3132637
Selecting books: a performance-based study
Our research compares the impact of paper vs. electronic presentation of text on the book selection process. Our focus is on the stage of book selection in which users study the content of a book to decide whether it is useful for their intended purpose. Effectiveness is operationalized as accurate determination of whether a non-fiction book contains enough discussion of a particular topic to be useful for a research paper. 24 undergraduates participated in a balanced study in which they were given a topic-book pair and asked to decide whether the book was useful for the topic. We explore the differences in performance, with specific reference to the role of the search function, table-of-contents and index
205485574
Assessing term effectiveness in the interactive information access process
This study addresses the question of whether the way in which sets of query terms are identified has an impact on the effectiveness of users' information seeking efforts. Query terms are text strings used as input to an information access system; they are products of a method or grammar that identifies a set of query terms. We conducted an experiment that compared the effectiveness of sets of query terms identified for a single book by three different methods. One had been previously prepared by a human indexer for a back-of-the-book index. The other two were identified by computer programs that used a combination of linguistic and statistical criteria to extract terms from full text. Effectiveness was measured by (1) whether selected query terms led participants to correct answers and (2) how long it took participants to obtain correct answers. Our results show that two sets of terms - the human terms and the set selected according to the linguistically more sophisticated criteria - were significantly more effective than the third set of terms. This single case demonstrates that query languages do have a measurable impact on the effectiveness of query term languages in the interactive information access process. The procedure described in this paper can be used to assess the effectiveness for information seekers of query terms identified by any query language.
22924389
User preference: A measure of query-term quality
16471179
Small World Architecture for Peer-to-Peer Networks
Small-world phenomenon has been observed in existing peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, such as Gnutella and Freenet. Due to the similarity of P2P networks to social networks, the previous small-world model proposed by Duncan Watts can be adopted in the design of P2P networks: each node is connected to some neighbouring nodes, and a group of nodes keep a small number of long links to randomly chosen distant nodes. Unfortunately, current unstructured search algorithms have difficulty distinguishing these random long-range shortcuts. This paper presents small world architecture for P2P networks (SWAN) with a semi-structured P2P search algorithm that is used to create and find long-range shortcuts toward remote peer groups. In SWAN, not every peer node needs to be connected to remote groups, but every peer node can easily find which peer nodes have external connections to a specific peer group
6983198
Investigation of Research towards Efficient Social Peer-to-Peer Networks
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks attract attentions worldwide with their great success in file sharing networks (e.g. Napster, Gnutella, BitTorrent, and Kazaa). In the last decade, numerous studies have been devoted to the problem of resource discovery in P2P networks. However, efficient resource discovery remains a key challenge for large-scale P2P networks. An investigation of existing research on resource discovery towards efficient social P2P networks will be given in this paper.
17142920
Service-Oriented Integration of Systems for Military Capability
Service oriented architecture (SOA) is becoming established in computing as a means to integrate processing and data across organisations. This paper proposes that system-level integration can benefit from service oriented architectural descriptions and loose coupling between the problem domain requirements and different system solutions. The problem domain is exemplified as military capability, from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), in particular, network enabled capability (NEC). Representations of military capability in the problem domain can be described in terms of processes. The processes are sequences of functions that can be described as services. Then different types of system solutions can implement the described services. Firstly, the paper presents an overview of conceptual SOA and in the context of military capability compares three levels of service integration: business services, systems services and computing services. Secondly, the paper presents a framework for evaluating the performance and effectiveness of service integration to compare different solutions in delivering military capability.
18595985
Fault-tolerant peer-to-peer search on small-world networks
This paper presents a small world architecture for P2P networks (SWAN) for content discovery in multi-group P2P systems. A semi-structured P2P algorithm of SWAN is utilized to create and find long-range shortcuts toward remote peer groups. In SWAN, not every peer node needs to be connected to remote groups, but every peer node can easily find which peer nodes have external connections to a specific peer group. From our analysis and simulation, SWAN has the advantages of both structured and unstructured P2P networks, and can achieve good performance in both stable and dynamic environments.
53235297
A monolithic CMOS L band DAB receiver