, pp. 252–263. Springer, Heidelberg (2007) 14. McGrath, J.E.: Groups: Interactions and Performance. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1984)

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15. Hoegl, M., Gemuenden, H.G.: Teamwork Quality and the Success of Innovative Projects: A Theoretical Concept and Empirical Evidence. Organization Science 12, 435–449 (2001) 16. Wittenbaum, G.M., Moreland, R.L.: Small-Group Research in Social Psychology: Topics and Trends Over Time. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2, 187–203 (2008) 17. Granovetter, M.: The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited. Sociological Theory 1, 201–233 (1983) 18. Brown, B., Bell, M.: Play and Sociability in There: Some Lessons from Online Games for Collaborative Virtual Environments. In: Schroeder, R., Axelsson, A.-S. (eds.) Avatars at Work and Play. Collaboration and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments, pp. 227– 245. Springer, Dordrecht (2006) 19. Slater, M.: How Colorful Was Your Day? Why Questionnaires Cannot Assess Presence in Virtual Environments. Presence 13, 484–493 (2004) 20. Bales, R.F.: Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1951) 21. Carte, T.A., Chidambaram, L., Becker, A.: Emergent Leadership in Self-Managed Virtual Teams. Group Decision and Negotiation 15, 323–343 (2006) 22. Schroeder, R.: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments: Key Issues, Common Themes, and a Framework for Research. In: Schroeder, R. (ed.) The Social Life of Avatars. Presence and Interactions in Shared Virtual Environments, pp. 1–18. Springer, London (2002)

Workflow-Based Architecture for Collaborative Video Annotation Cristian Hofmann1, Nina Hollender2, and Dieter W. Fellner1 1

Interactive Graphics Systems Group, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Fraunhoferstr. 5, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany 2 Center for Development and Research in Higher Education, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Hochschulstr. 1, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany {cristian.hofmann, d.fellner}@gris.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de, [email protected]

Abstract. In video annotation research, the support of the video annotation workflow has been taken little into account, especially concerning collaborative use cases. Previous research projects focus each on a different essential part of the whole annotation process. We present a reference architecture model which is based on identified phases of the video annotation workflow. In a first step, the underlying annotation workflow is exemplified with respect to its single phases, tasks, and loops. Secondly, the system architecture is going to be exemplified with respect to its elements, their internal procedures, as well as the interaction between these elements. The goals of this paper are to provide the reader with a basic understanding of the specific characteristics and requirements of collaborative video annotation processes, and to define a reference framework for the design of video annotation systems that include a workflow management system. Keywords: Video Annotation, Video Analysis, Computer-Supported Collaborative Work.

1 Introduction A group of students use a web-based video annotation tool to analyse video sequences taken from TV panel discussions with regard to the use of a range of specific argumentation tactics. Their task is to mark and categorize objects and sequences within the video, to annotate these selections with descriptions and own interpretations, and to compare and discuss their results with others, also by exploring databases of already analyzed videos. Users that work with a specific video analysis software are often confronted with a large number of available tools and, consequently, with a hardly comprehensible user interface. In order to ensure a fluent course of activities, a system is required that provides information about the sequence in which these tasks are to be accomplished, as well as which tools can be used referring to a certain task. Furthermore, the application should support transitions between successive work steps. A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 33–42, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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Research activities in the area of computer-supported video annotation have increased during the last years. Corresponding solutions have been implemented in various application areas, e.g. interactive audiovisual presentations in e-Commerce and edutainment or technical documentations [4], [25]. In our research work, we focus on the support of collaborative video analysis in learning settings performed by applying video annotation software. A growing number of application scenarios for (collaborative) video analysis in education can be identified. Pea and colleagues report on a university course of a film science department, in which two different movie versions of the play „Henry V“ are analysed by a group of students with respect to the text transposition by different actors and directors [23]. Other examples for the application of video analysis in education are motion analyses in sports and physical education, or the acquisition of soft skills such as presentation or argumentation techniques [16], [23], [25]. A large number of different research fields and approaches have been involved in Video Annotation and Analysis Research. Nevertheless, one relevant aspect has been taken little into account: The support of the analysis workflow, which comprises the management of annotation data with related tasks and system services. Thus, a majority of today’s applications do not consider the needs of the users regarding a complete workflow in video annotation [12]. This is especially the case for collaborative settings. By workflow-support, we mean the facilitation of loops and transitions between the single workflow steps and tasks on the one hand. On the other hand, appropriate tools and information can be provided at the proper time, depending on the current state of the work. Consequently, we expect a reduction of the learners’ and tutors’ load with regard to the use of such applications and hence enhancement of efficiency. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation of a reference architecture which is based on identified phases and tasks of the video annotation workflow. In section 3, the underlying annotation workflow is going to be illustrated considering its single phases and recursive loops that can be especially associated with the collaborative processes taking place. Our investigations addressed the specific needs of users who work in teams with a special focus on educational settings. The results are based on interviews and discussions conducted with experts and users regarding the sequence of tasks and work steps within the annotation process, as well as on a summary and reflection of the existing literature. In addition to that, we performed an analysis of the functionalities, the user interface, and interaction design of fifteen video annotation and analysis applications. In section 4, the system architecture is going to be exemplified with respect to its single elements, the interaction between these objects, as well as internal procedures within the elements of the architecture. The goals of this paper are to provide the reader with a basic understanding of the specific characteristics and requirements of collaborative video annotation processes, and to provide a structural framework for the design of video annotation systems that include a workflow management framework.

2 Related Work Bertino, Trombetta, and Montesi present a framework and a modular architecture for interactive video consisting of various information systems. The coordination of these components is realized by identifying inter-task dependencies with interactive rules,

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based on a workflow management system [4]. The Digital Video Album (DVA) system is an integration of different subsystems that refer to specific aspects of video processing and retrieval. In particular, the workflow for semiautomatic indexing and annotation is focused [31]. Pea and Hoffert illustrate a basic idea of the video research workflow in the learning sciences [22]. In contrast to our research work, the projects mentioned above do not or only to some degree consider the process for collaborative use cases. The reconsideration of such communicative and collaborative aspects requires modifications and enhancements of the existing approaches and concepts.

3 Collaborative Video Annotation Workflow The reference architecture for collaborative video annotation relies on a already presented model that implies the single phases, tasks, and loops within the video annotation workflow [15]. We identified the phases of configuration, segmentation, annotation, exploration, and externalization. In the following, the particular items of these steps are going to be pictured. Before starting an annotation project, the environment has to be configured. Participants are assigned to accounts and user groups that are associated with specific roles and access rights. Furthermore, the annotation tasks can be distributed among the individual users [18], [30]. Specific project preferences can be adjusted and the graphical user interface may be customized [7]. In video analysis projects, category systems need to be fed into the system. The also may be modified during the annotation process [5]. The segmentation, annotation, and exploration tasks can be seen as one unit. Thus, video annotators alternately segment, annotate, and need to browse own results or data belonging to other annotators or annotation projects [5], [16], [22]. This process is accompanied by data reviews, comparisons, and consequently modifications [22], [24], [28]. Annotators start chunking the video into segments they want to refer to, drawing on different apporaches [2], [3], [10], [14], [17], [22], [27]. Video segments can be defined either by a single person or by an assigned group in a collaborative manner. Thus, annotations that serve as communication contributions are resources for the coordination of collaborative segmentation activities. In some of the identified use cases, the segmentation task is partitioned and assigned to users or groups. Users continue with the annotation of these subsets and with arranging annotations into a certain order. One type of annotation is the linking of metadata or descriptive data [1]. Users may also describe observed behaviours, events, or objects within the video. In most cases, they are allowed to enter free textual annotations. In fact, other types of media formats like images or sounds are possible [10]. During the annotation phase, a further task can be the transcription of verbal and non-verbal communication [20]. In video analysis, the annotation phase also includes interpreting, rating, and reflecting. These activities can be performed either qualitatively, e.g. in discussions, or quantitatively, by means of statistic methods provided by specialized software [12], [22]. Like the segmentation task, annotation may be partitioned and distributed among different groups. When a collaborative group works separately, members need to discuss their results with other participants [6], [7], [21]. Thus, discussion is a central element within the collaborative annotation process. It is a means of agreement and consistency of different annotators’ results and leads to a return to previous steps of the workflow [26]. Pea and Hoffert assume that exploring one’s own

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data is required to properly conduct an analysis [22]. Especially in collaborative annotation, users also need to search for results of co-annotators, experts, or other sources [16]. In addition to discussion, this can be regarded as key activity concerning revision of own results and re-entries to previous workflow steps. The externalization phase includes activities without the use of the annotation application, and consists of any kind of publishing operations. It begins with editing and converting the data into several formats, and moves on to presenting this information in corresponding media [22]. E.g., databases of annotated video material can serve as digital resource for information retrieval in subsequent annotation sessions. In video analysis, it is often necessary to export data for further inspection with specific applications [12], [22].

4 Workflow-Based Reference Architecture In this section, we present an architecture model which is based on the workflow model pictured above. This architecture provides a basic structure for video annotation systems which include a workflow management framework. Design decisions particularly base on our endeavour to support given operating procedures within the annotation workflow. In that context, we identified basic requirements that have to be fulfilled by the architecture: Workflow Control: Transitions between workflow phases and the control of sequences of sub operations have to be supported. Also loops and re-entries to other phases of the workflow must be considered. Enclosure: The identified phases and tasks need to be pooled into functional units that are mutually delimited. Thus, task areas can be typecasted and invoked by addressing respective modules. Extensibility: The architecture must enable administrators to integrate, replace and remove tools that can be assigned to task-related modules. Consistency: Since multiple tools read and possibly write on the same data, the consistency of shared parts of the data set has to be ensured at every point of the annotation process. In addition to that, there are further requirements with regard to annotated data and collaborative activities. Thus, an appropriate handling of media files and its annotated information, as well as their organizational structure must be provided. With respect to collaborative use cases, the architecture model has to realize the data exchange between multiple spatial separated users of the application. For this purpose, stored information must be made available to every participant of the group. Consequently, consistency of data must also be warranted for every peer in the shared system. As showed in Figure 1, the reference architecture was conceptualized as component-based client-server model. The elements of the architecture are structured by a combination of the Model View Controller and Mediator patterns [8], [11], [29]. In the following sections, the single aspects are going to be illustrated. 4.1 Client-Server Model A fundamental condition for collaborative processes is the interconnectedness of every peer taking part for information exchanging purposes [7], [10]. A range of optional models can be considered, e.g., client-server, peer-to-peer, or web-based approaches. We suggest a client-server architecture, not only due to its wide spreading in the area of information systems [7]. The server application realizes the centralization of the information space and, at the same time, makes the data system available

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Fig. 1. Workflow-based Reference Architecture Model

for any client that is connected. Additionally, it provides several services such as authentication of annotators, and management of accounts and access rights. It is also responsible for consistent storage and management of global project configurations and video annotation information, but also workflow-related data like workflowtemplates and available tools. The central application provides support for distributed authoring process, e.g. tracking of changes made by co-annotators. The client application handles user entries and interaction on the graphical user interface. It provides authoring options and assigned tools for video and annotation editing purposes. 4.2 Model View Controller and Mediator Pattern In order to realize an appropriate management of media files and its annotated information, we rely on existing approaches with regard to video annotation or video linking. In the area of hypermedia research, several models can be identified, e.g. the Dexter Hypertext Reference Model. The Dexter model divides the system into three delimited layers, separating data, the given hyper structure, and its representation [13]. The Model View Controller Model (MVC) equally divides the application into three levels: the model layer represents the involved data, views display the information and assume user interaction, the controller layer processes user entries and is enabled to modify data in the model. Furthermore, data consistency is warranted through a specific notification policy [8]. In the presented workflow-based reference architecture, the model layer consists of data and information from video files, video segments and assigned annotations to project configuration information. Particularly, workflow-related data are stored workflow templates (which can be predefined by tutors) and a listing of the available tools. The view layer represents any visual component at the graphical user interface. Besides the general elements of the user interface, the single views display the available tools and methods which are previously assigned to respective tasks of the annotation workflow. The controller layer includes two different kinds of controllers: local controllers are assigned to every component of the view (as well as the server communication component) and act as interfaces between component and application. The broker component serves as global controller and implements the included Mediator pattern.

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The Mediator pattern provides a central instance which defines the cooperation and interaction of multiple objects. This central unit holds an intermediary role and coordinates the overall behaviour of the system [11]. Thus, workflow control can be supported with regard to transitions between workflow phases, sequences of sub operations, passing through loops, and re-entries to other phases of the workflow. The specific processes and sequences within the annotation workflow are defined by task groups and sub operations, which can be pooled into several system components. 4.3 Task-Related Components As mentioned above, the identified phases and tasks need to be pooled into functional units that are mutually delimited in order to typecast task areas that can be invoked by the mediator object. Furthermore, the architecture must enable administrators to integrate, replace and remove tools that can be assigned to these task-related modules. Thus, the phases of the workflow are implemented as software components. A software component can be seen as an enclosed unit which provides specific services. It can be embedded into a higher-level system and combined with other components. The concrete implementation of a component is concealed from its accessing instance, the communication is provided by specific interfaces [29]. Within our architecture model, the components are abstract and serve as containers for previously assigned tools and methods. Furthermore, they may be implemented several times. Thus, extensibility of the framework is supported. Based on the identified workflow phases and tasks, we conceived and included the components Broker, Administration, Workflow, Video, Segmentation, Annotation, Timeline, Search, and Server Communication. In order to comprise sequences of tasks and sub operations, as well as possible loops and re-entries, we defined functions, internal procedures, and interaction with other elements of the architecture for each single component. In the following, the task-related components of the reference architecture are going to be exemplified, with a focus on their specific functions. The Broker Component implements the mediator pattern and servers as global controller within the controller layer of the MVC model. It does not hold information about the concrete implementation of the system components; the communication is conducted via the components’ controllers which serve as interfaces. The workflow component informs the broker instance that this task has to be performed. In order to control the whole task processing, the broker activates and highlights, or disables and hides respective components. In addition to that, it controls the interaction and communication between involved system components. Once modifying operations are performed by one component, changes must be registered in the data system one the one hand. On the other hand, other components have to be notified. Thus, the specific notification policy of the MVC model is realized. Information annotated to dynamic media like video comprises temporal conditions [9], [10], [14]. Thus, the representation of segmentation and annotation data has to be synchronized with the playing video. The Administration Component is responsible for all administrative processes and configuration of the application. It provides input interfaces for configuration of general application and project properties as well as the management of user accounts, groups, roles, and access right. In addition to that, workflow- and task-related settings can be edited, e.g., creating, editing and removing of workflow templates. Workflow templates define the tasks that have to be accomplished, the operating order and

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sequences, as well as the available tool(s) that are assigned to a certain task. Furthermore, distribution of tasks to different users or user groups can be stored. In general, the administration component provides interfaces for different types of information entry, and allocates data to its proper destination. Conjointly with the broker and administration components, the Workflow Component forms the workflow management framework of the system. On the graphical user interface, the workflow component visualizes the tasks that have to be accomplished, and enables users to select an item in order to perform a certain task. After the selection of a task item, the broker instance is notified for workflow control purposes. Once all relevant procedures are finished, the broker notifies the workflow component about the previously selected task being accomplished. In that case, the representation of the workflow is updated. The Video Component displays the assigned video file(s), as well as respective video segments and annotated data. Common interactive elements such as play, pause, stop, rewind, etc. are provided. In addition to that, further potentially services have been identified during the comparative analysis of the state-of-the-art, e.g. (synchronized) playback of multiple videos, multiple types of playback and control, or provision of keyboard shortcuts. For this purpose, the video component needs to provide appropriate interfaces. In close collaboration with the segmentation component(s), video chunking activities can be performed upon the video display area. The Segmentation Component includes required video chunking approaches. Since segmentation activities are usually performed on other components like video players or timelines [17], [19], this component must provide multiple interfaces for coordination of the segmentation performance. Concrete implementations of the Annotation Component enable supply, representation and editing of annotated data such as metadata, descriptions, categorization, commentary, etc. The annotation component has read access to the annotation data in the model layer in order to represent this information synchronized with the respecting video and segment(s). The selection of an annotation instance by the user must be enabled. With regard to this, the broker component has to be notified in order to initialize components like video player or timeline to update their representation of the respective data. For explorative purposes, the representation of annotated data needs to be modified. I.e., tools for grouping, sorting, filtering, etc. must be provided. This bears not only on a user’s own annotated information, but also on external data like co-annotators’ results or annotations within previous video annotation projects. Any modification performed upon the annotation component has to be registered in the central data system. Thereto, the broker instance has to be notified. The conducted expert interviews and the comparative analysis of current applications revealed that segmentation and annotation activities are often performed along a Timeline representation [15], [17], [19]. One fundamental reason is the temporal conditions of information that is annotated to video-based media [9], [10], [14]. In addition to that, other system components may use a timeline representation of annotated information, e.g. statistical comparisons of multiple users’ results. The Exploration Component provides essential functionalities for browsing, searching, and comparing several kinds of information. Among this information are own results, results of co-annotators or experts, annotation data of other projects that are located

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in the same data system, and also external resources. Consequently, the exploration component must provide an appropriate representation for different kinds of data. The Server Communication Component is responsible for communication, transaction, and data exchange between clients and the central server application or the data layer. For this purpose, the component has to know the employed protocol(s) and support marshalling procedures.

5 Conclusion and Future Work In this paper, we present a workflow model for collaborative video annotation processes. Based on this model, we illustrate a reference architecture that particularly supports transitions between phases and sub tasks of the (collaborative) video annotation workflow by complying the basic workflow-related requirements control, task enclosure, extensibility, and information consistency. The applied client-server model realizes co-annotator interconnectedness and information exchange by means of a centralized data system. Furthermore, services for user management, distributed authoring, and data consistency are provided. By pooling work items and tasks into enclosed software components, the regulation and control of the annotation process by a central broker instance is facilitated. An arrangement of the architecture elements along a MVC model ensures appropriate handling and management of the video files and respective additional information. Thus, it can be drawn on the presented architecture model in order to design (collaborative) video annotation software with an integration workflow management framework. Up to date, we implemented the exemplified system architecture as well as basic software components. Elementary workflow sequences (which are under permanent further development) can be passed through. Future steps relate to the representation and user interaction referring to information displayed at the graphical user interface. This bears especially on the described workflow component and the control of the different tools that are provided on the user interface.

References 1. Baecker, R.M., Fono, D., Wolf, P.: Toward a Video Collaboratory. In: Goldman, R., Pea, R., Barron, B., Derry, S.J. (eds.) Video Research in the Learning Sciences, pp. 461–478. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London (2007) 2. Banerjee, S., Cohen, J., Quisel, T., Chan, A., Patodia, Y., Al-Bawab, Z., Zhang, R., Black, A., Stern, R., Rosenfeld, R., Rudnicky, A., Rybski, P.E., Veloso, M.: Creating multimodal, user-centric records of meetings with the carnegie mellon meeting recorder architecture. In: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Meeting Recognition Workshop (2004) 3. Bertini, M., Del Bimbo, A., Cucchiara, R., Prati, A.: Applications ii: Semantic video adaptation based on automatic annotation of sport videos. In: 6th ACM SIGMM International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, pp. 291–298. ACM Press, New York (2004) 4. Bertino, E., Trombetta, A., Montesi, D.: Workflow Architecture for Interactive Video Management Systems. In: Distributed and Parallel Databases, pp. 33–51. Springer, Netherlands (2002)

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5. Bortz, J., Döring, N.: Forschungsmethoden und Evaluation für Human- und Sozialwissenschaftler, 4th edn. Springer, Berlin (2006) 6. Brugman, H., Crasborn, O.A., Russel, A.: Collaborative annotation of sign language data with peer-to-peer technology. In: 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pp. 213–216. European Language Resources Association, Paris (2004) 7. Brugman, H., Russel, A.: Annotating multi-media / multi-modal resources with ELAN. In: 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pp. 2065–2068. European Language Resources Association, Paris (2004) 8. Buschmann, F., Meunier, R., Rohnert, H., Sommerlad, P., Stal, M.: Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture. A System of Patterns, vol. 1. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (1996) 9. Chambel, T., Zahn, C., Finke, M.: Hypervideo Design and Support for Contextualized Learning. In: IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, pp. 345–349. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2004) 10. Finke, M.: Unterstützung des kooperativen Wissenserwerbs durch Hypervideo-Inhalte. Dissertation, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany (2005) 11. Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., Vlissides, J.: Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1995) 12. Hagedorn, J., Hailpern, J., Karahalios, K.G.: VCode and VData: illustrating a new framework for supporting the video annotation workflow. In: Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, pp. 317–321. ACM Press, New York (2008) 13. Halasz, F., Schwartz, M.: The Dexter Hypertext Reference Model. Communications of the ACM 37(2), 30–39 (1994) 14. Hofmann, C., Hollender, N.: Kooperativer Informationserwerb und -Austausch durch Hypervideo. In: Mensch & Computer 2007: Konferenz für interaktive und kooperative Medien, pp. 269–272. Oldenbourg Verlag, München (2007) 15. Hofmann, C., Hollender, N., Fellner, D.W.: A Workflow Model for Collaborative Video Annotation - Supporting the Workflow of Collaborative Video Annotation and Analysis performed in Educational Settings. In: International Conference on Computer Supported Education 2009 (to appear, 2009) 16. Hollender, N., Hofmann, C., Deneke, M.: Principles to reduce extraneous load in webbased generative learning settings. In: Workshop on Cognition and the Web 2008, pp. 7– 14 (2008) 17. Kipp, M.: Spatiotemporal Coding in ANVIL. In: 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. European Language Resources Association, Marrakech (2008) 18. Lin, C.Y., Tseng, B.L., Smith, J.R.: Video Collaborative Annotation Forum: Establishing Ground-Truth Labels on Large Multimedia Datasets. In: TRECVID 2003 Workshop (2003) 19. Link, D.: Computervermittelte Kommunikation im Spitzensport. Sportverlag Strauß, Köln (2006) 20. Mikova, M., Janik, T.: Analyse von gesundheitsfördernden Situationen im Sportunterricht: Methodologisches Vorgehen einer Videostudie. In: Mužík, V., Janík, T., Wagner, R. (eds.) Neue Herausforderungen im Gesundheitsbereich an der Schule. Was kann der Sportunterricht dazu beitragen? pp. 248–260. MU, Brno (2006) 21. National Research Council Comittee on a National Collaboratory: National Collaboratories: Applying information technology for scientific research. Nation Academy Press, Washington (1993) 22. Pea, R., Hoffert, E.: Video workflow in the learning sciences: Prospects of emerging technologies for augmenting work practices. In: Goldman, R., Pea, R., Barron, B., Derry, S.J. (eds.) Video Research in the Learning Sciences, pp. 427–460. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London (2007)

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23. Pea, R., Lindgren, R., Rosen, J.: Computer-supported collaborative video analysis. In: 7th International Conference on Learning Sciences, pp. 516–521. International Society of the Learning Sciences (2006) 24. Ratcliff, D.: Video Methods in Qualitative Research. In: Camic, P.M., Rhodes, J.E., Yardley, L. (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology: Expanding Perspectives in Methodology and Design, pp. 113–130. American Psychological Association, Washington (2003) 25. Richter, K., Finke, M., Hofmann, C., Balfanz, D.: Hypervideo. In: Pagani, M. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Multimedia Technology and Networking, 2nd edn., pp. 641–647. Idea Group Pub., USA (2007) 26. Seidel, T., Prenzel, M., Kobarg, M. (eds.): How to run a video study. Technical report of the IPN Video Study. Waxmann, Münster (2005) 27. Snoek, C.G.M., Worring, M.: Multimodal video indexing: A review of the state-of-the-art. Multimodal Tools and Applications 25(1), 5–35 (2005) 28. Stahl, E., Finke, M., Zahn, C.: Knowledge Acquisition by Hypervideo Design: An Instructional Program for Univiversity Courses. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 15(3), 285–302 (2006); Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Chesapeake 29. Szyperski, C.: Component Software - Beyond Object-Oriented Programming. AddisonWesley, Reading (1999) 30. Volkmer, T., Smith, J.R., Natsev, A.: A web-based system for collaborative annotation of large image and video collections: an evaluation and user study. In: 13th Annual ACM international Conference on Multimedia, pp. 892–901. ACM Press, New York (2005) 31. Zhang, Q.Y., Kankanhalli, M.S., Mulhem, P.: Semantic video annotation and vague query. In: 9th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, pp. 190–208 (2003)

Catalysing the Development of a Conference Workspace Jukka Huhtamäki, Ossi Nykänen, and Jaakko Salonen Tampere University of Technology, Hypermedia Laboratory, Korkeakoulunkatu 1, FI-33720 Tampere, Finland {jukka.huhtamaki, ossi.nykanen, jaakko.salonen}@tut.fi Abstract. Modern Web introduces new means to support conference information retrieval and, moreover, social tools that enable conference delegates to actively contribute to a conference. Simultaneously, existing case studies show that collecting explicitly represented conference data is possible in real-life settings. From these grounds, methods and tools of component-based information visualisation can be used to process conference data, firstly, in order to create visualisations of the conference data, and, secondly, to produce data for populating interactive conference tools. We claim that when coupled with usage tracking and analysis, the automated creation of visualisations and population data can catalyse the iterative development of a conference workspace. In this article, we present case OPAALS 2008 where formal conference data was successfully harvested and utilised to partly automate the creation workflow of the conference workspace. Moreover, we introduce the methods that were used to gain insight on the dynamics of the workspace usage. Keywords: information visualisation, online communities, Semantic Web, information modelling, social media.

1 Introduction Most of the conferences and workshops today have a homepage including information about the venue, program, and presenters. Some events offer delegates the possibility to define their profile and to contribute to the conference online. Lately, work for equipping conference delegates with appropriate interactive tools has been done in the field of online conferences. Traditionally, the role of a conference delegate has been rather passive. Related to unconferencing, Winer [1] claims that “[t]he sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage”. Although this surely is always not the case, we agree that the usefulness of a conference can be added with tools supporting delegates to find their way to see the right talks, to meet other delegates with complementing interests and to contribute to the conference discussion before, during and after the event. In chemistry, catalysts increase the probability of a reaction by reducing the activation energy needed for a reaction to happen. Reducing “activation energy” is important in data-sharing systems [2] and we see that the same analogy is applicable to conference workspace development. We claim that once the conference data is presented in a form explicit enough to enable automated processing, pipeline-based data processing methods that are commonly used in information visualisation can be used A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 43–52, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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to partly automate the creation process of a conference workspace. First, views can be created for visualising the conference data, possibly based on user preferences, and, secondly, conference data can be transformed into formats that can be used to populate conference community and other interactive conference tools. Together with a tracking-based, visualisation-driven feedback loop of the workspace usage, the automation of the workspace creation process can catalyse the iterative and incremental development of a high-end conference workspace: alterations to workspace content or structure can be made quickly as the understanding on the requirements of a workspace improves over time. In this article, we present work done related to the 2nd International Conference on Open Philosophies for Associative Autopoietic Digital Ecosystems (OPAALS 2008)1. OPAALS 2008 was organised on 7th and 8th October 2008 in Tampere, Finland by the Hypermedia Laboratory (HLab) of Tampere University of Technology (TUT) in association with Mindtrek Conference2 and W3C Finnish Office3. OPAALS 2008 was a relatively small conference with about 50 registered delegates representing fields of, among others, social science, biology, and computer science. OPAALS 2008 is related to OPAALS Network of Excellence (FP6-034824). The two main objectives of OPAALS are to build a sustainable interdisciplinary research community in the area of Digital Ecosystems (DE) and to develop an integrated theoretical foundation for DE research. A significant part of OPAALS is building an Open Knowledge Space (OKS) to support the work done in the project. To simplify, we describe OKS as a repository and a model for capturing and managing OPAALS knowledge in an evolutionary manner in the spirit of open source. Currently, OKS wiki is the main tool used by the members of OPAALS. As a partner of the OPAALS consortium, HLab is working to develop an information visualisation system for the OKS. As HLab was also responsible for organising OPAALS 2008, the development process of the conference workspace was selected as a real-life pilot scenario for the visualisation system. The first objective of this article is to describe a semi-automatic process of preparing and setting up a data-driven conference information infrastructure that also supports the task of bootstrapping the related conference community. The second objective is illustrating the pipeline-based mash-up and visualisation technology (reported elsewhere) in this context, analysing the critical factors of technically and socially sound applications. The rest of the article is organised as follows. In Chapter 2, we review inspiring work related to case OPAALS 2008. The development workflow of OPAALS 2008 is presented in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 includes an informal analysis of our work and Chapter 5 concludes the paper.

2

Background and Existing Work

Let us next briefly review some inspiring work and insights related to (1) conference data modelling, (2) conference author social network visualisation, and (3) the possibilities of 1

http://matriisi.ee.tut.fi/hypermedia/events/opaals2008 http://www.mindtrek.org/conference 3 http://www.w3c.tut.fi/ 2

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using formal conference data to support conference delegates in making the most of the time spent in a conference. Moreover, we introduce Wille, a lightweight information visualisation framework that was applied in OPAALS 2008 to automate the processing of the conference data. In order to demonstrate the real-life usage of Semantic Web technologies and to test the workflows and tools needed to collect semantically rich data in a realistic setting, or to eat the “Semantic Web Dog Food”, conference metadata about people, papers and talks has been created for a number of European and International Semantic Web Conferences (ESWC and ISWC) [3]. The metadata is represented in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format following the ESWC2006 Conference Ontology. The ontology combines concepts of the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary4 to concepts specific to the conference domain. Currently, data representing six academic conferences is available online5 both as a browsable repository and via an Application Programming Interface (API) supporting SPARQL Query Language for RDF (SPARQL)6. Moreover, a simple geographic map of “Dog Food Organisations”7 is provided as an additional mean for navigating the data. A profound case of academic conference data visualisation was done related to IRIS (Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia) conference [4]. To visualise the evolution of the social network of authors and the research topics of IRIS on a period from 1978 to 2006, data representing articles and their authors was collected manually from web pages, conference proceeding CDs and other sources and inserted into a database. A dynamic network visualisation tool Commetrix was used to visualise the data. The outputs of the work include animations of the evolution of IRIS co-authorship and of the diffusion of terms in IRIS community8. In addition to solving the issues related to heterogenous sources of data, manual work was needed to identify the authors whose names or origins were written in various ways. In particular, Scandinavian letters (å, ø, ä, ö, æ, etc.) caused problems for data collectors since author names including such letters are expressed in various ways. In his winning proposal for the Semantic Conference Design Challenge of the 3rd Annual European Semantic Web Conference, Grimnes [5] nicely sums up many of the needs of a conference delegate: delegates should be able to efficiently browse conference program and tag talks, on basis of which a conference system, where the user data could possibly be initialised with existing profile information in FOAF format, could guide the delegate intelligently through the conference. Today, such intelligent online communities can be built via integrating and tailoring existing community engines and other Web 2.0 development tools. The underlying objective of information visualisation is to serve as an amplifier of the cognition of a user through expressive views giving insight on a certain phenomena represented by the data [6]. In order to support the development of information visualisations for the Open Knowledge Space and other sources of explicit or heterogenous information, information visualisation framework Wille is being developed by the Hypermedia Laboratory [7]. A visualisation designer can use Wille to build 4

http://www.foaf-project.org/ http://data.semanticweb.org 6 http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ 7 http://data.semanticweb.org/organization/ 8 http://chacini.cs.tu-berlin.de/Commetrix/iris/iris.html 5

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information processing pipelines that connect to different sources of data, process the data through series of queries and transformations and create stand-alone visualisations to visualisation users. Alternatively, Wille can be applied to produce data for existing information visualisation tools including Vizster (see [8]). An example of applying Wille is a social network visualisation of OKS wiki contributors where Wille is used to access and process OKS wiki data to create a representation of wiki editing history in a format supported by Vizster [9]. Two main versions of Wille exist, Wille Phase 1 and Wille Phase 2. Due to the early stage of development of Wille Phase 2, the batch-processing based Wille Phase 1 was used for conference data processing and visualisation creation.

3 Development of OPAALS 2008 Workspace The OPAALS 2008 development workflow is depicted in Fig. 1. Conference data is collected and represented in an explicit format enabling the automation of workspace creation. Moreover, the usage of the workspace is tracked and visualised to gain insight on workspace dynamics.

Fig. 1. A diagram presenting the workflow of OPAALS 2008 workspace development

A detailed description of the workflow follows. 3.1 Collecting and Modelling OPAALS 2008 Data Traditional conference management tools were used to collect OPAALS 2008 data. Articles were submitted through an online open source conference management

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system OpenConf9 that was installed for OPAALS 2008. Conference delegates registered via Mindtrek registration system. The registration data was delivered to the OPAALS 2008 team every now and then via email. Since OpenConf (we used version 2.01) does not provide a separate management process of camera-ready articles, authors submitted the final versions of articles via email in Portable Document Format (PDF). The files were named according to a uniform naming scheme to enable link generation. OPAALS 2008 conference data is composed of article data (id, author(s), title, session, keywords, abstract, full article in PDF format), delegate profile information (id, name, conference community username, email, organisation, location [city, country] and a list of interests) and session information (id, title, type, chair, start time, end time). Moreover, for members of OPAALS, additional profile information (image, additional list of interest) was collected from the OKS. For this, OPAALS username was added to the conference data to connect the OPAALS member identities to respective OPAALS 2008 delegate identities. In order to avoid time-consuming software development, a (human) conference data manager conducted the aggregation of conference data, an effort resulting to an Open Office Calc spreadsheet (opaals2008.ods in Fig. 1). A few iterations were made to collect sufficient data that fully supported the creation of the needed visualisations. Although a human actor was needed to manage data collection and aggregation, efforts were made to smoothen the process. For exporting article information from the submission management system via a Web interface, a data API capable of accessing the OpenConf database and exporting the data in a machine-readable format was implemented. Moreover, a set of Wille pipelines were developed for processing the data: Two previously developed pipelines, one for getting OPAALS member data in canonical FOAF format (opaals.foaf in Fig. 1) (see [9] for more information) and another for fetching OPAALS member images were re-used. In addition, a dedicated OPAALS 2008 data pipeline was developed for picking the spreadsheet content from the Open Office Calc file (which is, effectively, a zip file including spreadsheet content in XML format), scraping the data load, geocoding delegate origins with Google Maps API10, adding pre-fetched OPAALS member profile information and, finally, creating an Extensible Markup Language (XML) representation of the conference data (opaals.xml in Fig. 1). 3.2 OPAALS 2008 Workspace The OPAALS 2008 conference workspace11 is designed to support conference delegates to (1) prepare for the conference, (2) work effectively during the conference and (3) follow-up discussion and initiatives after the physical event. The workspace is two-folded: a traditional conference homepage is spiced up with conference data visualisations and complemented with a dedicated conference community driven by an open source social network engine Elgg12. 9

http://www.openconf.com/ http://maps.google.com 11 http://matriisi.ee.tut.fi/hypermedia/events/opaals2008/ 12 http://elgg.org/ 10

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The following visualisations are included in the workspace. Interactive program is a densely hyperlinked view to the conference program. Presenter list introduces all the presenters appearing in OPAALS 2008. Article list enumerates all the articles published in OPAALS 2008 proceedings. The full version of each article is linked to Article list in PDF as well as the related conference presentations that were delivered to the OPAALS 2008 team. A keyword cloud, a tag cloud (see e.g. [10]) based on a histogram of conference article keywords is provided to support browsing the articles by their subject. Finally, Presenter map, a traditional map-based mash-up utilising Google Maps, shows the whereabouts of each presenter giving a talk in OPAALS 2008. The interlinking of the different views of the workspace is tight, thus providing flexible means to browse the conference contents. Moreover, conference sessions are linked to discussions running in the conference community and author information to their user profiles in the community. A simple Content Management System (CMS) was built to serve the static content as well as the generated views within a page template providing a uniform navigation scheme and general look and feel to the conference homepage. The CMS does not implement user session management or authentication, thus creating e.g. a personal tagging system for program was not possible. A general Workshop pipeline was built to produce the needed visualisations and population data files. The pipeline is composed of components Workshop program and Workshop community, first creating the Interactive program, the Delegate list, the Article list and marker data for the Presenter list (markers represent information in a Google Map) and second creating a data file (community.xml in Fig. 1) used to populate the conference community. A set of tailored XML vocabularies are used to represent the data within the pipelines. Most of the data processing is implemented as Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). The visualisations are based simply on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). In addition, Presenter Map uses Google Maps basic technologies, Keyhole Markup Language (KML) and the Javascript API of Google Maps. A mildly tailored version of Elgg (version 0.9) was used to run the conference community. A bash script was implemented to create a community account for each delegate, to populate the community profiles with collected data and to deliver the account information to delegates via email. To minimise the efforts of delegates and to enable linking from the Presenter list to the conference community, the conference data manager defined the community usernames manually into the conference data. In addition to the online conference workspace, a stand-alone version of the workspace was created through parameterisation of the Workshop pipeline and disseminated as a CD-ROM. Finally, a manually edited version of OPAALS 2008 proceedings in PDF was included both into the conference homepage and the CD-ROM. 3.3 Gaining Insight on Workspace Dynamics During the development of the OPAALS 2008 workspace, feedback from different visualisations and features of the conference workspace was collected from the members of the OPAALS 2008 team in face-to-face meetings and, in addition, from social network usefulness experts through informal discussions and reviews. Moreover, in order to provide the workspace development team with concrete data on the

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Fig. 2. A visualisation of the evolution of the conference delegate social network (two frames)

workspace usage before, during and after the conference, we installed Google Analytics13, an online usage tracking and visualisation tool, for collecting and visualising the usage data. In addition, a tailored log collector was implemented to the conference community platform by utilising the extension mechanism of Elgg. Google Analytics enables us to gain insight on the usage of the workspace in a general level. Moreover, on basis of the community log information, we are e.g. able to generate a visualisation of the evolution of the social structure of the community. Two excerpts of the development are shown in Fig. 2. Nodes represent the community members and the theme groups in the conference community and lines represent the interconnections between them. The graph representation of the community is created with a social network analysis tool Pajek14. In OPAALS 2008, the profile views constitute the majority of the community activity, thus making the social network data less significant. Similar means can, however, be used to create social network visualisations in conferences where online interaction is more diverse. Moreover, animations of social network evolution can be created from the log data e.g. with SoNIa, a tool for visualising dynamic, longitudinal network data15. The information derived from usage tracking and visualisation can be used to reflect the dynamics of the workspace. For instance, we decided to separate the traditional, static homepage of the conference from the more interactive workspace. This meant that we had two versions of the conference program, one with hyperlinks to different parts of the workspace and another without. In the period of September 15, 2008 to February 15, 2009, the unlinked version of the program was viewed twice as much as the interactive version. We suspect that this may have had a major effect on the popularity of the other parts of the workspace. In the future, we would create only one program that would initially be a static one and would be replaced by the interactive version once enough data for creating one is available. 13

http://www.google.com/analytics/ http://pajek.imfm.si/ 15 http://www.stanford.edu/group/sonia/ 14

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4 Discussion and Informal Analysis Case OPAALS 2008 serves as an example of the potential of data driven development of online workspaces. We have showed that when sufficient technical expertise is available in a conference team, explicitly represented conference data can be collected with traditional conference management software, spreadsheets and other state-ofthe-art tools and, moreover, a useful workspace can be created from this data for supporting the conference delegates. From the end-user point-of-view, an optimal solution for a conference workspace would be achieved through a fully integrated system supporting submission management, registration, collaborative tagging, discussions and communication, networking and conference data visualisation. Since developing such a tailored system is not always possible and application needs vary, a lightweight alternative created by utilising explicitly represented conference data, component-based information visualisation pipelines and contemporary mash-up and community technologies provides a valid option. An automated publishing process has several advantages in addition to enabling an iterative, data-driven development of a conference workspace. Examples include the possibility to create a consistent Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) space for the workspace to enable deep linking of conference artefacts and third-party created complementing metadata, following the principles of design for reuse [11]. Programmatically created views to the conference data are, due to their predictable structure, both browsable (by humans) and crawlable (by machines), thus forming a repository of digital conference artefacts. Moreover, it is possible to refresh the format of the data views e.g. by adding support for Microformats16 for representing the conference schedule and the profile information of article presenters. In general, the automation introduces means to conference source data normalisation, thus adding to the data quality by preventing errors in data replication and insuring the referential integrity of links within the data and the generated views. The dynamics of the workspace usage can be better understood through tracking and visualisation of the usage providing insight on the popularity of individual views, the navigation paths and even the structure of the social network of the delegates. While Google Analytics provides useful general views to workspace usage, the usage data collected with Google Analytics is still quite imprecise. Importantly, the users identity remains unknown, thus we are not able to connect users e.g. to their demographic information. Using only Google Analytics for the public part of the conference workspace hinders us to follow the paths of individual conference community users outside the community where a built-in tracking mechanism does enable user-specific tracking. Several efforts can be made to further add to the usefulness of a conference workspace. Using a temporary community for a conference does not encourage the use. Moreover, system-specific authentication credentials hinders the use of the community. Applying OpenID17 or some other general authentication scheme would enable the use of existing digital identities in such a short-lived community. Also, more advanced conference data can be collected. Article references, for example, can be 16 17

http://microformats.org/ http://openid.net/

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formalised e.g. with Zotero18. A general identification scheme for authors and articles is, however, needed in addition to a consistent reference representation scheme to enable advanced computing on basis of the reference information.

5 Concluding Remarks Complemented with component-based data processing pipelines and extensive export and import mechanisms of individual conference tools, explicit representation of conference data provides means to decouple the unique, invaluable data from the individual conference tools that tend to change on yearly basis as more prominent technologies emerge. Data processing pipelines can be developed to create the needed visualisations views directly and to generate data files in formats suitable for feeding various visualisation players and social platforms. Iterative development is supported through the possibility to add new views to existing data by implementing new publishing routines and to refine the workspace by tailoring the existing ones. Once collected, a formal conference data set can be utilised in the future e.g. by aggregating the data with other existing sets of data or by creating new representations of the data in appropriate formats. However, to ensure the option to use a certain data format, the characteristics of the format should be taken into account so that all the necessary pieces of information are collected. The system developed for OPAALS 2008 is a combination of a publishing framework, an information visualisation system and a conference management system. Following the presented approach in a series of future conferences, we are able to analyse and also actively steer the development of workspaces for academic conferences and other communities. The OPAALS 2008 conference workspace serves as a firm basis for the development of future workspaces. Work on tailoring existing components and pipelines and creating new ones is, nevertheless, needed when new workspaces are created, insisting on experience in utilising Wille. In order to fully understand the dynamics of the conference workspace and thinking of the workspace users, the methods of user-centered design and qualitative research methods should be used to complement the measures and figures created through quantitative means. However, usage visualisation surely serves as means to facilitate the discussion on workspace development both for the archive of OPAALS 2008 as well as for future conferences. To enable the emergence of a conference ecosystem composed of individual services capable of communicating dynamically to each other, APIs are needed for data access and easily machine-readable formats for data interpretation. Shared policies and practices, however, ultimately define whether such a system will emerge. Acknowledgments. The authors would like to express their gratitude to Thumas Miilumäki for creating the social network visualisations with Pajek, Arto Liukkonen for tailoring the conference community and Matti Haapaniemi for the development of early prototypes of workshop data visualisation. Moreover, we appreciate the help and feedback from the OPAALS community. 18

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References 1. Winer, D.: What is an unconference? (March 5, 2006), http://scripting.wordpress.com/ 2006/03/05/what-is-an-unconference/ 2. Smith, K., Seligman, L., Swarup, V.: Everybody Share: The Challenge of Data-Sharing Systems. Computer 41(9), 54–61 (2008) 3. Möller, K., Heath, T., Handschuh, S., Domingue, J.: Recipes for Semantic Web Dog Food — The ESWC and ISWC Metadata Projects. In: Aberer, K., Choi, K.-S., Noy, N., Allemang, D., Lee, K.-I., Nixon, L., Golbeck, J., Mika, P., Maynard, D., Mizoguchi, R., Schreiber, G., Cudré-Mauroux, P. (eds.) ASWC 2007 and ISWC 2007. LNCS, vol. 4825, pp. 802–815. Springer, Heidelberg (2007) 4. Molka-Danielsen, J., Trier, M., Slykh, V., Bobrik, A., Nurminen, M.: IRIS (1978-2006) Historical Reflection through Visual Analysis. In: IRIS30, Tampere, Finland (2007) 5. Grimnes, G.: Semantic Conference Program. In: Sure, Y., Domingue, J. (eds.) ESWC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4011. Springer, Heidelberg (2006), http://www.eswc2006.org/technologies/designchallenge/ semantic-conference-program.pdf 6. Ware, C.: Information Visualization: Perception for Design. Elsevier, San Francisco (2004) 7. Nykänen, O., Salonen, J., Haapaniemi, M., Huhtamäki, J.: A Visualisation System for a Peer-to-Peer Information Space. In: 2nd International OPAALS Conference on Digital Ecosystems, pp. 76–85. Tampere University of Technology, Tampere (2008) 8. Heer, J.: boyd, d.: Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks. In: 2005 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (INFOVIS 2005), pp. 33–40. IEEE Computer Society, Washington (2005) 9. Huhtamäki, J.: Community visualisations in Open Knowledge Space: Uncovering rabbit holes in a digital ecosystem. In: 1st OPAALS workshop. opaals.org (2007) 10. Hearst, M.A., Rosner, D.: Tag Clouds: Data Analysis Tool or Social Signaller? In: 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, p. 160. IEEE Computer Society, Washington (2008) 11. Vinoski, S.: Serendipitous Reuse. IEEE Internet Computing 12(1), 84–87 (2008)

Dialogues of Locations: BlueSpot András Kangyal1 and László Laufer2 2

1 Guanxi, Garas u. 9, 1052 Budapest, Hungary Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Egry J.u.1., 1111 Budapest, Hungary [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract. We designed and implemented an experimental communication system called BlueSpot, which was functioning for 3 months in Budapest, Hungary. It was a free communication system that connected nearly 50 geographical locations in the city into a network. In BlueSpot users could send messages to localities instead of people using the Bluetooth service of their mobile phones. Messages were received by all users present at the target location. We are describing the system architecture and our experiences with the interaction design of the BlueSpot application. We also provide an analysis of the content of the messages, revealing user experiences in a synchronous location based communication system. Keywords: Location Based Services, Messaging system, Bluetooth, Interaction design.

1 Introduction In most European countries the penetration of mobile phones almost reached, in some cases has already exceeded a 100 percent. Most of these devices are only used for talking and for sending short messages. Other potentials are still waiting to be unleashed by both the providers and the users. In the recent decade there was a lot of research carried out to utilize one of the most important information of these mobile ICT users: their location. Although Location Based Services (LBS) has become a very popular research area in recent years, only after the release of the iPhone it got significant public attention. According to the GFK Technology Research, in the 4th quarter of 2008 in the US one third of iPhone owners used LBS, as opposed to the overall of 10% of all mobile users of the 25-34 age group [1]. On one hand this fact shows the unused potentials of these services, on the other hand it also draws attention of the importance of the high entry threshold of being able to access LBS. In this article we would like to discuss a Hungarian experimental Location Based Service called BlueSpot [2]. The system ran for 3 months in 2007 in Budapest, and was specially designed to be accessible on all mobile phones, not just for GPS or even G3 capable smartphone owners. In the following paragraphs we would like to give a short overview of some classifications of LBS, and try to define our system according A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 53–61, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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to these concepts. We describe the functionality and the purpose of BlueSpot and finally share the results and our experiences we gathered in the test period.

2 Overview of Location Based Systems According to the definition of Virrantaus LBSs are information services accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the location of the mobile device [3]. As we previously mentioned the spread of mobile communication technologies necessarily resulted in the need for such services and thus lots of pilot systems were developed. As a consequence of the experimental nature of the field there is no unified classification of LBS exists. In his paragraph we do not try to create such a standard taxonomy, we just collected some considerations which are useful for us to describe our system and we also provide our own classification revealing the importance of our developments. 2.1 Classifications of LBSs One of the most important factors that characterizes LBS is the source and the granularity of the location information. According to Dix [4] it is useful to differentiate between three different kinds of location detection. Some of the systems have access to the coordinates of the users, like GSP enabled mobile devices or other systems that determine the location on the basis of nearby Wi-Fi routers or GSM antennas. In these systems the location is in some sort of explicit dimensional representation. In a zonal system the devices are located within some area of a sensor. The granularity of these zones can vary from a few millimeters (enter a door with an RFID card and a reader) to a few meters (automatic road toll paying service) or even more (e.g. in the case of BlueSpot it was up to 10 meters). In the zonal system the exact location of the user is not know, thus the service provided must be relevant within the whole zone. Near Location Based Systems (NLBS), which allow users to access information based on their surroundings, typically belong to this category. The third group of systems uses relational location detection, where objects report some form of relative location information. Usually these users are within a few meters distance of each other (e.g. Bluetooth devices which are close to each other). Due to technical reasons these services also differ whether the device is used indoors or outdoors. Several modalities of location detection like GPS cannot be used indoors, or less accurate within a building like GSM based positioning, while others like infrared is more problematic to use in an open space. From the HCI perspective the focus of the applications have a more significant importance. Steiniger [5] defined 8 categories of LBS systems based on the type of information they provide: Navigation (e.g. routing), Information (e.g. travel guide), Tracking (e.g. product tracking), Games (e.g. geocaching), Emergency, Advertising, Billing (e.g. road toll), Management (e.g. customer relationship) and Leisure (e.g. instant messaging). He also expresses that it is hard to define long lasting categories, because of the accelerated evolution of devices and application in this field.

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2.2 Location in the Communicational Process According to our understanding of LBS, it is also important to treat the location as a form of information, which is being used up in a communicational process. To characterize this process we can differentiate between the number of users participating and the synchronicity of the communication. Along these dimensions we found two major clusters of applications, which do not cover all location based systems, and to some extent overlap with each other. Nevertheless we think it is important to describe them as they characterize a lot of recent LBS developments. We think that one of the major categories of these applications has a focus on the social network of the users. These Social Network Based LBSs function as a locative extension of the well known social network services. The most typical application in this group is the so called buddy search. In these systems the users know the people who they are interacting with (most commonly by instant messaging with each other), and location serves as an important supplementary information in the dialogue. Another important attribute of these social networked based LBS is that they are synchronous communicational tools. The location information gains its importance if the user gets to know where the people are in his social network right now. In some cases the history of the location information of his/her friends is also presented. Typically it is a one to one communication tool, sometimes a one to many, where the receivers are the whole social network of the user. It is a very popular form of LBS: Google Latitude [6] or the Nok-Nok [7] system of Nokia are commonly known representatives of this category. We think that another emerging focus of LBS is Location Based Tagging. In these systems there is a database of places with different granularity of location information, and some specialized type of information is being attached to these localities. To some extent it can be treated as a form of augmented reality. Usually the information assigned to the location already exists at time of the interaction, and as a result the communication between the information provider and receiver is asynchronous. Like other knowledge sharing systems these LBSs typically serve as a many to many communicational tool. Most location based iPhone applications (e.g. iSushi, or travel tip services) fit into this category.

3 The BlueSpot Location Based Chat System The purpose of the BlueSpot system was to provide a special location based chat application, in which the participants of the dialogues are not representing themselves, but their location. The system was only available in specific places like bars, cafes, and other scenes of social life. To create such a system we only needed a zonal granularity of the location information. This Near LBS only had to detect whether the user is present in that specific place or not. The system harnessed the Bluetooth capability of the mobile phones, and connected the users with each other through special Bluetooth routers, which were connected to the internet. As we discussed previously most location based chat services rely on the social network of the user. These services could be better described as Location Based Instant Messaging systems, as the users are selecting their partners from a previously

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defined contact list. On the web the killer feature of chat rooms and IRC channels is that unidentified (not necessarily anonymous) users participate in a virtual public space. In this way IRC and chat is very similar to hanging out in a bar, talking to friends and getting acquainted with strangers in a public space. These communicational tools are not just using and strengthening the already existing strong social links, but also provide a possibility to expand the network of the participant. In Instant Messaging, text messaging (SMS) and telephony partners mostly know each other, so these channels of communications are taking place in a virtual private space. These services are metaphors of inviting friends to our home, or our office and having a discussion with them in our private space. In virtual spaces no matter if they are public or private; the users are staying in their real private space: mostly sitting in their room or at their office, instead of a real public space. There are just a few examples of technology being used in public spaces to enhance the communication of the people present. The most commonly used service is the SMS Wall, which provides a common platform for the people located at the same public space. There has not been any technology developed yet, which enables public spaces to communicate with each other. Real life public spaces incubate an ad-hoc community of people being present at the same time at the same place. But these communities remain isolated. When youngsters decide to hang out in an evening, they have very limited information about what is happening at a specific place. The information they have about an event or a public space is mediated by an asynchronous communication channel (website, magazine etc.). If nobody is present there from their social network they cannot get information about the ongoing event at a location. In 2008, one year after the BlueSpot experiment, the rise of Twitter microblogging service showed the importance of this type of synchronous communication, since this is one of the most important themes of the tweets. In BlueSpot, the user staying at a location could send a message to another location with his/her phone. The people present at the other location could reply, creating one dialogue between the two public spaces. All the other people present can follow and take part in the discussion. On the other hand dialogues within one location were not supported; from the same place the senders` messages could only be seen in the history of the dialogue thread after someone replying form the addressed location. We also created a client, accessible from the web, grouping all the web users to one location, which could be regarded as "home". Although these users were at different places they were all behaving similarly, as they were all asking questions from their home, which determined the topics of the discussions. 3.1 System Architecture The key idea in BlueSpot was to try to develop a free mobile messaging service not restricted to be used on smartphones only. Therefore the most important requirement of the system was to demand a low entry threshold. The service had to be free, so we had to provide the technical infrastructure, which was completely independent from the Hungarian mobile networks. Taking part in the project demanded minimal effort from the users. For this, we developed hotspots connected to each other through the internet and communicating with the mobile clients via Bluetooth. Therefore, the communication of the users relied only on their Bluetooth enabled mobile device and

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the BlueSpot system. The whole project was based on Open Source solutions, and the infrastructure consisted of three levels of devices: a central webserver, hotpots (Bluebox) placed at special locations and mobile clients running on the users' phones. Webserver. On the top level there was a webserver which was connected to the hotspots through the Internet. We used PostgreSQL as database system, and PHP as programming language above a standard Debian Linux system. The communication between the different levels was based on standard XML requests. The webserver was basically a transmitter between the hotspots. It distributed the messages to the different locations and collected data on the actual state of the whole system. It counted how many reachable users had been logged in and how many users had participated in the discussions. The server sent this information to every user via the hotspots.

Fig. 1. System architecture of BlueSpot: mobile clients, Bluetooth hotspots and the webserver

Bluebox Hotspots. The Bluebox hotspots were specially designed for the BlueSpot infrastructure, making them the most interesting part of the system. These devices were hacked ASUS WLAN HDD. They wirelessly connected to a Wi-Fi router or to a modem via LAN cable. We dismantled the boxes and changed the hard drive to a 128MB memory card. We ran an OpenWRT embedded Linux application on these cards, which ensured the communication between the webserver and mobile phones as a mediator. These cards stored the downloadable mobile client applications as well. We plugged in a Bluetooth dongle to the USB port of the Bluebox, which maintained the connection with the mobile phones. The range of the dongles was the bottleneck of the system. It was only 8-10 meters maximum, and when a user left the covered area, the connection was lost. In some cases in order to cover the whole location we had to use multiple boxes. Mobile Clients. When the system detected a new mobile phone with a Bluetooth device turned on, the user got a message to download the Java based (J2me) mobile phone client application from the Bluebox. If they accepted the message, they could install the application. This was the most sensitive part of the interaction, as most of the users did not know the source and the purpose of the program they were about to install. The functionality of the client was very similar to a text messaging system.

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Fig. 2. Our first GUI concept, where the positions of the keys were constant on the screens, but they were representing different functions on every screen. This made the interaction similar to the ones on touchscreen devices, but with a normal mobile numeric keypad. Usability tests proved it to be difficult for the users to learn.

The messages were displayed in threads of discussions. Besides this the map of the city with the participating places was another important function. Each place was represented with dots of different sizes on the map. The magnitude corresponded with the number of logged in users at the location, and the color of the dot showed how active their communication was at the moment. The users could browse and reply to previous messages, but also had the possibility to start a new conversation with another location. 3.2 Graphical User Interface Originally we wanted to enable average phones to have functions that only smartphones have. Besides their GPS capability these phones also have a bigger display and the interaction does not only rely on the numeric keyboard, but a touchscreen or a stylus as a pointer is also being used. In our original interface design we wanted to create a pseudo-touchscreen, where 10 areas of the screen correspond to the 10 numerical buttons of the keyboard (See Fig. 2). The corresponding areas of each button remained the same during the whole interaction, so the user could learn the positions of each key and did not have to pay attention on pressing the right button. As we tested this idea with paper prototyping we had to accept that the users rejected this concept. Although when using up/down/left/right navigation on simple mobile screens they use the keyboard in a similar way, the constantly changing functions of the keys confused the users. As a result of the usability tests, we decided to return to the commonly used mobile menu system (See Fig. 3).[8] This proves that composite metaphors in mobile interfaces are as important as in a desktop environment. When we repeated our usability tests with the menu driven interface all the users could easily learn the navigation in the menu system. A major and unsolvable usability problem was that when entering a message the text editor interface was the native editor surface of each mobile phone. This meant that by replying or writing a message, the users often thought they have exited the program, and started to enter a normal text message in their mobile phones` menu system. Unfortunately we could not get around this problem, and had to put up with this disturbing part of the interaction.

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Fig. 3. The same screens in the final version of the GUI (in Hungarian) The contents of the screen from left to right: 1. Notification when receiving a new message; 2. Map of locations with the number of users logged in; 3. Content of an incoming message; 4. Menu of incoming messages; 5.Login screen.

4 Results Since BlueSpot was an academic experiment, and it only ran for 3 months, it did not get a lot of publicity from the media. Still, with its 47 locations (+1 web client), and its 1500 users it was one of the biggest Locative Media projects at the time. Most of the users were informed about the service from the welcome messages of Blueboxes at the public locations. The routers could only notify those mobile owners, who had the Bluetooth service turned on their phones permanently. In this period there were approximately 40000 users notified, out of which only 2600 user initiated the software download. Due to software installation problems only 1500 users succeeded, and were able to use the service. One third of the users actively participated in the discussion, by not just reading, but also writing messages to others. In the social media scene this ratio of passive and active users is considered to be high. According to a contemporary survey of Pew Internet Research, only one fifth of the blog readers wrote blogs at that time [9]. Unfortunately the average BlueSpot user wrote only 2.5 messages and the number of simultaneously logged in users rarely exceeded 10. As a result of these conditions the service has not reached a critical mass, thus did not evolve to become a synchronous communication channel of locations. Opposed to other location based tagging services, which do not demand parallel presence of their users, and could successfully rapidly increase their number users. One major portion of the messages was related to the BlueSpot service. Every user initially sent a "Hello world" type of message, to test the system. After this first message those who were brave enough to continue were either expressing their enthusiasm or asked a question related to the system. Messages sent for abroad through the web client also had similar content. The Web2Location type of conversation was initiated by the users of the web client. As the web users were located at their homes, these messages were about asking information about a specific location. Most of the time the web users were thinking about visiting that spot, and wanted to know if there was free table, if it was crowded, or asked about the current atmosphere. In the cases of open air spots, most often they were asking about the whether situation. These dialogues were good examples of synchronous communication between “home” and a location, as the immediacy of the information was a key factor in the discussion.

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A smaller, but still significant portion of the dialogues belong to the Location2Location type, and took place between two public spaces. The users were planning to leave a location, and asking whether it was worth to travel to the other spot (bar hopping). In some cases users organized common activities, like invited users from another locations to join their foosball tournament or simply to come over to party with them. The participants of these activities often used the system to write short coverages on the current situation, their moods etc. As a small group of the users regularly logging into the system had a kind of “BlueSpot user identity”. One a bartender, who was actively participating in the discussions, offered a free beer to everyone who came over to his place and said "abt natural", which is a well known joke from Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run" movie.

5 Conclusion BlueSpot system was an experiment to convert the screen of the mobile phone to a public display: everything the user wrote to someone at another place, everybody else could see in that location, and everything he received, all the people around him/her saw as well. Although there was no limitation of message size, users usually sent short SMS size messages, as they were used to do so from their mobiles. They did not know who is going to read their message so they addressed the public place as a whole. The contents of the messages showed that all users enjoyed the experience of these locative chat rooms. The system was working for a relatively short period of time and the vast majority of the people got introduced to it by an automatic notification message sent by the Bluetooth router, and an installation of unknown software from an unidentified source was required initially. Despite these factors the system was a great accomplishment with over a 1500 users at the time. The original goals of the BlueSpot, to provide a free infrastructure for people with simple mobile phones, and making it possible for the average mobile user to experience location based synchronous communication was successfully met. Acknowledgements. The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Hungarian National Office for Research and Technology, T-Mobile Hungary, Media Research Center at BUTE, Hungarian Wireless Community, Automata AB. In addition, the authors are thankful to the developers at Nextlab.hu, iMind.hu, Cjp.hu and Kitchen Budapest (Kibu.hu) for their valuable contributions.

References 1. One in Three iPhone Owners Used a Location Based Service in Q4 (2008), http://www.fiercewireless.com/press-releases/ one-three-iphone-owners-used-location-based-service-q4-2008 2. BlueSpot, http://bluespot.hu/en_3.html 3. Virrantaus, K., Markkula, J., Garmash, A., Terziyan, Y.V.: Developing GIS-Supported Location-Based Services. In: Proc. of WGIS 2001 – First International Workshop on Web Geographical Information Systems, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 423–432 (2001)

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4. Dix, A., Friday, A., Koleva, B., Rodden, T., Muller, H., Randell, C., Steed, A.: Managing Multiple Spaces. In: Turner, P., Davenport, E. (eds.) Spaces, Spatiality and Technology. Springer, Heidelberg (2005) 5. Steiniger, S., Neun, M., Edwardes, A.: Lecture Notes: Foundations of Location Based Services. Department of Geography, University of Zürich (2006) 6. Google Latitude, http://www.google.com/latitude/ 7. Nok-Nok, http://noknok.tv/ 8. BlueSpot menu system, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2IxVbbyXWw 9. Lenhart, A., Fox, S.: Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers (2006), http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/ PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf

Instant Online Communities as a Means to Foster Conferences Martin Christof Kindsmüller1, Jan Milz2, and Johannes Schmidt2 1

University of Lübeck, Institute for Multimedia & Interactive Systems, Ratzeburger Allee 160, D-23538 Lübeck, Germany [email protected] 2 Sixgroups INSTANT Communities GmbH, Karlstraße 19, D-22085 Hamburg, Germany {jm,js}@sixgroups.com

Abstract. In this paper we introduce an instant online community (IOC) solution as an add-on for existing websites. The IOC enables social interaction between the main content provider and visitors of one or more websites. We present the successful application of the sixgroups.com Livecommunity in the context of a joint conference to support communication between organizers and attendees, and attendees amongst each others. All stakeholders are supported throughout the conference, from preparation until follow-up. Yet, the main focus lies in accompanying them while they are attending the conference. The lessons learned and conclusions from this application are discussed, as well as the steps to be taken in improving the sixgroups.com Livecommunity. Keywords: Online Communities, Web 2.0, Conference Management.

1 Online Communities Preece and Maloney-Krichmar state in the introduction to their special thematic section “Online Communities: Design, Theory, and Practice” of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication that “Community has become the 'in-term' for almost any group of people who use Internet technologies to communicate with each other.” [1]. This statement seems especially true in the business world, if one recalls the 580 million US dollars that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp paid in July 2005 for taking over an online community – namely the social networking website MySpace [2]. This statement can also to apply for the academic field of computer science. Searching in the ACM Digital Library gives 995 hits for the search terms “online community” or “virtual community”1. According to [3] online community can be defined as “…a voluntary group of users who partake actively in a certain computer-mediated service”. The emphasis lies on: 1

Search conducted by the authors on February, 24th 2009. To relate this results to other common terms in computer science: searching the ACM Digital Library e.g. for the term “turing complete” leads to 222 hits, searching for the term “semantic web” to 2,997 hits.

A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 62–71, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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(1) voluntary engagement, (2) using a technical carrier service, (3) interacting online as opposed to face-to-face, and (4) being aware of being a member of that special community. In other publications (e.g. [4, 5]) the term “virtual community” is used for denominating the very same concept. In the following, we use the term “online community” (short OC) as it denotes the character of the community more accurately: community members are interacting online as opposed to face-to-face. As the aforementioned definition indicates, the basic constituents of OCs include individual issues, group-related issues, as well as technology-related issues. Whereas the technical carrier system of an OC can be engineered using state-of-the-art software and usability engineering methods [6, 7, 8], the underlying social system cannot be founded or created from scratch: “Recipe-based fabrication of online communities is, at the very least, a bold venture if not an illusionary enterprise” [cf. 3]. Or as Rheingold [4] states: “…communities grow organically and tend to follow their own rules”. The underlying social system evolves over time because of social relationships, common interests, and goals or other circumstances people share. Therefore, we refer to this process as enabling or supporting communities rather than founding or building them. 1.1 Communities of Interest, Practice, Purpose or Circumstance A large number of smaller OCs exist in the World Wide Web other than the few, but massively popular OCs, like MySpace, Facebook, or Friendster. OCs do not only differ in size, but can be classified into several types, like communities of interest, practice, purpose, or circumstance [10]. Some of them are not even meant to be an OC in the first place. Every situation where a content provider (producer) creates content on a website which is consumed by a number of recipients (visitors) has the potential to form a community of circumstance and interest [9]. Users share a common interest of visiting a website because of its content or its relation to a topic of general interest. In this situation, users may not know that they are involved in a community. The community exists at this time often only virtually (as opposed to in fact). The circumstance of visiting a specific website is part of the common ground of the visitors (for common ground cf. [11, 12]). On many of those websites the dialogue between producer and recipients and recipients amongst themselves is not well supported. Visitors are not aware who else is interested in the same content, webmasters do not know who their visitors really are. Producer recipient interaction is described by two classes of goals for the different perspectives. The goals of the content providers are: (P1) communicating with visitors, (P2) gathering feedback from visitors, (P3) providing support for visitors, (P4) increasing customer loyalty and stickiness. Goals of visitors are: (V1) knowing who else is or was online, (V2) interacting and communicating with others interested in the same content, (V3) giving feedback to the content provider, (V4) expressing loyalty to the content provider. In the following section, we introduce the idea of an instant online community – a service that addresses these goals by enabling social interaction. 1.2 What Is an Instant Online Community? An instant online community (IOC) instantly enables social interaction for online communities. By instant, we mean supporting an online community ad hoc from an

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already existing group of visitors of a website by providing visibility, awareness, and means of interacting between one another. A precondition for an IOC to work would be that people are located at the same virtual place, i.e. on a website, over a period of time. A defining feature for an IOC is the community enabling support by establishing the awareness of being a member of a community. Community activities for establishing this awareness of being a member are not well supported yet on many websites. Visibility, awareness information, and the possibilities of social interaction are limited. Visibility implies that there is a place in general where community activity can take place. Awareness information allows members to see who is or was online and which resources have been contributed by other users at what time. Social interaction is supported by personal profile pages, private messages, “friendships”, and conversations via chat messages.

2 The Sixgroups.com Livecommunity The sixgroups.com Livecommunity is an IOC which is interwoven with an embedding website (hosting site) by widget technology (JavaScript/HTML-snippet). Once integrated, the Livecommunity shows up as a small bar at the top of each page of the hosting site (cf. Fig. 1). Interaction takes place in an overlaying window – technically an iframe – which opens on click events. All content that is related to the Livecommunity is hosted and delivered by the sixgroups.com server infrastructure, whereas the original website is left untouched with the exception of a small code snippet that has to be integrated. 2.1 Elements of the Livecommunity The following elements are located in the closed bar (Fig 1, from left to right): (B1) sixgroups.com logo to access sixgroups.com website (e.g. to create a new IOC); (B2)

Fig. 1. The sixgroups.com Livecommunity bar embedded in the hosting website of the conference Mensch & Computer 2008

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number of users who are currently online; (B3) triangle – opens the Livestream; (B4) last entry of the Livestream showing community activity and/or events (in Fig. 1, a message about a new member joining the VielMehr Community is pictured); (B5) “What is this?” – a link to a short introduction to the sixgroups.com Livecommunity; (B6) link to login or join the community; (B7) Search field for Google search. A click on the triangle (B3) opens an overlay including the six elements (Fig. 2): (O1) register and login: users can create a personal profile page, and login. (O2) Message form: authenticated users as well as guests can post a chat message here (the administrator can restrict this feature to members only). (O3) Livestream: all items such as messages, events, and media resources are shown in chronological order and can be filtered by media type such as Twitter message (Tweet) or Flickr photo. At the same time, the filter settings show the number of items of each media type in the Livestream. The recent four items in the Livestream include a status message (1), a Twitter message (2), a photo from Flickr (3), and a friendship message (4). (O4) Information area: some essential aspects and benefits of the Livecommunity are explained here. (O5) Latest visitors: members who are online now or have visited the website in the past are presented. Finally, (O6) list of partnersites: a Livecommunity can be integrated into multiple websites which are listed as partnersites. This can be characterized as webring, a known concept of connecting multiple independent websites which share a common subject via hyperlinks.

Fig. 2. The sixgroups.com Livecommunity overlay superimposing the hosting website of the conference Mensch & Computer 2008

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2.2 Use Cases The sixgroups.com Livecommunity approach supports different use cases. The use cases are related to different requirements of the focused user groups. In this paper we will center on the use case Support for Conferences. Some simpler use cases are introduced briefly. Use Case 1: One Livecommunity per Website. A Livecommunity is set up on a single website. A webmaster establishes a Livecommunity in order to provide a social context and to enable interaction between visitors of this certain website. Use Case 2: One Livecommunity for Multiple Websites. A Livecommunity is distributed over multiple independent websites. This can be considered as an advancement of the concept of webrings. Different websites are not only interconnected via hyperlinks, but via one IOC that enables user interaction across the connected websites. 2.3 Use Case “Support for Conferences” – Real-Time and on Location Support One crucial requirement for a successful conference is to establish a vivid social interaction between organizers and attendees, and attendees among themselves. All stakeholders need to be supported from the preparation to the follow-up of the conference. However, particular attention must be paid to supporting stakeholders while they are attending the conference. Therefore, the real-time and on location support is the most critical element for an IOC set up for a conference. In the sixgroups.com Livecommunity approach, the so-called Livestream (Fig 2, O3) acts as the core feature that establishes a communication and awareness channel for all stakeholders. Attendees can use it for gathering and disseminating relevant information and networking before, during, and after the conference. Furthermore, the Livestream visualizes the syndication of media resources through the use of tags. Media resources include all kind of media such as photos, videos, slideshows, blog posts, and messages from remote content providers such as Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter. Thus, the Livestream makes an existing information space accessible in a new way. Syndicating relevant content from remote repositories in one media stream generates awareness of the general web activity about conference related subjects in almost real-time, as opposed to only the activity on the conference website itself. To support presence awareness [13, 14], a user list showing the online status for each user is presented (Fig 2, O5). Everyone who is online in the Livecommunity can start a conversation via chat messages (Fig 2, O2). Registered users are represented by nickname or first name, and a profile image, if available. Attendees preparing for the conference can use the Livecommunity to get in touch with other attendees or the organizers of the conference via chat and private messages. During the conference, attendees can furthermore arrange ad hoc meetings and presentations, or just arrange lunch meetings. Single text messages can be transformed into a threaded discussion by answering a message. This feature can be used as a directed feedback channel if speakers and audience agree to use a certain discussion as a session specific room. Speakers, organizers, and attendees, as well as other interested parties, can join such a contextual feedback channel and also subscribe to

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such channels using RSS feeds. This feedback aspect is a significant value for the organizers and speakers as well. Conference related resources like presentation slides, photos, or videos are found by agents that scan available external services like Slideshare, Flickr, YouTube for the matching tags. All resources are fed into the Livestream in almost real-time. Users' activities and resources as well as all discussions are represented in the chronologically ordered Livestream which can be filtered by media type. Questions and answers remain visible in the system and constitute an information repository.

3 IOC for Conferences, a Case Study In the following sections, the focused use case is illustrated by a case study covering the application and use of the sixgroups.com Livecommunity system at the HCI conference Mensch & Computer 2008 (M&C)2. The IOC was set up on the main conference website (http://vielmehr.org) and four subordinated sites, whereas each sub-site represents one of the conferences of the joint conference VielMehr3. Building such a webring helped to reach the critical mass of traffic in the Livestream and also helped to bring the attendees of the subconferences together to enhance thinking and acting outside the box. In order to promote and support the IOC throughout the conference, certain measures were taken. We introduced the IOC in a pre-conference email to all attendees and program committee members. The IOC was also presented in the opening keynote. In addition, there were data projectors that showed the Livestream in the foyer and in every session room. The first community activity occurred one week before the beginning of the conference. Attendees announced their arrival times and anticipations. They asked about accommodations or arranged ride-sharing. In this case, the Livecommunity also assisted to coordinate the conference. On the first day, the IOC acquired the attendees' attention considerably. People noticed that their contributions in other systems (mostly Twitter messages and photos from Flickr) were showing up in the Livestream when the correct tags/hashmarks (“vielmehr08”/“#vielmehr08”) were used. First conversations about sessions and possible meeting places occurred. A constant usage of the IOC became established during the following two days. After 16 days a total of 1009 “events” (unique entries) occurred in the Livestream. These events where triggered by the users (community activities) or by the agents (syndicated content). The community activity was supported by a total of 82 users, which is about 13 % of all conference attendees. Table 1 gives a summary of the community activities and the syndicated content in the VielMehr-Livecommunity. As Table 1 reveals, a significant amount of traffic in the Livestream was generated via Twitter (237 out of 495 text messages were Tweets). 2

Mensch & Computer (Human Being & Computer) is an annual HCI conference for the German speaking HCI community, jointly organized by the Gesellschaft für Informatik (German Informatics Association) and the German Chapter of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). 3 VielMehr (German for “much more”) was the Motto of the joint conference.

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Table 1. Summary of the activity in the VielMehr-Livecommunity recorded during the conference (expanded period from 09/01/2008 - 09/17/2008)

Gener al Sta tis tic s Conf. Attend ees 6 30 IOC memb ershi ps 58 24 Uniq ue gu ests To ta l e vents 10 09

Com munity Activ ity Conve rsation s 2 58 38 "Frie ndsh ips" Pri vate messag es 97

Syndic ated Conte nt Picture s Twee ts Blo g posts Vid eos

38 5 23 7 37 13

4 Lessons Learned The following lessons learned have been extracted by sixgroups.com and the organizers of the M&C conference. The analysis of specific measures, which have been mentioned in the last section, as well as interviews with organizers and attendees during the conference uncovered several shortcomings. 4.1 Providing More Visibility One issue was a lack of visibility of the IOC. The closed Livecommunity widget (Fig. 1) was apparently unable to obtain enough attention on the conference website. Therefore, a deeper integration of the Livecommunity into the hosting website in order to increase the visibility and the interconnection of the contents is one of the core objectives in the further development. This can be achieved by a more salient design of the bar (cf. section 4.4) or by making features like the message and comment box directly accessible from the hosting website via widget technology. By this means it would be possible to start a discussion about a certain presentation by clicking a button related to this presentation in the program overview page on the conference website. 4.2 Explicit Communication and Visibility of Benefits A second aspect was that the benefits of the IOC have not been made explicit to all attendees. Only about 13 % of all visitors of the conference were present Livecommunity. This aspect covers three dimensions which must be considered: (1) make the user interface communicate these benefits, (2) offer adequate help texts, and (3) offer suitable introductions into the benefit and use of an IOC at the conference (e.g. via email in advance, or as part of the opening keynote). The organizers can easily emphasize the value of an IOC as an information and feedback channel if they take care that the Livestream is already filled with great share of relevant and up-to-date content at an early stage of the IOC life cycle. 4.3 Better Referencing in Presentations Every speaker should be briefed on the availability of the IOC. The speakers then should encourage their audience to use it for feedback on and during their presentations. Predefined structures (e.g. one thread per session) can simplify this procedure. The deep integration concept can further help in referencing the presentations as discussed in

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Fig. 3. Redesign of the sixgroups.com Livecommunity bar. The interface was purified in compare to the original design shown in Fig. 1.

section 4.1. Announcing short URLs for every thread (session or presentation) is another means for better referencing in presentations. 4.4 Take Usability Issues Seriously A main challenge in usability as well as in user experience is the seamless integration of the IOC into the hosting website. Possible duplicate elements like login link, search field, or logo in the Livecommunity bar can interfere with the hosting site. Therefore the elements in the bar were reduced to those which were necessary in the Livecommunity context. To further enhance the usability several redesign efforts were undertaken. Most of them resulted in purifying the interface (Fig. 3). Compared to Fig. 1 the new interface solved the problem of the competing navigation elements such as login/logout link and search field. The new version of the closed bar shows information and navigation elements which are provided by Livecommunity only. The bar now shows the name of the Livecommunity in a prominent position. The “Open” button has become the focused element. The triangle of the old design is still there and acts as a memory trigger for users familiar with the old version. The button works as a toggle to open and close the overlay containing the Livestream.

5 Conclusions This last section is dedicated to the conclusions derived from using the sixgroups.com Livecommunity as an IOC for the M&C/VielMehr conferences. The organizers of the joint conference consider the integration of the IOC into the conference websites of all sub-conferences as successful. Attendees, as well as others interested – but unable to attend the conference – were connected to the event by recognizing and using the IOC on the conference website. Community activity in the IOC took place in different ways: (1) extending one's social network by establishing friendships (the social graph), (2) private peer-to-peer communication, and (3) using the Livestream as a general public communication and awareness channel. A final, more general, conclusion reflects a new type of community that we believe to have discovered during this and similar applications of the sixgroups.com Livecommunity. We will discuss this in the following section. 5.1 Communities Emerging around Shared Common Subjects Syndicated content (or rather the fact that content can be syndicated) suggests that the application of a sixgroups.com Livecommunity can create a community that spreads beyond the boundaries of a single system or service. One particular feature that encourages this process is the Livecommunity backchannel.

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Fig. 4. Shared common subject spreading beyond system boundaries

At the moment the Livecommunity supports a backchannel for Twitter messages: a reply to a Twitter message shown in the Livestream can (via the Twitter API) also show up as a Twitter reply in the Twitter system itself. Therefore, it can be recognized by the person who originally posted the message on Twitter. Thus the boundaries of separated online communities are becoming increasingly fuzzy. This causes a paradigm shift: The identification with a specific group of people using the same technical carrier system is no longer the defining feature of community membership. Now a community can emerge around a shared common subject beyond the borders of computer mediated services. Therefore, the boundaries of online communities have to be specified in a new way. They are not anymore constituted by a certain technical carrier system or service (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.), but by a shared common subject (e.g. “HCI”, “Usability Engineering”, etc.) (Fig. 4). 5.2 Outlook Further work will be applied to enable online communities that can grow beyond the boundaries of technical systems or services. There are two main challenges that have to be addressed. On the one hand, there are technical challenges: (1) Can a login and authentication process be established that can use one account/identity to authenticate users against multiple services? At the moment there are several promising developments such as OpenID4 and OAuth5 that can be used towards solving this issue. (2) Can user reactions (comments, ratings, etc.) on distributed content be transferred back to the content source (bidirectional transfer via APIs), so that the contributing user is able to recognize them if the technical environment is heterogeneous? These challenges can be summarized under the general issue of standardization. On the other hand, there are usability, user experience and privacy challenges: (1) How is membership in OCs defined if identity is shared e.g. by OpenID? (2) How do users cope with fuzzy boundaries? (3) How can one provide appropriate awareness: 4 5

OpenID is a single-sign-on-system, see http://openid.net OAuth is a protocol to allow secure API authorization, see http://oauth.net

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Where am I? Where are the other community members? Where is my content going to be published? (4) How can the users protect their (virtual) identity/identities? In summarizing our lessons learned and conclusions it becomes obvious that for the advancement of the IOC approach like described further research is necessary.

References 1. Preece, J., Maloney-Krichmar, D.: Online communities: Design, theory, and practice. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(4) (2005) 2. Reiss, S.: His Space. WIRED magazine (14/07, 2006), http://www.wired.com/wired/archiv e/14.07/murdoch.html 3. Kindsmüller, M.C., Melzer, A., Mentler, T.: Online Communities and Online Community Building. In: Khosrow-Pour, M. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, 2nd edn., pp. 2899–2905. Information Science Publishing, Hershey (2009) 4. Rheingold, H.: The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier (revised edition). MIT Press, Cambridge (2000) 5. Kollock, P., Smith, M.A.: Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities. In: Herring, S. (ed.) Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social, and cross-cultural perspectives, pp. 109–128 (1996) 6. Palmer, S.R., Felsing, J.M.: A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River (2002) 7. Holtzblatt, K.: Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for UserCentered Design. Morgan Kaufmann, London (2005) 8. Krohn, T., Kindsmüller, M.C., Herczeg, M.: User-Centered Design meets Feature-Driven Development. An Integrating Approach for Developing Social Software. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Centered Design 2009 (2009) (in print) 9. Marathe, J.: Creating Community (1999), http://jay.marathe.net/profile/articles/1999-11community.htm 10. Marsh, G.: The community of circumstance - a tale of three cities: community participation in St Kilda, Knox, and Lewisham. In: Chekki, D.A. (ed.) Research in community sociology. Varieties of community sociology, vol. 9, pp. 65–88. Jai Press, Greenwich (1999) 11. Clark, H.H., Brennan, S.E.: Grounding in communication. In: Resnick, L.B., Levine, J.M., Teasley, S.D. (eds.) Perspectives on socially shared cognition, pp. 127–149. American Psychological Association, Washington (1991) 12. Monk, A.: Common ground in electronically mediated communication: Clark’s theory of language use. In: Carroll, J.M. (ed.) Toward a multidisciplinary science of HCI, pp. 265– 290. MIT Press, Cambridge (2003) 13. Dourish, P., Bellotti, V.: Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In: Proceedings of the ACM CSCW 1992, pp. 107–114. ACM, New York (1992) 14. Carroll, J.M., Rosson, M.B., Convertino, G., Ganoe, C.H.: Awareness and teamwork in computer-supported collaborations. Interacting with Computers 18(1), 21–46 (2006)

Mobile Social Service Design for Large-Scale Exhibition Huanglingzi Liu, Ying Liu, Wei Wang, and Bin Wang Nokia Research Center, Beijing {linda.2.liu, ying.y.liu, wei.23.wang, bin.6.wang}@nokia.com

Abstract. In order to improve the exhibition service, technology enhanced visitor experience is gradually gaining more attention. In this paper, we follow user-centered design to explore the possibility of building a mobile social service for a large-scale exhibition. User data from interviews, questionnaires and field studies have been analyzed. Five factors influencing visitor’s social engagement are analyzed and implications for new mobile social service designs in large-scale exhibitions are discussed: personal requirement on the knowledge of exhibits, time cost of social interaction, exhibitor’s requirement on information distribution and collection, the maintenance of a temporary social network and coordination with the exhibition environment. Keywords: user-centered design, social awareness, mobile social service, exhibition service.

1 Background The exhibition industry in China has witnessed a rapid increase in the last few years. From 2006 to 2007, the annual growth rate of the Chinese exhibition industry is around 20%, and the figure in the European exhibition industry is 2%-3% [8]. In order to improve the effects of the exhibition, a technology enhanced visitor experience has started to gain more attention. For example, Expo 2010 Shanghai plans to provide an interactive Internet platform to support visitor’s remote experience. Social software has seen a tremendous growth in user penetration over the past few years and social software has already been integrated into mobile devices [5]. Many studies have been done on the utilization of mobile technologies to enhance social interaction among visitors in the museum context. O. Stock et al (2007) proposed to design technologies to construct a structured group and foster their social activities [12]. Groupware is then used. In ‘The Fire and The Mountain’ exhibition, hybrid interactive artifacts (i.e. installations that support visitors manipulating and interacting with physical and digital exhibits) are utilized to enhance social interaction [7]. Some researchers use social awareness to help visitors create social experiences. For example, in the Imprints system [1], visitors are supported to leave personalized marks at exhibits. They use an icon to represent themselves and attach that icon to museum exhibits so that each can seek out the traces of other visitors. In Artlinks system [4], visitors are allowed to see other visitors, their reactions to an exhibit, and connections among visitors through these reactions. It’s supposed that providing demographic and museum-going information allows people A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 72–81, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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to make connections based on similarity of circumstance. People might, for instance, feel closer to someone who is about the same age, or who have visited the museum for similar reasons [4]. Awareness of social cues in physical information space enables ‘social navigation.’ The benefits of social navigation not only give users a sense of social presence and of not being alone in the space, but also provide users a relative guide based on the knowledge accumulation [13]. Generally, there are two main types of social navigation [6]. Direct social navigation takes the form of recommendations and guides, enabling people to search for information/products based on their criteria, or based on content. Indirect social navigation instead focuses on aggregating information of an entire community of users. Compared with the museum context, the exhibition is more complex and it would be interesting to explore and see if mobile technologies can be applied to promote social interactions in such a context and how to make it. Moreover, mobile technologies provide a good platform for the further development of social interactions because of their high penetration in end users. There are different kinds of exhibitions. In this paper, we mainly discussed those that are open to the public, large in scale and organized systematically so that exhibitors can promote their products or services. Social contexts in exhibitions are more complex than those in the museum. Exhibitors would like to attract the attention of visitors by various means, which, on the other hand, might distract visitors in the surrounding people. Whether the social interactions among visitors in exhibitions are valuable for all visitors, exhibitors and organizers is still an open question. A mobile social interaction service may not be accepted and used by end users if it only facilitates social interactions without being aware of its user’s context. The user-centered design process emphasizes user and task analysis before the concept design. We followed the process in the study and tried to analyze and understand social activities in the exhibitions first, and then consider the possibility of social technology design for exhibitions.

2 User Study Procedure We firstly conducted individual interview with participants to collect narratives through open questions, and evaluations on social service requirements through interview-guided questionnaire. Then shadowing method was carried out in exhibition context. Participant’s real exhibition experiences were observed. For recruiting we asked help from a marketing research firm. 29 participants were recruited and interviewed in this study. Among the interviewees, 2 are exhibition staff working in a professional exhibition design company, 4 are exhibitors, 4 are exhibition organizers and 19 are visitors who have visited at least two open-to-public exhibitions in a recent half year and at least one exhibition exceeded 100,000 visitors. 3 categories of exhibition are covered in this user study: culture exhibition, like travel exhibition or tea expo; industrial exhibition, like Moto exhibition; and trade exhibition like import & export trade show. All the participants come from Beijing and Shanghai, two major exhibition cities in Mainland of China. Before interview procedure, 19 visitors filled in the pre-questionnaire so that the demographic characters and the general issues relative to exhibition visit could be known. Among the 19 visitors, 10 are male and 9 are female, aged between 17 and 60

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years (mean=36, median=33).Then the visitors were asked several open questions mainly designed to explore their real exhibition experiences. After the open interview, a 5 point questionnaire was filled in by all the interviewees to collect their both qualitative and quantitative remarks on the necessity of various social interaction features. 7 of 19 visitors agreed that researchers would observe them in one exhibition which they selected according to their own personal needs. Not only the 7 visitors and their company were observed, but also other social activities happened on site and were recorded by researchers. After the ethnographic participant observation, researchers asked several questions mainly intended to let the participant clarify their behavior and purposes. The data analysis mainly focuses on how people make sense of their social world in an exhibition environment.

3 Exhibition Visitor’s Social Experience For exhibition visitors, there are generally three roles to interact with: exhibitors, mates, and unfamiliar visitors. The following three kinds of connections were analyzed based on the qualitative and quantitative data. 3.1 Connection with Exhibitors Obviously, the connection between visitors and exhibitors is the most important link. People come to the exhibition mainly to know the exhibits or be known by some interested exhibitor. For exhibitors, knowing visitors and being known by visitors is their main target. When visitors are asked to describe their visiting experiences, most of them mentioned the activities related to exhibitors. For example, business card exchange, printed brochures distribution, gift distribution, discussion with the responsible interpreter on some exhibits or possible cooperation, and photos taken of the exhibits or even with exhibitors. In order to promote brands or advertise their exhibits, exhibitors manage to attract as much of the visitors’ attention as possible. They usually do a lot of preparation work before the exhibition, for example, designing an exhibit booth, displaying the product introduction poster, brochure and videos or interactive media, and so on. Except for this design work, exhibitors also hold some on-site activities like gift distribution, on-site lectures or performance shows, etc. to access a group of approaching visitors. Exhibitors tend to gather people to enhance the promotional effects, but they have problems categorizing people. When asked about on-site gift distribution issues, exhibitors during the interview explained their embarrassments: “We’d like to distribute good gifts to those potential customers…However we don’t know whether they are potential customers before we meet them…” “Of course gifts are small…Could you imagine a visitor carrying big pieces and going around the exhibition?” 3.2 Connection with Companions Petrelli and Not (2005) reports that only 5% of visitors come to a museum alone while 45% come in organized groups, 20% with friends and 30% with children [11]. Our questionnaire survey reached similar findings. 19 participants who have attended

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exhibitions at least twice in a recent half a year reported 44 exhibition visits all together, 79% visits have been with company. Based on the interview and observation result, we can generally categorize visitor groups into three main categories according to their on-site activities: • The “always together” group in which members would like to go everywhere together • The “linked group” in which members may have some parting during the visiting procedure, but try to have each other in the field of vision or be aware of each other’s location from time to time. • The “leave-together group” in which members visit the exhibition separately and make an appointment to leave together When they are asked why they go to an exhibition with someone else, 2 main reasons can be deducted: • better effects, such as better memory and a better impression can be achieved from an exhibition A visitor of an ordinary supplies exhibition said: “We discussed the various exhibits, compared their strong points and weak points during the visiting procedure…A wiser decision could be made based on a full discussion of different opinions.” • The exhibition itself could be a social platform for visitors and their companions A visitor of an auto exhibition mentioned: “It won’t be lonely if someone comes with you to attend an exhibition…It’s also a good opportunity to talk about common interests…” However, these connections to companions are not encouraged by the exhibition environment. Firstly, crowding is a major problem for most exhibitions in China. It’s not easy to maintain the “always together” group. Once the group members are separated by the flood of people, it will be difficult to ‘see’ where each other is. So “the linked group” may find that they have lost the link to their company. Even worse, making a phone call in the crowded and noisy environment to connect with friends is absolutely not an easy task. Secondly, as for ‘leave together group,’ although they are supposed to interact with the exhibits or exhibitors individually, they still would like to share the visiting experience with their mates from time to time, even to discovery more about exhibits together under some condition. For example, one visitor mentioned “when I saw something really outstanding, I would like to recommend this to my mates immediately, even to friends who didn’t come…If I know my mate is also interested in my recommendation, I may wait for him and exchange comments on site, then visit individually…. ” In the questionnaire survey session, we designed four questions related to the requirements of the connection with their friends. • Is it necessary to provide you a special service/device so that you can locate your friend(s) on the exhibition map? • Is it necessary to provide you a special service/device so that you can recommend an exhibit/exhibition stall to your friend(s) on site? • Is it necessary to provide you with a special service/device so that you can send appointment (including venue, time) to your friend(s) on site?

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recommend exhibits

make appointment

share comments

Fig. 1. Visitor remark on the necessity of ‘connection with mates’

• Is it necessary to provide you a special service/device so that you can exchange comments or impressions with your friend(s) on site? Participants described the necessity on five-point scale. Fig 1 showed the average requirement level of 19 visitors on the above 4 aspects. People tend to accept the designs to enhance the connections with their mates in an exhibition environment if the cost of interaction is not very high. As to ‘locate friend’,’ recommend friends exhibits’, ‘make appointment with friends in the exhibition’, all of the three average scores of necessity are higher than 3.5, participants can easily point out the use scenarios and described the benefits that the technology may bring them. For example, one male visitor described: “with the service (locate friend),I can find my mates in the crowded exhibition…I could be very relaxed during the whole exposition since I know where my friend is and we can meet somewhere if we want to visit together in the midway… If I find something interesting, I can recommend it to my friend or let him join in my visit…” At the same time, they also showed concerns about the usability and feasibility, especially on the ‘share comments with friends’ aspect. Most participants have difficulty in imagining the use scenario of ‘sharing comments with friends under the help of technologies in exhibition.’ Some visitors expressed: “Why not share comments face-to-face? We come to the exhibition together…We can find plenty of opportunities to discuss together.” Some of them even require the researchers to describe the solution in a much detailed way. “What kind of comments are you talking about? ... How can I take these comments down? ... It’s too boring if it needs a lot of input…” 3.3 Connection with Surrounding People According to social learning theory, people can learn by observing the behavior of others and the outcome of those behaviors [10]. In an exhibition environment, visitors are absolutely influenced by the unfamiliar people around them. They may imitate other’s behavior; modify their visiting plan based on the observation results. For example, visitors observed that some take photos of some exhibit, and they were motivated to take a photo of that exhibit also. If they saw that some exhibition booth was

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surrounded by people, even if they could not push in through the crowd, they were curious and eager to know what happened at the popular place. Although there are quite a lot of implicit interactions happening among unfamiliar visitors besides observing what others do, like overhearing what others say, feeling other people’s moods and the whole atmosphere of an exhibition booth, etc, visitors think that an exhibition visit is mainly a personal experience rather than a social activity. During the interview session, they expressed that exhibits are their visiting focuses and they have no interests in the unfamiliar people surrounding them. Actually, our observations proved that they told us one aspect of truth. Visitors seldom discussed with each other on a specific exhibit on site. And they usually have no idea of other people walking around them or looking at similar things around them. A male visitor said: “I buy the entrance ticket to see the exhibits, not the visitors like us…Why should I know what they are doing, what they are thinking? They have nothing to do with us…If I need more knowledge about the exhibits, I could ask the exhibitors there.” A female visitor told us: “…No, I would like to share my impressions with others…but not on the scene…After an exhibition, I may write something on my blog or post some remarks on an online forum…” In the questionnaire survey session, we designed five questions relative to the requirement of the connection with unfamiliar people. • Is it necessary to provide you a special service/device so that you can chat with other visitors on site? • Is it necessary to provide you a special service/device so that you can exchange exhibit’s introduction files with other visitors on site? • Is it necessary to provide you a special service/device so that you can exchange business cards or profile information like interests with other visitors on site? • Is it necessary to provide you a special service/device so that you can exchange criticisms or remarks relative to exhibits/exhibitors on site? • Is it necessary to provide you with a special service/device so that you can share your visiting-experiences, like visiting routes, with other visitors? Participants described the necessity in five-point scale. Fig 2 showed the average requirement level of 19 visitors on the above 5 aspects. 5 4.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 exchange profile

exchange files

exchange critisisms

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Fig. 2. Visitor remark on the necessity of ‘connection with other visitors’

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The average scores of the necessity on the five social features are between 2.5 and 3.5; which means social interaction among visitors in an exhibition situation is an uncertain demand. Some visitors may think it would be ok to have such kind of support but some think it is useless, or most people feel it’s difficult to make a judgment on the necessity since they can’t imagine the use scenario once the supporting technology is there. However, participants respond differently to the 5 questions. If the social interaction requirement is described in a more detailed way or the social activity is exhibit/exhibitor oriented, it seems people are more likely to accept it.

4 Concept Design Implications Exhibition visitors do have some motivation to use mobile social services, but at the same time, the barriers of adoptions are obvious also. Factors influencing visitors’ social engagement are analyzed and implications for new mobile social service designs in exhibitions are presented in this section. 4.1 Relate the Social Interaction with the Personal Requirement on the Knowledge of Exhibits For general visitors, knowing where, what, and how is their main exhibition visit target. Any technology designed for exhibition use, should be adapted to assist visitors in reaching this target. As we have discussed earlier, if users are more affirmative, they can get valuable information about the exhibits and they are more likely to accept the social feature of our designed technology. 4.2 Satisfy Exhibitor’s Requirement on Information Distribution and Collection As the designer and organizer of an exhibition, exhibitors would like to dominate and foster mutual communication with visiting customers so that they can spread and promote their products/techniques. In order to improve the communication effect, they need to classify visitors. Meanwhile, similar groups of visitors could be organized and various on-site social activities for different categories of visitors could be held to expand or strengthen exhibition influence. 4.3 Reduce Time Cost of Social Interaction to the Least ‘Time critical’ is important for exhibition visitors. If the information consumption based on social interaction is time-consuming, there is no real advantage of having access to surrounding people and get information through mobile technology, because they are already located in an information-rich environment. To reduce time cost of social interaction among visitors, context-aware UI is required. Explicit input from visitors may interrupt the relationship with the physical world. Context could reduce the input cost and make the communication much more efficient [9]. With the help of context aware computing, the ways that people engage in social interaction in exhibitions could adapt to several situations involving user’s locations, nearby exhibits, personal interests, and social activity history, etc.

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4.4 Extend the Temporary Social Network to the Real, Long-Term Based Social Network The social network we are going to build in the exhibition context is a kind of rapidly formed network based on a short-term goal since the service is exhibition scenario oriented. In order to attract more users participating in this temporary social network and the relationship with “real,” it is suggested that along-term based social network be built. Compared to being connected to people they do not know, visitors show more interest in being connected with their mates and remote friends. As we discussed above, before going to an exhibition, some visitors may communicate with people online to get some information, or contact people who possibly have similar interests and also go there. After the exhibition, visitors may talk about what’s interesting within their social network; publish comments, photos on Facebook, WebBlog or BBS; which means the sociality is mainly experienced by visitors before and after the exhibition. In the exhibition, visitors required more of the connection with their mates or remote friends than the unfamiliar people surrounding them. Incentive or reputation structures should be built toward the transformation from temporary social gathering to real, long-term based social networking. 4.5 Encourage Multi-channel Social Interaction According to our observations, visitors keep interacting with various physical tools like indoor signs, product brochures, printed posters, public displays, touch sensitive screen and so on. Among these physical tools, the printed brochure is the most important communication medium between visitors and exhibitor. Exhibitors may write down the supplementary information on the printed leaf according to a visitor’s requirement. Exhibitors and visitors may exchange information face-to-face based on the printed material. Visitors can take notes in the printed leaf and keep it as long as they like. These direct interactions that happen in an exhibition should not be interrupted by the technology supported social interactions and should not be an obstruction to social interaction, which could be a big challenge for designers. Use environmental design is required. It would be a way that the newly designed mobile social service could be coordinated with other exhibition facilities, which means the new design is a component of the whole exhibition service ecosystem rather than take the place of all existing facilities like a printed visiting guide, guiding signs, public digital display, products brochures on exhibition site, etc. The following concept description gives an example on how to make a mobile social service coordinate with the exhibition environment. Public displays in the exhibition show the popularity of each exhibition booth (number of tagged times) and the crowding status. John sometimes changes his visiting route according to the information (Fig 3).Sometimes the public display shows a game registration ad which encourages visitors to vote for something or compete with other participants using mobile handhelds. John wins a digital lunch coupon because he posts an advertising slogan for a car model and gets the most votes.

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Fig. 3. Public display as another platform for social interaction

5 Conclusion and Future Work People gathering to visit exhibitions are a kind of temporary social network. Whether it is possible to involve mobile social services in this context is the main research focus of this paper. In order to provide background material and find design opportunities, we collected data from interviews, questionnaires and field studies to understand visitor’s visiting experience and corresponding social features. Based on the user research results, we identified some design implications for social technology use in the exhibition environment and proposed a brief concept based on visiting route sharing. For exhibitors, they could utilize the service as a platform to collect visitors’ information. For visitors, they are allowed to move easily and be supported by a dynamic group of people. Anyway it’s a high risk job of designing the social technology for exhibition visitors since people have limited time during an exhibition visit and they don’t want to be interrupted by bad learnable or unusable services. Future work will be dedicated to the concept development. Several design and implementation challenges need to be overcome, especially sensor networking architecture in the exhibition hall and a context-aware UI for the client application.

References 1. Boehner, K., Thom-Santelli, J., Zoss, A., Gay, G., Hall, J.S., Barrett, T.: Imprints of Place: Creative Expressions of the Museum Experience. In: Proc. CHI 2005 Extended Abstracts, pp. 1220–1223 (2005) 2. Cheverst, K., Mitchell, K., Davies, N., Smith, G.: Exploiting Context to Support Social Awareness and Social Navigation. SIGGROUP Bulletin 21 (2000) 3. Ciolfi, L., Bannon, L.: Learning from Museum Visits: Shaping Design Sensitivities. In: Proc. HCII (2003) 4. Cosley, D., Lewenstein, J., Herman, A., Holloway, J., Baxter, J., Nomua, S., Boehner, K., Gay, G.: ArtLinks: Fostering Social Awareness and Reflection in Museums. In: Proceedings of CHI 2008 (2008)

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5. Counts, S., ter Hofte, H., Smith, I.: Mobile Social Software: Realizing Potential, Managing Risks. In: CHI 2006 workshop, April 22-27 (2006) 6. Dieberger, A.: Where did all the people go? A collaborative Web space with social navigation information. In: WWW9 (May 2000) 7. Garzotto, F., Rizzo, F.: Interaction Paradigms in Technology-Enhanced Social Spaces: a Case Study in Museums. In: Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing pleasurable products and interfaces (2007) 8. Jurong, G. (ed.): The Report on Development of China’s Convention & Exhibition Economy in 2006-2007. Social Science Literature Press (2007) 9. Hong, D., Chiu, D.K.W., Shen, V.Y.: Requirements elicitation for the design of contextaware applications in a ubiquitous environment. In: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Electronic commerce (2005) 10. Ormrod, J.E.: Human learning, 3rd edn. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River (1999) 11. Petrelli, D., Not, E.: User-centred Design of Flexible Hypermedia for a Mobile Guide: Reflections on the HyperAudio Experience. User modelling and User Adapted Interaction UMUAI special issue on User Modeling in Ubiquitous Computing 15, 303–338 (2005) 12. Stock, O., Zancanaro, M.: PEACH - Intelligent Interfaces for Museum Visits. In: Stock, O., Krüger, A., Kuflik, T., Zancanaro, M. (eds.) Cognitive Technologies, pp. 269–288. Springer, Heidelberg 13. Svensson, M., Hook, K., Coster, R.: Designing and Evaluating Kala: A social Navigation System for Food Recipes. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 12 (September 2005) 14. Thom-Santelli, J., Toma, C., Boehner, K., Gay, G.: Beyond Just the Facts: Museum Detective Guides. In: Re-Thinking Technology in Museums Workshop (2005)

Accessibility of Registration Mechanisms in Social Networking Sites Gabriele Meiselwitz and Jonathan Lazar Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Towson University, 8000 York Road, Towson, MD, 21252, USA {gmeiselwitz, jlazar}@towson.edu

Abstract. This paper discusses the use of social networking sites in higher education and the accessibility issues which arise for students using assistive technologies when they register for these systems. Many instructors incorporate social networking into their daily teaching by creating learning groups, enabling collaborative work, or just by simply synchronizing course items with students’ personal sites within these networks. This study examines the registration process for several social networking sites. Sites were evaluated according to their compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act; evaluation also included the use of CAPTCHAs and the use of email for user identification. The paper concludes with a summary of the current status of registration processes for social networking sites and recommendations on how to improve the situation considering their application in higher education. Keywords: social networking, accessibility, higher education.

1 Introduction Social networking sites are extremely popular with teens and college students, and many students participate in several social networks. The development of social networking sites connecting individuals across the globe is part of a larger technological movement, often referred to as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 offers new ways of information exchange, involving user participation including collaboration and information sharing; changing computer consumers to “prosumers”, who are not only consuming information, but are also producing and sharing information [1, 7, 18]. E-learning is largely based on the World Wide Web, and Web 2.0 is expected to have a strong impact on e-learning environments. Several researchers refer to elearning using Web 2.0 technologies as “e-learning 2.0” and predict that learning in these environments will become increasingly collaborative, learner-centered, and learner controlled [7, 6, 18]. Instructors already are using facebook groups, wikis, blogs, or podcasting, and current Learning Management Systems like Blackboard offer synchronization with student facebook accounts [1, 3]. New learning theories A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 82–90, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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like connectivism, distributed cognition, and communal constructivism are emerging and all address the shift to networked knowledge and community learning, applicable not only to student learning, but also to faculty department work and staff collaboration, making it crucial for educators to consider integrating social networking into their courses [14, 17, 19]. Students with disabilities can especially benefit from this development. Students have increased access (often 24/7) and have increased flexibility when studying and completing assignments. In addition, students can work collaboratively, join communities from the comfort of their own home, and become active contributors to the learning environment and the community [13]. Using Web 2.0 in the classroom will also better prepare students for the future work force, where many will encounter Web 2.0 applications that are being used in a variety of settings [1, 13, 18]. Because of the importance of web 2.0 to online education for people with disabilities, there have been recent legal efforts to ensure that podcasts downloaded from itunes remain accessible for people with disabilities [5]. Web 2.0 technologies like JavaScript, CSS, or Ajax increase interaction and although they provide a more dynamic and rich web, they also increase complexity and challenge assistive technology [7, 8, 10]. In addition, technologies that are used for site administrative purposes, like CAPTCHAs or account activation through user email, can further complicate access for users employing assistive technologies [23]. CAPTCHAs are used for distinguishing between humans and an automated registration process, usually powered by bots or viruses. In most cases, this is done showing distorted letters that the user then types in manually. CAPTCHAs are used by many sites to address undesirable and/or malicious Internet bot programs and present a significant challenge to users using assistive technology [15, 22]. Email can further complicate the account registration process for users. Many sites require users to use their email account as login names. Often verification is enforced during the login process which requires the user to connect to his/her email and then connect back to the registration process, incorporating yet another element for users to handle during the process. This project evaluates 22 social networking sites with possible application in higher education. Accessibility is checked by evaluating the user registration process of social networks. User registration is the first task that connects a user to the site. If a user experiences an accessibility problem on the initial site with a basic task, this usually prevents the user from accessing other pages of the site or can make it extremely difficult to navigate the site [13].

2 Research Method Two well-known sets of accessibility rules for web content are available, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Accessibility Initiative, and U.S. federal rules mandated in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act [20, 16]. Many educational institutions are required to comply with Section 508, since they receive U.S. government funding. Because Section 508 (section 1194.22) rules are the defacto law for web accessibility in the US, these rules will be the focus of this study. Several tools are available to evaluate web content accessibility according to Section 508 rules. For this project, the software tool RampPE

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(www.deque.com) version 6.0 was used. On the settings for RAMP, violations for paragraph l (scripting) report all noscript violations (i.e. both the absence of a noscript tag, and inappropriate noscript code). For specific assistive technologies, a separate functional test could clarify if the noscript tag is needed, as it theoretically is possible that a content-free strictly graphical script would not need an equivalent. However, since this project does not test for compliance with a specific assistive technology (only general accessibility guidelines), all noscript violations are included. For paragraph o (skip navigation links), the minimum number of links to turn on violation is set to 3 links. Manual evaluation of CAPTCHAs and email confirmation will also be performed. CAPTCHA and email are evaluated by exploring how they are being used in the registration process, and if any alternatives are offered to the user during the process. Twenty-two social networking sites are evaluated regarding the accessibility of their user registration process. Accessibility of the user registration process is checked by evaluating all steps necessary to register a user and arrive at the home page within the account. All steps are summarized under the registration process. Sites were selected using the Wikipedia/Alexa Top 500 social network compilation [21]. The following selection criteria have been applied: sites have to focus mainly on the U.S., must have applicability in higher education, and sites with a higher number of registered users were selected over sites with a lower number of registered users. Sites were divided into three categories: a) strictly social (e.g. MySpace or Facebook), b) social with a special focus (e.g. Youtube or Flickr), and c) social with a professional focus (e.g LinkedIn or Xing).

3 Results Results are displayed by a) the number of instances of all violations during the account creation/user registration process, b) the number of rules that have been violated during the account creation/user registration process, c) the use of CAPTCHAs and email during the registration process. Table 1 presents an overview of evaluated sites and category, including the site’s URL and the total violation instances per site. Table 1. Overview of Sites including URLs and total violation instances Site

URL

Total Violation Instances

1 Social MySpace Facebook Xanga Twitter Multiply Classmates MyYearbook Hi5 Graduates Student

www.myspace.com www.facebook.com www.xanga.com www.twitter.com www.multiply.com www.classmates.com www.myyearbook.com www.hi5.com www.graduates.com www.student.com

71 7 36 18 49 106 127 116 74 380

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Table 1. (continued)

2 Social with Special Focus Blogger Livejournal Flickr YouTube Buzznet Secondlife Wikipedia

www.blogger.com www.livejournal.com www.flickr.com www.youtube.com www.buzznet.com www.secondlife.com www.wikipedia.org

31 126 30 137 83 22 17

www.linkedin.com www.bizfriendz.com www.xing.com www.ecademy.com www.bizpreneur.com

16 112 29 97 114

3 Professional LinkedIn Bizfriendz Xing Ecademy Bizpreneur

Violation instances show the total number of violations that occurred. The number of rules violated shows the number of different rules that have been violated during the user registration process, not considering how many times a particular error has occurred. The number of rules violated is also important; generally it is more difficult for a developer to make updates if 10 different rules were violated, rather than if 10 instances of the same rule were violated [12]. In addition, the use of CAPTCHAs, alternatives offered to CAPTCHAs, and forced email logins during the user registration process are also discussed. 3.1 Total Violation Instances by Site Results in Figure 1 and Table 1 show the total number of violation instances by site. The largest number of instances is 380 instances of Section 508 violations, followed by seven sites with violation instances between 100 and 150. Seven sites have 30 violation instances or less, unfortunately no site is completely accessible. That is not surprising, since, as web sites move towards web 2.0, they often add updates which are not accessible, and often wind up decreasing web site accessibility over time [4, 9, 11]. It is especially disappointing that the site with the most violations is a site that specifically targets students (www.student.com) and promotes student social networking and

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student resources like college information, jobs and careers, test preparation, textbooks, and others. 3.2 Violation Instances by Section 508 Paragraph Figure 2 clearly points out the four main problem areas of web accessibility during the user registration process. Paragraph n (forms) undoubtedly is the most problematic area with 709 instances; the main issues reported are labels and grouping. The next largest area of concern is paragraph l (scripting) with 592 violations, with a substantial number of violations due to device dependent scripting and missing noscript declarations. It should be noted that violations in paragraph l also contain noscript violations. Paragraph a (alternate representations) follows with a total of 252 violations, then paragraph o (skip navigation links, minimum number of links set to 3) with 184 violations. All other violations are significantly lower, paragraph i (frames) shows 41 violations, paragraph j (flickering) shows 17 violations, paragraph p (timed responses) shows 3 violations. Violations in paragraph p were all due to the use of autorefresh or autoredirect. All other paragraphs (b,c,d,e,f,g,h,k,m) show no violations. 3.3 Number of Rules Violated by Site Figure 3 displays the number of rules violated for each site’s account user registration process; not considering how many times each rule was violated. Two sites have

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violated only one rule, however, most sites have violated between 4 and 6 rules, and one site shows a violation of 7 rules. 3.4 Accessibility Categories Figure 4 summarizes the accessibility status of the user registration process of all sites. Considering that it is more difficult to correct violations for several rules than correcting several instances of the same rule, a ranking system based represents the site’s accessibility status [12]. Accessibility status is defined by the following four categories: 0 rules violated 1-3 rules violated 4-6 rules violated 7+ rules violated

accessible marginally inaccessible moderately inaccessible substantially inaccessible

Using the above defined accessibility categories, 9 sites are marginally inaccessible, 12 are moderately inaccessible, and 1 site is substantially inaccessible. Unfortunately, no site was completely accessible using the accessibility status evaluation. 3.5 CAPTCHAs and Email Figure 5 describes the percentage of sites adding CAPTCHAs and email confirmation to the user registration process. In this study, over 77% of all sites used character based CAPTCHAs, and unfortunately, only 27% of the sites provided sound based CAPTCHAs. The sound based CAPTCHA was the only alternative provided, no other options were available on any of the evaluated sites. Half of the evaluated sites also use email confirmation, which forces users to open their email program and reply to an email during the user registration process. In addition to problems resulting from violations of Section 508 rules, this further increases the challenge for users depending on assistive technology by adding more elements to the already not fully accessible process.

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CAPTCHAs and Email

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4 Conclusion The evaluation points out two problem areas in web accessibility of the user registration process of social networking sites. Violation instances of paragraph l (scripting) and n (forms) together are responsible for over 72% of all violation instances. It is not surprising that violation instances concentrate in these two areas, considering that user registration consists mostly of forms for data input and often uses scripting to assist in data collection from forms as well as to aid users in entering data and filling out forms. These violations are often multiplied as sites go through several screens to collect user data. However, the high number of violation instances is disappointing; users with assistive technology may experience a significant challenge completing the user registration process. Considering that social networking sites are modular and complex sites and that the user registration process is only a very small part of the complete site, it is to be expected that additional problems arise for users using assistive technology once they use other features of the site. For instance, users without disabilities have had a very hard time removing their profiles from Facebook [2]. However, it should also be noted that some sites (e.g. facebook and linkedin) have very few violations during this process and that the few violations occur in only one rule. The accessibility status shows that 40% of all evaluated sites are marginally inaccessible (1-3 rules violated). Unfortunately, 59% of all sites are moderately inaccessible (4-6 rules violated). If any of these sites are planned to be integrated into the educational environment in higher education, it seems essential to reduce the number of Section 508 violations during the user registration process. Some instances of violations suggest that increased developer awareness could avoid some of the problems making content inaccessible. One page, for example, shows 35 instances of label violations, an issue that could easily be resolved by adding the label element. Use of CAPTCHAs and forced email logins further complicate the user registration process by introducing elements not under the control of the developer. Text-based CAPTCHAs especially provide a challenge for users with visual impairments; this situation could be improved by offering several alternative methods for users [15].

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The breakdown by category did not show any main difference, except for two categories, social networks with a professional focus had less violations in paragraphs l (scripting) and o (skip navigation). However, total violation instances, the number of rules violated, and other paragraphs aside from paragraphs l and o did not show a notable difference between the categories. The use of web development tools supporting assistive technology could be a first step to improve the situation. Development tools can assist the developer; they can alert the developer when content is not accessible and can provide guidance on making the content accessible. In addition, educators planning on using social networking sites in the classroom should carefully evaluate which sites provide the best support for assistive technology.

References 1. Alexander, B.: Web 2.0 – A new Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning. Educause (March/April 2006) 2. Aspan, M.: Quitting Facebook Gets Easier. New York Times (February 13, 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/technology/13face.html 3. Blackboard: Where Social Meets Learning (2008), http://www.blackboard.com/clientcollateral/ Bb_Sync_Brochure.pdf 4. Borodin, Y., Bigham, J.P., Raman, R., Ramakrishnan, I.V.: What’s new? Making web page updates accessible. In: Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 145–152 (2008) 5. CBS News: Apple eases itunes access for the blind (2008), http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/26/tech/ main4481951.shtml?source=related_story 6. Downes, S.: E-Learning 2.0. E-Learn Magazine. ACM, http://www.elearnmag.org/ subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1 7. Ferretti, S., Miri, S., Muratori, L., Roccetti, M., Salomoni, P.: E-Learning 2.0 you are WeLCoME? In: Proceedings of Conference on Web Accessibility, Beijing, April 21-22 (2008) 8. Gibson, B.: Enabling an Accessible Web 2.0. In: Proceedings of Conference on Web Accessibility, May 07-08 (2007) 9. Hackett, S., Parmanto, B., Zeng, X.: Accessibility of Internet websites through time. In: Proceedings of the 6th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 32–39 (2004) 10. Kelly, B., Nevile, L., Draffa, E.A., Fanou, S.: One World, One Web ...But Great Diversity. In: W4A 2008, Beijing, April 21-22 (2008) 11. Lazar, J., Greenidge, K.: A year older, but not necessarily wiser: Web accessibility trends over time. Universal Access in the Information Society Journal 4(4), 285–291 (2006) 12. Lazar, J., Beere, P., Grenidge, K., Nagappa, Y.: Web Accessibility in the Mid-Atlantic United States. Universal Access in the Information Society 2(4), 331–341 (2003) 13. Meiselwitz, G., Lazar, J., Clements, J., Jones, A.: Evaluating the Accessibility of Course Management Systems. In: Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction (HCII), Crete, Greece, pp. 1000–1004 (2005)

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14. Reinhold, S.: Wiki trails: Augmenting Wiki Structure for Collaborative, Interdisciplinary Learning. In: Proceedings of WikiSym 2006, pp. 47–58. ACM, New York (2006) 15. Sauer, G., Holman, J., Lazar, J., Hochheiser, H., Feng, J.: Accessible Privacy and Security: A Universally Usable Human-Interaction Proof. Paper accepted for special issue of Universal Access in the Information Society (2009) (in press) 16. Section 508, http://www.section508.gov 17. Schaffert, S.: Ike Wiki: A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management. In: 1st International Workshop on Semantic Technologies in Collaborative Applications (2006), http://ki.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/twiki/pub/Dev_d3web/ PapersRessourcen/schaffert06_ikewiki.pdf 18. Thompson, J.: Is Education 1.0 ready for Web 2.0 Students? Journal of Online Education 3(4) (2007), http://www.innovateonline.info/ index.php?view=article&id=393&action=article 19. Wang, C., Turner, D.: Extending the Wiki Paradigm for Use in the Classroom. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Information Technology. IEEE Press, New York (2004) 20. W3C: Policy Resources, http://www.w3.org/WAI/policy-res.html 21. Wikipedia: List of Social Networking Sites (2008), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_social_networking_websites 22. Yan, J., Ahmad, S.: Usability of CAPTCHAS or usability issues in CAPTCHA design. In: Proceedings of Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (2008) 23. Yardi, S., Feamster, N., Bruckman, A.: Photo-Based Authentication Using Social Networks. In: ACM Workshop on Online Social Networks, Seattle, August 18 (2008)

A Visualization Approach for Group Behaviors, Beliefs and Intentions to Support Critical Decisions Colleen L. Phillips, Norman D. Geddes, and Justin T. Simms Applied Systems Intelligence, Inc., 3650 Brookside Parkway, Alpharetta, GA 30041 {cphillips, ngeddes, jsimms}@asinc.com

Abstract. During persistent surveillance of a given population in a conflict situation, data management can quickly become unwieldy due to the inundation of low-level information from many, disparate sources. Computational population models can easily fuse and aggregate information input, but there is still the challenge of providing effective data visualization which minimizes information overload and introduces misinterpretation by simplified visualization based on aggregations. Visualizations of the actionable knowledge to the analyst based on the population effects as evidenced by their stratagemical behaviors are needed. Five model classes that study the beliefs of groups and how their beliefs change as a result of events were evaluated for their potential for visualization based on an analyst’s cognitive model of the conflict situation. A visualization approach was developed that can be used for all of the classes of models based on frames of reference for time and physical location within the environment. Keywords: data visualization, group modeling, stratagemical behaviors, beliefs.

1 Introduction Current low-intensity, theater military operations are multi-dimensional. In Iraq and Afghanistan, and before that, in Somalia and Bosnia, the desired geo-political outcome has required significantly more than applying military force to defeat an armed enemy. As a result, the importance of joint efforts in diplomacy, information distribution and economic interventions can be significant to the outcome of achieving military dominance [1]. During wartime, the US presence in a host nation (HN) can trigger conflicts beyond those of battle. Local conflicts can arise within the HN populace since our presence might be viewed as being part of a military conspiracy to disrupt their way of life. Over the past few years, the US military has set the stage for moving away from a reactive, divisive approach, to one of local populace engagement manifested through multiple DIMEFIL (Diplomatic, Informational, Military, national Economic, personal Financial, Intelligence guided, and Law enforced) interventions [2]. Estimating the potential effects of these interventions involves persistent surveillance of populations within the operational area and the social, economic, informational and ideological A.A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris (Eds.): Online Communities, LNCS 5621, pp. 91–100, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

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forces within those populations. Models of the population and its PMESII-PT (Political, Military, Economic, Social, Informational, and Infrastructure with Physical and Time) elements need to be predictive with respect to DIMEFIL interventions and how these actions in the current situation will result in changes to the beliefs, desires and intentions of the members of the groups involved [3]. The visualization of actionable knowledge about the population’s reactions to these interventions is necessary for the analyst to make a choice between the various DIMEFIL intervention options. During persistent surveillance of the population and its PMESII-PT, data management can quickly become unwieldy due to the inundation of low-level information from many, disparate sources [4]. Computational population models can easily handle this data for input by aggregating and fusing, but there is still the challenge of visualizing all of the data and incurring information overload or inducing misinterpretation by simplified visualization based on aggregations [5]. Representing the actionable knowledge to the analyst based on the population effects are needed at the strategic (long-term), operational (near-term), and tactical (current) levels. Modeling population response to interventions is an important research topic with broad application to politics, marketing, advertising and education. As a result, there is a large, multidisciplinary literature of both research and practice in measuring and modeling the beliefs, desires and intentions of populations. 1.1 Analyst’s Decision Cycle An understanding of the PMESII-PT environment, the populations involved, and DIMEFIL interventions to take can be modelled in the Analyst’s Decision Cycle for choosing interventions depicted in Figure 1 below [6]. Starting at the top of the diagram, monitoring the situational environment (the PMESII-PT and populations involved) is followed by assessing the situation, making plans to adjust the environment, directing the actions for these interventions, and continuing the cycle of persistent monitoring of the PMESII-PT and the populations. This workflow is continuously iterated as the analyst continues to monitor a populations response to PMESII-PT effects. There are three event horizons corresponding to how far ahead the planning occurs. The decision cycle iterates at the fastest rate in terms of traversing the stages during

Fig. 1. Every intervention decision made by the analyst uses a similar cycle to assist in understanding the environment and focusing the resources to support their decisions

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the tactical level planning/execution of interventions. The second planning horizon occurs near-term. These interventions may take months and the iteration rate through this horizon is slower than at the tactical level. The last event horizon is for strategic planning for the order of one to two years and the cycle iterates at the slowest rate. 1.2 Five Classes of Population Models A trade study of computable social models was performed and the dozens of models found were organized into five classes by the authors for this paper. The five model classes that study the beliefs of groups and how their beliefs change as a result of events were categorized into the following models with pros and cons: 1. System Dynamics Models [7]: coarse grain data, large time scales O(years), validity of model parameters estimation is difficult, heavy footprint to deploy, explicit causal mechanisms, inherent representation of time, 2. Social Network Models [8]: lack of causality mechanisms, does not aggregate to larger social units, limited predictive ability, rich and detailed representation of population entities, sensitive to differences in populations, 3. State Transition Models [9]: behaviors described statistically, lack of explicit representation and reasoning about population’s reactions, inherent representation of time, potential for prediction of long-term effects, 4. Group Ideology Models [10]: uses every day perceptions in terms of a large amount of unstructured data, has inherent mechanisms for representing causality, representation of differences in populations, needs continuous updating and maintenance, and 5. Group Dynamics Models [11]: richest representation of causal data with same challenges as the group ideology model, best for short term predictions, group intention understanding possible, and future states of a population can be predicted. The set of challenges facing all models will need to be resolved in order to realize their full potential. The first challenge is fuzzy matching of observations to behavioral patterns. To be of value to the analyst, the visualization tool needs to be able to match attributes of a behavioral observation to a behavioral pattern and display that pattern in a meaningful way to enable actionable intelligence. The next challenge is handling uncertainty via a reasoning mechanism. The basis of the models is the perception of truth instead of truth itself. A mechanism is needed for distinguishing strong beliefs from weaker ones. The last challenge for population models is the negotiation of objectives. When dealing with multiple populations, there will be population expectations of differing needs and objectives. A capability to recognize opportunities for collaboration and alliances is needed which incorporates voting mechanisms and simulated outcomes.

2 Information Requirements for Persistent Surveillance In order to understand the visualization design for supporting the analyst’s decisionmaking cycle for various populations and the possible corresponding interventions based on predicting population reactions, an analysis of the human information processing

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Fig. 2. The Human Information Processing Model as described by Wickens

requirements needs to be made. A simple model of how the human processes information and the model for the persistent surveillance of populations are described. 2.1 Human Information Processing Model The human brain performs complex mental operations on information perceived from the environment. The widely accepted model that allows us to conceptualize these complex operations as a sequence of information processing stages is in Figure 2 and adapted from Wicken’s model [12]. Sensory processing and storage is the first stage when information is coming from the environment. Of course, if we don’t attend to it, we will not know it is occurring. Once perceived, we can place it into working memory and with the use of long-term memory we can ultimately make decisions. This is a useful framework for interpreting human performance in complex tasks such as deciding which intervention to take based on expected population reactions. Of course these stages will need to be mapped to the analyst’s tasks described next.

Fig. 3. Population Behavior Assessment Model showing labeled points 1-4 where visualization is needed to display the information required by the analyst

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2.2 Behavior Assessment Model Various sources of information are required in order to select a set of interventions that will have the desired population outcome. Based on current military documentation and many interviews with military analysts, the relevant situational information (seen in Figure 3) is required at the four points described in the assessment loop. Since it is a constant loop for persistent surveillance, there is no starting or stopping point. For visualization, we need 1) an assessment of the changes in beliefs, 2) low level data fused and aggregated into high level data (actionable knowledge), 3) an assessment of the PMESII-PT environment, and 4) a simulation of the expected population reactions based on DIMEFIL interventions which have been proposed. The remainder of the loop involves observation and study (below the line of influence) called the area of surveillance.

3 Visualization Methodology for Population Models The last step to attaining visualization is the mapping of the human and task information requirements to the visualization design features. Then a relationship between the interface design features and the population model chosen can be defined. Based on the analyst’s task requirements, there are four components that need to be visualized as shown (and numbered) in Figure 3. These components should directly support the analyst by adhering to the human processing model. 3.1 Mapping Information Needs to the Visualization Design The visualization is triggered by changing population beliefs or behaviors. In order for the analyst to know this has occurred (because the visualization environment is one that persists), we need to get the analyst’s attention when the state of the world has changed. This corresponds to the sensory register in Figure 2. Alerts and notifications within the interface should be utilized to increase the chance that the changing information is sensed and perceived. In Figure 4, a highlighted alert (that also flashes red) has been generated for the analyst in the lower left screen. The corresponding box at a location on the map also flashes red. The analyst is then visually notified when an event has occurred which requires their attention. Next, the incoming low level data needs to be fused and aggregated. Since the human working memory (see Figure 2) has limited capacity, only high level data should be presented to the analyst on the top screen to prevent information overload and quickly convey the meaning of the alert to the analyst (See Figure 5a). In the top left side are the current PMESII-PT elements and the population beliefs that have reached a set threshold for an alert to be issued to the analyst. However, to understand why the alert was issued, the analyst may need to look at more details (or drill down into the statistics) in order to make knowledgeable assessments. In the human long-term memory (see Figure 2), deep knowledge is stored and portions are placed into working memory to combine, manipulate, and hypothesize about decision variables and outcomes. Memory problems associated with information retrieval and recovery can be avoided by using tabs to display the low level data trends and changes (see Figure 5b).

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Fig. 4. Screenshot of the visualization interface showing the alert notification to the analyst

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Fig. 5. (a) (Left) The visualization interface showing high level details presented to the analyst. (b) (Right) Visualization is shown for low level trends in information bars of green (clear), yellow (caution), and red (alert) types of notification.

Lastly, since the working memory of the analyst can only consider a number of hypotheses at one time, and long-term memory may have trouble retrieving them, a capability to simulate various courses of actions (COAs),