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The knowledge economy and the wide dissemination of information supported by infonnation and communication technology (lCT) have created opportunities for people to access infonnation at anytime and from anywhere. They can be endorsed when constructing knowledge in a practical and real-time fashion. The technological advances have also increased the workload on individual users who have to sift through large volume of data to find relevant infonnation. Although search engines can return suitable infonnation sources based on users' queries, this is only to a point. While we live in a 'one size fits all' world, we are not all the same. Therefore there is a need to support a broad and diverse community of users when they require infonnation for improving qualifications or enhancing productivity in the workplace. However, the design of personalised infonnation provision is challenging because there is a need for mechanisms to assist the capturing of users' infonnation requirements. Infonnation provision to support .users' knowledge construction depends largely on understanding users' infonnation requirements. The requirements represent ,. personalised preferences for what infonnation content is required and how the selected content should be presented and delivered to meet individuals' needs. Modelling the personalised capability in users' requirements is essential for effective infonnation provision. Such modelling is required to produce a holistic and integrated representation of infonnation content provision which ensure individual users' satisfaction. Subsequently it imposes challenges to the existing methods, because they normally provide the techniques which focus independently on specific modelling aspects, e.g., processes, functions, data, and infrastructure. The requirements specifications generated by these techniques are sometimes fragmented and difficult to be coherently integrated. The main contribution of this PhD research lies in the delivery of a method for the articulation of users' requirements (MATURE) to assist personalised infonnation prOVISIOn in infonnation systems. The method has adopted Constructivism and Semiotics paradigms which enabled the rigorous examination of users' behaviours during infonnation requests. MATURE allows users to interactively specify infonnation requirements which are systematically encapsulated in a user requirements space. The users requirements are analysed and transfonned into infonnation provision specifications through the process of articulates, maps and configures. The ' MATURE ontology model conceptualises semantic units which represent processes with embedded nonns. The ontology controls systemically the process analysis and the documentation of infonnation provision specifications in an integrated manner. A number of techniques, such as user profiling, learning'object schema, nonn constructor, cognitive style assessment, and documentations of specifications, have been developed to enable the technical execution of the ontolqgy model. The infonnation provision specifications contribute to the packaging: of infonnation content that meet users' needs. The method has been applied and validated using case studies in e-Learning settings.

This thesis presents research which examines how the display of location-based information on a mobile device affects navigation. The research was informed by current literature and user research conducted with Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Services. Experimental results are explained in terms of Passini’s (1980) model of wayfinding. Design guidelines and a human-factors framework for mobile location-based services are also presented. Cognitive task analysis and semi-structured interviews were used to conduct a user requirement study with firefighters from Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Services. Following this study, an experimental programme was developed to test how different methods of presenting information and displaying different types of information affected navigation. Measurements included time taken to navigate a route, workload, perceived usability and perceived navigational ability. A small scale observational study examined user behaviour while navigating with GPS enabled information. Finally, a focus group was used to evaluate the results from the experimental work with Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Services. Qualitative studies suggest that firefighters could use mobile, location based information to enhance navigation in large incidents. This information should be easy to understand and act on, incurring the minimum of cognitive demand. To achieve these requirements, the type of information presented on a paper map should not simply be transferred directly to a mobile device but must be adapted. The type of information displayed must also take into account the environment to maximise navigation efficiency and minimise cognitive demand. In the inside environment, simplified information showing only main features such as staircases and route changes should be displayed. In the outside environment paths and a selection of large, permanent features such as buildings support navigation most effectively. Evaluation with the fire service indicates that firefighters concur with the results of the experimental program. Major areas of further research include collaborative designs involving multiple mobile services and further experimental work examining how the presentation of specific features affects navigation in the outside environment.

Digital Libraries (DL) generally contain a collection of independently maintained data sets, in different formats, which may be queried by geographically dispersed users. The general problem of managing such large digital data archives is particularly challenging when the system must cope with data which is processed on demand. This dissertation proposes a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture for the utilisation of an active DL that provides computing services in addition to data-retrieval services, so that users can initiate computing jobs on remote supercomputers for processing, mining, and filtering of the data in the library. The system architecture is based on a collaborative set of agents, where each agent undertakes a pre-defined role, and is responsible for offering a particular type of service. The integration of services is based on a user defined query which can range in complexity from simple queries, to specialised algorithms which are transmitted to image processing archives as mobile agents. The proposed architecture enables new information sources and services to be integrated into the system dynamically, supports autonomous and dynamic on-demand data processing based on collaboration between agents, capable of handling a large number of concurrent users. Focus is based on the management of mobile agents which roam through the servers that constitute the DL to serve user queries. A new load balancing scheme is proposed for managing agent load among the available servers, based on the system state information and predictions about lifetime of agent tasks and server status. The system architecture is further extended by defining a gateway to provide interoperability with other heterogeneous agent-based systems. Interoperability in this sense enables agents from different types of platforms to communicate between themselves and use services provided by other systems. The novelty of the proposed gateway approach lies in the ability to adapt an existing legacy system for use with the agent-based approach (and one that adheres to FIPA standards). A prototype has been developed as a proof-of-concept to outline the principles and ideas involved, with reference to the Synthetic Aperture Radar Atlas (SARA) DL composed of multi-spectral remote-sensing imagery of the Earth. Although, the work presented in this dissertation has been evaluated in the context of SARA DL, the proposed techniques suggest useful guidelines that may be employed by other active archival systems.

An area of e-commerce that is very much an active area of research is that of using an individual's preferences to enhance search. The development of this research area, and the model used to produce all existing methods, has an implicit assumption that the vendor to whom the consumer is releasing their preference information is trustworthy. This assumption results in two major issues: the certainty of privacy loss, and the potential for exploitation. Motivated by a wide ranging investigation into the concept and history of privacy and the methods used to protect it, along with the conclusion drawn from this investigation that the previously used methods of privacy protection via legal means can no longer keep pace with technological evolution, this thesis presents an alternative approach to searching with a consumer's preferences that enables the main goal of preference searching whilst also minimising privacy loss and the potential for exploitation. A proof of concept implementation of this approach, called "Gradual Partial Release", is presented. Essentially, its aim is to minimise privacy loss and exploitation by splitting a consumer's preferences up into multiple subsets of these preferences partial release - to be released one at a time to the vendor - gradual release - until sufficient results are returned. Three different Gradual Partial Release algorithms, that split up preferences into subsets in different ways, are presented, along with measures enabling quantitative measurement of privacy loss and exploitation to allow evaluation of their effectiveness. An evaluation was performed of the effectiveness and efficiency of the Gradual Partial Release algorithms, comparing the effectiveness (in terms of minimising of privacy loss and exploitation) of each algorithm and to the current approach to preference searching. Experiments show that the proposed Gradual Partial Release approach enables the basic idea of preferences searching whilst simultaneously offering the possibility of reduced privacy loss and reduced exploitation.

The context of this thesis is the growth in size and significance of the St Andrews University Library, made possible by the University's entitlement, under the Copyright Acts between 1709 and 1836, to free copies of new publications. Chapter I shows how the University used its improving Library to present to clients and visitors an image of the University's social and intellectual ideology. Both medium and message in this case told of a migration into the printed book of the University's functions, intellectual, spiritual, and moral, a migration which was going forward likewise in the other Scottish universities and in Scottish culture at large. Chapters II and III chart that migration respectively in religious discourse and in moral education. This growing importance of the book prompted some Scottish professors to devise agencies other than consumer demand to control what was read in their universities and beyond, and indeed what was printed. Chapter IV reviews those devices, one of which was the subject Rhetoric, now being reformed to bring modern literature into its discipline. Chapter V argues that the new Rhetoric tended in fact to confirm the hegemony of print by turning literary study from a general literary apprenticeship into the specialist reading of canonical printed texts. That tendency was not without opposition. Chapter VI analyses the challenge from traditional oral culture as it was expressed in the marginalia added to the Library books at St Andrews University by its students, and argues that this dissident culture helped to form the voice of the poet Robert Fergusson while he was one of those students. Chapter VII goes on to show how Fergusson used that voice to warn his countrymen of the threat which print represented to their culture, and to show how it might be resisted in the interests of both literature and conviviality.

This dissertation presents an investigation into the manifestations of relevance observed in the context of related scientific information. The main motivation is to observe if researchers, in the context of knowledge discovery, use different criteria to judge the relevance of the information presented. Additionally, the effects that discipline and research experience background may have on these manifestations are investigated. The scenario selected to carry out the observation is that of Literature Based Discovery (LBD). LBD is a trial-error interactive search strategy, developed by Swanson (1986a), which supports the finding and retrieving of complementary bodies of literature – sets of articles that are bibliographically non-interactive yet logically connected. Research scientists from three different disciplines and research experience backgrounds are observed while they interact with an LBD system built for the purposes of this study. Their cognitive processes and interactions are recorded and analysed. To aid in the analysis of the data, the concept of relevance criteria profiles is developed. Relevance criteria profiles are a technique to count and group the expressions of relevance criteria as observed during the search sessions. These offer the possibility of aggregating the observations into group profiles as well as the ability to measure the (dis)similarities that may arise in between profiles. As relevance criteria profiles provide a global view of the criteria used to judge relevance, a complementary visualisation technique is also developed. This technique displays the relevance judgement processes, as well as the interactions, in a sequential fashion allowing the researcher to perform temporal analyses on the session data. The results show that researchers do use a variety of criteria when judging the relevance of information in the context of LBD. Moreover, individuals use these criteria in different frequencies; both discipline and research experience background seem to influence these frequencies however they may not be the only intervening factors. The observed interaction patterns suggest that researchers approach the problem in two stages: i) an initial more exploratory stage followed by ii) a more focused and engaged stage. The main contribution of this thesis is the observation of these manifestations of relevance together with the interaction patterns. The final recommendation offered is that the multi-dimensional nature of relevance in this context should be addressed when evaluating LBD systems. Additionally, it is acknowledged that certain interaction behaviours may also be used during the design and testing of such systems.

Modern research into the genetic basis of human health and disease is increasingly dominated by high-throughput experimentation and routine generation of large volumes of complex genotype to phenotype (G2P) information. Efforts to effectively manage, integrate, analyse and interpret this wealth of data face substantial challenges. This thesis discusses informatics approaches to addressing some of these challenges, primarily in the context of disease genetics. The genome-wide association study (GWAS) is widely used in the field, but translation of findings into scientific knowledge is hampered by heterogeneous and incomplete reporting, restrictions on sharing of primary data, publication bias and other factors. The central focus of the work was design and implementation of a core informatics infrastructure for centralised gathering and presentation of GWAS results. The resulting open-access HGVbaseG2P genetic association database and web-based tools for search, retrieval and graphical genome viewing increase overall usefulness of published GWAS findings. HGVbaseG2P conceptual modelling activities were also merged into a collaborative standardisation effort with international partners. A key outcome of this joint work is a minimal model for phenotype data which, together with ontologies and other standards, lays the foundation for a federated network of semantically and syntactically interoperable, distributed G2P databases. Attempts to gather complete aggregate representations of primary GWAS data into HGVbaseG2P were largely unsuccessful, chiefly due to concerns over re-identification of study participants. This led to a separate line of inquiry which explored - via in-depth field analysis, workshop organisation and other community outreach activities – potential applications of federated identity technologies for unambiguously identifying researchers online. Results suggest two broad use cases for user-centric researcher identities - i) practical, streamlined data access management and ii) tracking digital contributions for the purpose of attribution - which are critical to facilitating and incentivising sharing of GWAS (and other) research data.

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In the research model the information seeking process is seen as a dynamic development to reduce uncertainty or increase the value through four stages until the problem is solved. The results showed a surprising progress of the uncertainty stages. The hypothesis that the information seeking process reduces uncertainty through the four stages: 'problem recognition', 'problem definition', 'problem resolution' and 'solution statement' until the problem is solved can be rejected since there is no significant decrease in uncertainty level from stage 1 to 4. The hypothesis about the connection between the individual information seeker and the social and organizational environment was confirmed. A set of the most important core relevance criteria were applied. All kind o f information source types were included. The research developed a cognitive sociology model o f information seeking. The research used a mixed methodology with a combination o f qualitative and quantitative methods which complemented each other. Empirical data from 2002-06 in the social sciences and applied sciences domains were based on 14 case studies and 60 participants from a survey following the case study. The participants were dissertation students focusing on their dissertation from a UK research-led university in different departments and an IT university in Denmark.