Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Library and Information Science Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Syracuse University

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Discipline
Keyword
Publication Year
File Type

Articles 91 - 120 of 120

Full-Text Articles in Library and Information Science

An Nlp Approach For Improving Access To Statistical Information For The Masses, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Jennifer H. Liddy Jan 2001

An Nlp Approach For Improving Access To Statistical Information For The Masses, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Jennifer H. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Naïve users need to access statistical information, but frequently do not have the sophisticated levels of understanding required in order to translate their information needs into the structure and vocabulary of sites which currently provide access to statistical information. However, these users can articulate quite straightforwardly in their own terms what they are looking for. One approach to satisfying the masses of citizens with needs for statistical information is to automatically map their natural language expressions of their information needs into the metadata structure and terminology that defines and describes the content of statistical tables. To accomplish this goal, we …

Go to article

Investigating The Interplay Between Structure And Information And Communications Technology In The Real Estate Industry, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Rolf Wigand Jan 2001

Investigating The Interplay Between Structure And Information And Communications Technology In The Real Estate Industry, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Rolf Wigand

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are reshaping many industries, often by reshaping how information is shared. Information intensive industries, by their nature, show the greatest impacts due to ICTs that enable information sharing and the bypassing of traditional information intermediaries. However, while the effects and uses of ICT are often associated with organizations (and industries), their use occurs at the individual level. In other words, it is changes to individual work related to the use of ICTs that reshape both organization and industry structures, and vice versa. To explore the relationships between individual uses of ICT and changes to organization …

Go to article

The Social Embeddedness Of Transactions: Evidence From The Residential Real Estate Industry, Steve Sawyer, Kevin Crowston, Rolf T. Wigand, Marcel Allbritton Jan 2001

The Social Embeddedness Of Transactions: Evidence From The Residential Real Estate Industry, Steve Sawyer, Kevin Crowston, Rolf T. Wigand, Marcel Allbritton

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Information and communications technologies (ICT) are becoming pervasive in the residential real estate industry and affecting the work lives of real estate agents. Drawing on data from a regional study of the residential real-estate industry in the United States, we focus on the disintermediation or, more accurately, the re-intermediation of real estate agents in the sales process. We examine how real estate agents are (1) taking advantage of new ICT in their work, and (2) protecting themselves from others wishing to displace their position in the real estate value chain. Our analysis draws on two contrasting theoretical approaches to better …

Go to article

Genre-Based Navigation On The Web, Barbara H. Kwasnik, Kevin Crowston, Mike Nilan, X. Liu, J. Cai Jan 2001

Genre-Based Navigation On The Web, Barbara H. Kwasnik, Kevin Crowston, Mike Nilan, X. Liu, J. Cai

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We report on our ongoing study of using the genre of Web pages to facilitate information exploration. By genre, we mean socially recognized regularities of form and purpose in documents (e.g., a letter, a memo, a research paper). Our study had three phases. First, through a user study, we identified genres which most/least frequently meet searchers' information needs. We found that certain genres are better suited for certain types of needs. We identified five (5) major groups of document genres that might be used in an interactive search tool that would allow genrebased navigation. We tried to balance the following …

Go to article

A Process Theory Of Competency Rallying In Engineering Projects, Bernhard R. Katzy, Kevin Crowston Jan 2001

A Process Theory Of Competency Rallying In Engineering Projects, Bernhard R. Katzy, Kevin Crowston

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Firms face an environment changing at an increasingly rapid pace. Market opportunities in particular can arise and disappear in a short time. Unfortunately, the speed with which organizations can adapt their strategies and competencies to meet these opportunities remains limited. We argue that firms can address these individual limitations by cooperating with others for access to market opportunities and needed competencies. In this paper, we present a process theory of how a network of firms can reliably engineering and deliver products in the face of rapid market changes. In this theory, the success of the network is predicated on 1) …

Go to article

E-Tables: Non-Specialist Use And Understanding Of Statistical Data, Gary Marchionini, Carol Hert, Ben Shneiderman, Liz Liddy Jan 2001

E-Tables: Non-Specialist Use And Understanding Of Statistical Data, Gary Marchionini, Carol Hert, Ben Shneiderman, Liz Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper provides a progress report on a project that aims to understand how people think about and understand statistical data presented in tables. The focus is on people who are not statistical specialists. To this end, studies of various user populations were conducted, underlying data enrichment and explanation was investigated, and interactive user interface prototypes were developed and tested.

Go to article

Information And Communication Technologies In The Real Estate Industry: Results Of A Pilot Survey, Rolf T. Wigand, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Marcel Allbritton Jan 2001

Information And Communication Technologies In The Real Estate Industry: Results Of A Pilot Survey, Rolf T. Wigand, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Marcel Allbritton

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We have been studying the growing use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the residential real estate industry and the effects of this use on how realtors work. Earlier stages of our project involved qualitative research to develop a better understanding of the industry, the work of realtors and their use of ICT. In this paper we report on the results of qualitative research and a pilot of a survey intended to gather large-scale data on realtors and ICT use.

Go to article

Identifying Document Genre To Improve Web Search Effectiveness. The Bulletin Of The American Society For Information Science And Technology, Barbara H. Kwasnik, K. Crowston, Mike Nilan, D. Roussinov Dec 2000

Identifying Document Genre To Improve Web Search Effectiveness. The Bulletin Of The American Society For Information Science And Technology, Barbara H. Kwasnik, K. Crowston, Mike Nilan, D. Roussinov

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Go to article

The Virtual Factory: Discontinuous Work In A Virtual Organization, Kevin Crowston Aug 2000

The Virtual Factory: Discontinuous Work In A Virtual Organization, Kevin Crowston

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The Virtual Factory is an organized network for regional cooperation in the manufacturing industry in the region around Lake Constance, on the border between Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The network was developed through a collaborative action research project started by the Institute for Technology Management, University of St. Gallen2. Project leadership (the core partners) came from entrepreneurs and senior managers from companies in the region and four researchers from the Institute.

Go to article

"Classification Structures In The Changing Environment Of Active Commercial Websites: The Case Of Ebay.Com". In Beeghtol, Clare, Howarth Lynne C., And Williamson, Nancy J. (Eds.) Dynamism And Stability In Knowledge Organization., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Xiaoyong Liu Jul 2000

"Classification Structures In The Changing Environment Of Active Commercial Websites: The Case Of Ebay.Com". In Beeghtol, Clare, Howarth Lynne C., And Williamson, Nancy J. (Eds.) Dynamism And Stability In Knowledge Organization., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Xiaoyong Liu

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper reports on a portion of a larger ongoing project. We address the issues of information organization and retrieval in large, active commercial websites. More specifically, we address the use of classification for providing access to the contents of such sites. We approach this analysis by describing the functionality and structure of the classification scheme of one such representative, large, active, commercial websites: eBay.com, a web-based auction site for millions of users and items. We compare eBay’s classification scheme with the Art & Architecture thesaurus, which is a tool for describing and providing access to material culture.

Go to article

Cross-Language Information Retrieval Using Dutch Query Translation, Anne R. Diekema, Wen-Yuan Hsiao Jan 2000

Cross-Language Information Retrieval Using Dutch Query Translation, Anne R. Diekema, Wen-Yuan Hsiao

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes an elementary bilingual information retrieval experiment. The experiment takes Dutch topics to retrieve relevant English documents using Microsoft SQL Server version 7.0. In order to cross the language barrier between query and document, the researchers use query translation by means of a machine-readable dictionary. The Dutch run was void of the typical natural language processing techniques such as parsing, stemming, or part of speech tagging. A monolingual run was carried out for comparison purposes. Due to limitations in time, retrieval system, translation method, and test collection, there is only a preliminary analysis of the results.

Go to article

Representation And Organization Of Information In The Web Space: From Marc To Xml, Jian Qin Jan 2000

Representation And Organization Of Information In The Web Space: From Marc To Xml, Jian Qin

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Representing and organizing information in libraries has a long tradition of using rules and standards. As the very first standard encoding format for bibliographic data in libraries, MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format is being joined by a large number of new formats since the late 1980s. The new formats, mostly SGML/HTML based, are actively taking a role in representing and organizing networked information resources. This article briefly describes the historical connection between MARC and the newer formats for representing information and the current development in XML applications that will benefit information/knowledge management in the new environment.

Go to article

Searching And Search Engines: When Is Current Research Going To Lead To Major Progress?, Elizabeth D. Liddy Jan 2000

Searching And Search Engines: When Is Current Research Going To Lead To Major Progress?, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

For many years, users of commercial search engines have been hearing how the latest in information and computer science research is going to improve the quality of the engines they rely on for fulfilling their daily information needs. However, despite what is heard, these promises have not been fulfilled. While the Internet has dramatically increased the amount of information to which users now have access, the key issue appears to be unresolved – the results for substantive queries are not improving. However, the past need not predict the future because sophisticated advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have, in fact, …

Go to article

Question Answering: Cnlp At The Trec-10 Question Answering Track, Jiangping Chen, Anne R. Diekema, Mary D. Taffet, Nancy Mccracken, Necati Ercan Ozgencil Jan 2000

Question Answering: Cnlp At The Trec-10 Question Answering Track, Jiangping Chen, Anne R. Diekema, Mary D. Taffet, Nancy Mccracken, Necati Ercan Ozgencil

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes the retrieval experiments for the main task and list task of the TREC-10 question answering track. The question answering system described automatically finds answers to questions in a large document collection. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on matching of named entities, linguistic patterns, and keywords. In answering a question, the system carries out a detailed query analysis that produces a logical query representation, an indication of the question focus, and answer clue words.

Go to article

Question Answering: Cnlp At The Trec-9 Question Answering Track, Anne R. Diekema, Xiaoyong Liu, Jiangping Chen, Hudong Wang, Nancy Mccracken Jan 2000

Question Answering: Cnlp At The Trec-9 Question Answering Track, Anne R. Diekema, Xiaoyong Liu, Jiangping Chen, Hudong Wang, Nancy Mccracken

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes a question answering system that automatically finds answers to questions in a large collection of documents. The prototype CNLP question answering system was developed for participation in the TREC-9 question answering track. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on keyword and named entity matching. Results indicate that the system ranks correct answers high (mostly rank 1), provided that an answer to the question was found. Performance figures and further analyses are included.

Go to article

Processes As Theory In Information Systems Research, Kevin Crowston Jan 2000

Processes As Theory In Information Systems Research, Kevin Crowston

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Many researchers have searched for evidence of organizational improvements from the huge sums invested in ICT. Unfortunately, evidence for such a pay back is spotty at best (e.g., Brynjolfsson, 1994; Meyer and Gupta, 1994; Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 1998). On the other hand, at the individual level, computing and communication technologies are increasingly merging into work in ways that make it impossible to separate the two (Gasser, 1986; Zuboff, 1988; Bridges, 1995). This problem—usually referred to as the productivity paradox—is an example of a more pervasive issue—linking phenomena and theories from different levels of analysis. Organizational processes provide a bridge between …

Go to article

The Effects Of Market-Enabling Internet Agents On Competition And Prices, Kevin Crowston, Ian Macinnes Jan 2000

The Effects Of Market-Enabling Internet Agents On Competition And Prices, Kevin Crowston, Ian Macinnes

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The Internet offers a vision of ubiquitous electronic commerce. A particularly useful feature is the ability to automate the search for price or other information across multiple vendors by using an "agent" to retrieve relevant information. The use of agents has the potential to dramatically reduce buyers ' search costs. We develop a framework that suggests that vendors who sell products with many differentiating factors beyond price will tend to accept agents, while vendors of commodities or branded goods will tend to resist them unless they have lower costs than their competitors. Empirically, we found that agents seem to be …

Go to article

How Do Information And Communication Technologies Reshape Work? Evidence Form The Residential Real Estate Industry, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Rolf Wigand, Marcel Allbritton Jan 2000

How Do Information And Communication Technologies Reshape Work? Evidence Form The Residential Real Estate Industry, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Rolf Wigand, Marcel Allbritton

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We are exploring how ICT use affects the work lives of real estate agents, the process of selling/buying houses and the overall structure of the residential real estate industry. Earlier stages of our work involved intensive field research on how real estate agents use ICT. In this paper, we report on the design and analysis of a pilot survey of 868 agents intended to investigate their ICT use more generally. Analysis of the 153 responses to this survey sheds light on how ICT use supports information control, enables process support, and helps agents to extend and maintain their social capital.

Go to article

The Role Of Classification In Knowledge Represantation And Discovery, Barbara H. Kwasnik Jan 2000

The Role Of Classification In Knowledge Represantation And Discovery, Barbara H. Kwasnik

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The link between classification and knowledge is explored. Classification schemes have properties that enable the representation of entities and relationships in structures that reflect knowledge of the domain being classified. The strengths and limitations of four classificatory approaches are described in terms of their ability to reflect, discover, and create new knowledge. These approaches are hierarchies, trees, paradigms, and faceted analysis. Examples are provided of the way in which knowledge and the classification process affect each other.

Go to article

The Effects Of Linking On Genres Of Web Documents, Kevin Crowston, Marie Williams Jan 1999

The Effects Of Linking On Genres Of Web Documents, Kevin Crowston, Marie Williams

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Documents on the Web can be composed of multiple Web pages, suggesting the need to consider how linking between pages affects a document's form. We illustrate this point by considering patterns of linking in a common genre of document, the Frequently Asked Questions file or FAQ. In a sample of 70 FAQs, we found four patterns of linking: no links, links within the page, links to pages on the same host and links to other hosts. We suggest that links that tie together document pieces simply recreate the already accepted FAQ genre, but links that provide navigation within the document …

Go to article

Building And Maintaining Internet Information Services, R. David Lankes Jan 1998

Building And Maintaining Internet Information Services, R. David Lankes

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This study addressed the problem of Internet information services having to meet the increasing information demands of users in the dynamic Internet environment. The purpose of this research was to use K-12 digital reference services as a starting point to better understand the process of building and maintaining Internet information services. This study had three specific objectives: (1) to build and apply a conceptual framework based on complexity research, literature and the researcher's experience; (2) to use this conceptual framework to empirically describe how organizations, specifically K-12 digital reference services, build and maintain services in the dynamic Internet environment; and …

Go to article

Reproduced And Emergent Genres Of Communication On The World-Wide Web, Kevin Crowston, Marie Williams Jan 1997

Reproduced And Emergent Genres Of Communication On The World-Wide Web, Kevin Crowston, Marie Williams

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The World-Wide Web is growing quickly and being applied to many new types of communications. As a basis for studying organizational communications, Yates and Orlikowski [1, 2] proposed using genres. They defined genres as, “typified communicative actions characterized by similar substance and form and taken in response to recurrent situations” [1, p. 299]. They further suggested that communications in a new media will show both reproduction or adaptation of existing communicative genres as well as the emergence of new genres. We studied this phenomena on the World-Wide Web by examining randomly selected Web pages (100 in one sample and 1000 …

Go to article

Dr-Link: A System Update For Trec-2, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Sung H. Myaeng Jan 1994

Dr-Link: A System Update For Trec-2, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Sung H. Myaeng

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The theoretical goal underlying the DR-LINK System is to represent and match documents and queries at the various linguistic levels at which human language conveys meaning. Accordingly, we have developed a modular system which processes and represents text at the lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels of language. In concert, these levels of processing permit DR-LINK to achieve a level of intelligent retrieval beyond more traditional approaches. In addition, the rich annotations to text produced by DR-LINK are replete with much of the semantics necessary for document extraction. The system was planned and developed in a modular fashion and functional …

Go to article

A Descriptive Study Of The Functional Components Of Browsing., Barbara H. Kwasnik Aug 1992

A Descriptive Study Of The Functional Components Of Browsing., Barbara H. Kwasnik

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The paper describes a descriptive study of the functional components of browsing, which is viewed as the strategic and adaptive technique that people use to search, scan, navigate through, skim, sample, and explore information systems. Data on browsing is collected from thirty participants -- ten each in three browsing formats: print, command-driven computer version, and hypertext window-environment version. Data collection is by means of several techniques: the collection of thinking-out-loud, task-concurrent protocols; open-question interviews during the task; observation; and video and sound recording. The aim of analysis is to describe functions of browsing such as: orientation, place-marking, transition, comparison, identification, …

Go to article

The Exploration By Means Of Repertory Grids Of Semantic Differences Among Names For Office Documents., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Corinne Jorgensen, Jan 1992

The Exploration By Means Of Repertory Grids Of Semantic Differences Among Names For Office Documents., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Corinne Jorgensen,

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We used repertory grids to investigate the differences in names assigned to a selected list of 11 frequently mentioned office documents. The assumption is that naming reflects a classificatory decision and is based on a complex set of perceived aspects (which we call constructs) of the documents being named. We describe repertory grids as used in this application and summarize the resulting analysis.

Go to article

The Importance Of Factors That Are Not Document Attributes In The Organization Of Personal Documents., Barbara H. Kwasnik Jan 1991

The Importance Of Factors That Are Not Document Attributes In The Organization Of Personal Documents., Barbara H. Kwasnik

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The authors describe the difficulties of translating classifications from a source language and culture to another language and culture. To demonstrate these problems, kinship terms and concepts from native speakers of fourteen languages were collected and analyzed to find differences between their terms and structures and those used in English. Using the representations of kinship terms in the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) and the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as examples, the authors identified the source of possible lack of mapping between the domain of kinship in the fourteen languages studied and the LCC and DDC. Finally, some preliminary suggestions …

Go to article

An Analysis By Means Of Naturalistic Approaches Of Two Complex Behaviors. In Gilbert, Nigel (Ed.) Proceedings Of The Workshop On Complex Systems, Ethnomethodology And Interaction Analysis., Barbara H. Kwasnik Jul 1990

An Analysis By Means Of Naturalistic Approaches Of Two Complex Behaviors. In Gilbert, Nigel (Ed.) Proceedings Of The Workshop On Complex Systems, Ethnomethodology And Interaction Analysis., Barbara H. Kwasnik

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes two studies I which naturalistic approaches were used to investigate complex human behaviors. The first study is a description of the way in which people organize their documents in their own offices; the second study aims for a functional description of the behavior known as “browsing”. Both studies use thinking-out-loud protocols, observation, and interviews in the setting in which behaviors take place. The rationale for the choice of techniques is presented along with a discussion of advantages and difficulties.

Go to article

Extraction Of Knowledge About The Cognitive Process Of Browsing From Discourse And Thinking-Aloud Protocols. Also Published As Part Of: Kwasnik, B. Et Al Automatic Extraction From Dictionary Text: Project Development., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Myaeng H. Sung Aug 1989

Extraction Of Knowledge About The Cognitive Process Of Browsing From Discourse And Thinking-Aloud Protocols. Also Published As Part Of: Kwasnik, B. Et Al Automatic Extraction From Dictionary Text: Project Development., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Myaeng H. Sung

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Go to article

How A Personal Document's Intended Use Or Purpose Affects Its Classification In An Office., Barbara H. Kwasnik Jun 1989

How A Personal Document's Intended Use Or Purpose Affects Its Classification In An Office., Barbara H. Kwasnik

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper reports on the findings of a larger case study that attempts to describe how people organize documents in their own offices. In that study, several dimensions along which people make classificatory decisions were identified. Of these, the use of to which a document is put emerged as a strong determiner of that document’s classification. The method of analysis is reviewed, and examples of the different kinds of uses are presented, demonstrating that it is possible to describe a wide variety of specific instances using a closed set of descriptors. The suggestion is made that, in designing systems for …

Go to article

Using Structural Represantation Of Anomalous States Of Knowledge For Choosing Document Retrieval Strartegies., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Belkin N. J. Sep 1986

Using Structural Represantation Of Anomalous States Of Knowledge For Choosing Document Retrieval Strartegies., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Belkin N. J.

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Go to article

First Prev