This research explores web information systems developers‘ choices and use of methodologies. The stated aim of the research is to seek to identify key features of the developers‘ requirements for methodologies and then from this, to design a framework for use in practice. The literature review reveals that a great many methodologies are available but recent research also suggests that these are poorly used in practice. This study explores whether or not this is so and if so, why. Using an interpretevist epistemological framework the principles of Grounded Theory Methodology are used to conduct a mixed methods investigation. Structuration Theory offers a theoretical framework for analysis and development of the theory. An initial web-based survey aims to capture a breadth of developers‘ views and experiences. This is then followed with semi-structured interviews which enables exploration of the area in depth. The findings suggest that web information system developers are not following a published methodology but prefer instead to develop their own ‗bespoke‘ approach to suit the project. The developers seem to be aware of, and are using, traditional information system tools and importing them as appropriate into the web development methodologies. They are however, less aware or concerned with published web methodologies apparently needing greater flexibility and choice for developing web information systems than the published methodologies offer. Thus, the proposed new framework (entitled WEBFRAME) aims to provide web developers with a set of key principles to facilitate development of web information system development methodologies. This proposed framework is evaluated and validated by an expert panel of web developers with findings from this evaluation and validation reported here.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate interactive multimedia design: from the analysis of problems with multimedia systems to the subsequent derivation of design features and their assessment. It concentrates on the application of interactive multimedia from a user-centred perspective to rational, choice-based decision making in electronic-shopping, and specifically as a solution to the difficulty consumers have in judging product quality. The popularity and widespread use of interactive technologies, especially the Internet, the complexities of multimedia design, and the importance of electronic-shopping make the need for this investigation timely. The research approach consisted of the following: the derivation of design features through analysis of designs, interviews with designers and review of relevant literature; application of design features through an understanding of problems with electronic-shopping and development of a prototype shopping environment; and assessment of the features through empirical work. The thesis produces three key findings. First, a set of six design features to support multimedia design: naturalness/realness, media allocation and combination, redundancy, significant contribution of the media, exploration, and quality of information representation. Second, a better understanding of multimedia design decision-making. And third, the application of interactive multimedia product experience to improve online consumer behaviour. The research makes contributions to the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Electronic Commerce, and offers practical recommendations to designers of interactive multimedia, especially when part of their design problem involves support for users’ interactions with representations of choice alternatives.

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The thesis is concerned with research in the field of human decision-making, concentrating on techniques of gaming for the pursuit of this research. Following an introduction to the work and a statement of the research programme as it was initially conceived, some current ideas in gaming are investigated. The Superior Commander system of game control is introduced. The content of research games is discussed, and the Organisational Control Game, a board war game designed for research, is described. It is shown that the Organisational Control Game and Superior Commander system successfully meet the requirements for a useful research game and gaming methodology. A detailed literature survey of the psychological secondary task technique for assessing mental processing load is presented. It is noted that the technique might be extended to the study of tasks which have a large problem-solving component. A secondary task experiment on such a task, a chess problem task, is described. It is demonstrated that the secondary task approach can provide techniques for the investigation of complex problem-solving and decision-making tasks. A series of plays of the Organisational Control Game, in which the players had had previous military experience, is described. These games are compared with an earlier series of games, in which the players were students. Certain differences in playing style are identified. The research programme is re-examined, and modifications to it are described. The need for a technique for elucidation and examination of an individual decision-maker's perceptions of his decision-making environment is identified. The technique of cognitive mapping is shown to be suitable for this purpose. A cognitive map analysis of a series of games in which the players were serving army officers is presented.

Enterprise 2.0 refers to the use of networked social software in organizational practice. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, and many other kinds of community-oriented computer applications, accessed primarily via the Web, are heavily promoted by software vendors and industry insiders, and are being implemented in organizations around the world. Enterprise 2.0 promoters make broad claims for benefits to be realized from uses of such tools—improvements in communication, collaboration, productivity, and worker satisfaction, for instance—but seldom offer evidence to support their claims. Such unsubstantiated claims suggest simplistic assumptions about the complex, contingent environments in which the tools are used. This thesis uses a mixed method approach to explore the influences of these tools on social and organizational behaviors and outcomes, and vice versa. The research question to be addressed is, “What shapes the uptake, uses, and effects of Enterprise 2.0 in everyday practice?” It applies social theoretics to explain how and why social media practices develop, primarily through the use of Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus. Planned research contributions are: empirical evidence of Enterprise 2.0 effects from everyday uses; the analysis and evaluation of Enterprise 2.0’s impacts on differing organizational structures; understanding of the Web’s contributions to organizational communication via Enterprise 2.0; and deeper understanding of the social processes at the interplay of individuals, organizations, and social media.

Emerging web services technology has introduced the concept of autonomic interoperability and portability between services. The number of online services has increased dramatically with many duplicating similar functionality and results. Composing online services to solve user needs is a growing area of research. This entails designing systems which can discover participating services and integrate these according to the end user requirements. This thesis proposes a Dynamic Web Services Composition (DWSC) process that is based upon consideration of previously successful attempts in this area, in particular utilizing AI-planning based solutions. It proposes a unique approach for service selection and dynamic web service composition by exploring the possibility of semantic web usability and its limitations. It also proposes a design architecture called Optimal Synthesis Plan Generation framework (OSPG), which supports the composition process through the evaluation of all available solutions (including all participating single and composite services). OSPG is designed to take into account user preferences, which supports optimality and robustness of the output plan. The implementation of OSPG will be con�gured and tested via division of search criteria in di�erent modes thereby locating the best plan for the user. The services composition and discovery-based model is evaluated via considering a range of criteria, such as scope, correctness, scalability and versatility metrics.

A rapidly emerging need within virtual environments is the ability to accommodate a large, distributed user-base. In particular, Internet-based distributed virtual environments represent a challenge in providing a heterogeneous environment accessible by many thousands of users. Interest Management represents the process of filtering network data based on relevance to users, in order to make the most efficient use possible of available network capacity. In this thesis, the potential for a visual-attention based refinement to interest management is explored, which utilises a spotlight-based model of human attention. By considering the relationship between attention and interest management, this thesis illustrates a tendency within existing systems to use a simplistic or object-based approach to measure relevance, typically based on proximity to the user or visibility. By considering the current state of the art alongside common theories of visual attention, it is hypothesised that a refinement aiming to accommodate a spotlight model may offer an approach capable of more efficient use of bandwidth when compared to existing techniques. In particular, it is suggested a spotlight model would be capable of accommodating key aspects of human visual attention in a processor-efficient and composable manner. Bandwidth conserved by the use of such an approach may be subsequently re-utilised to provide a higher degree of interactivity within a distributed virtual environment, or to support greater numbers of simultaneous users. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of a spotlight-based approach, a test environment is created which allows users to participate in a number of activities alongside a large volume of simulated clients. Throughout these activities, interest management is changed seamlessly between variations of a spotlight approach, extremes, and an approximation of the current state of the art. Results obtained from a total of 15 users indicate a preference for such an approach when compared to the current state of the art in 80% of subjects, and suggest the capacity to reduce available bandwidth by up to 60%, dependent on task, without perceivable impact.

The thesis is designed to improve our understanding of user participation in Web-based development practices in the commercial setting of the 3D software industry. It aims to investigate whether the creative capacities of users and their contributions to the online firm-hosted 3D platform are indicative of a novel configuration of production that influences the processes of product development across firm boundaries. The thesis mobilizes the user participation literature developing in media research as its main theoretical framework. It builds on insights derived from work on user participation in media sites as seen through a cultural lens, in particular, as developed in Henry Jenkins' notions of 'participatory' and 'convergence culture'. The user participation literature is supported by a combination of insights drawn from work on communities of practice and user-centred innovation so as to offer a more robust approach to examine and appreciate the firm-hosted 3D platform as a site of user participation. More specifically, the conceptual framework for the study provides a basis for an examination of the ways a software developer finn encourages user participation in a market and of how this enables and facilitâtes particular modes of user creativity. These are shown to shape and maintain a firm-hosted platform that aids product development efforts that are expected to benefit the developer fimi. An empirical study of the platform, Second Life, provides the basis for the analysis of finn-user interactions which are shown to underpin a distinctive finn leaming process in the context of product development that occurs across permeable fimi boundaries. The thesis yields insight into the way a developer firm invites its user base to partner with it in product development, indicating how aspects of user participation associated with non-market dynamics are embedded in commercial activity and professionalism. The pivotal role of users is revealed in the design, development and sustainability of a firm-hosted 3D product. The findings point to interesting relationships between the distinctive creative capacities of users and the range of capabilities afforded by the firm-provided design space. Variations in user participation and contributions to product development suggest that particular patterns of learning opportunities occur. The analysis yields several new concepts including a 'modification effect market' which are used to extend existing conceptualizations of user participation in digitai development practices in the commercial setting of the 3D software industry.

Previous research on multimedia information filtering has mainly concentrated on key frame identification and video skim generation for browsing purposes, however applications requiring the generation of summaries as the final product for user con- sumption are of equal scientific and commercial interest. Recent advances in computer vision have enabled the extraction of semantic events from an audio-visual signal, so it can be assumed for our purposes that such semantic labels are already available for use. We concentrate instead on developing methods to prioritise these semantic elements for inclusion in a summary which can be personalised to meet a particular user's needs. Our work differentiates itself from that in the literature as it is driven by the results of a knowledge elicitation study with expert summarisers. The experts in our study believe that summaries structured as a narrative are better able to convey the content of the original data to a user. Motivated by the information filtering problem, the primary contribution of this thesis is the design and implementation of a system to summarise sequences of events by automatic modelling of the causal relationships between them. We show, by com- parison against summaries generated by experts and with the introduction of a new coherence metric, that modelling the causal relationships between events increases the coherence and accuracy of summaries. We suggest that this claim is valid, not only in the domain of soccer highlights generation, in which we carry out the bulk of our experiments, but also in any other domain in which causal relationships can be iden- tified between events. This proposal is tested by applying our summarisation system to another, significantly different domain, that of business meeting summarisation, using the soccer training set and a manually generated ontology mapping. We introduce the concept of a context-group of causally related events as a first step towards modelling narrative episodes and present a comparison between a case based reasoning and a two-stage Markov model approach to summarisation. For both methods we show that by including entire context-groups in the summary, rather than single events in isolation, more accurate summaries can be generated. Our approach to personalisation biases a summary according to particular narrative plotlines using different subsets of the training data. Results show that the number of instances of certain event classes can be increased by biasing the training set appropriately. This method gives very similar results to a standard weighting method, while avoiding the need to tailor the weights to a particular application domain.