<p>Målet med detta examensarbete är att ta fram ett gränsnitt för navigering i stora datamängder samt undersöka eventuella styrkor och svagheter hos detta gränsnitt. Bakgrunden till projektet är att företaget Analog Software utvecklar ett system som automatiskt skall klassificera objekt i en datamängd och sedan presentera denna klassificerade datamängd.</p><p>Gränsnittet skall stödja en informationssökningsstrategi som benämns ”browsing”. En teknik för visualisering av information som varit framgångsrik är den så kallade ”Fisheye-tekniken” som baseras på en analogi med en vidvinkellins. Tekniken visar lokal information med hög detaljrikedom samtidigt som den visar global information med låg detaljrikedom.</p><p>Ett flertal gränssnitt har använt sig av denna teknik för visualisering av information. I detta arbete har ett textbaserat Fisheye-gränssnitt tagits fram och testat med avseende på två olika funktioner. De två funktionerna är ”anomalier” och ”stöd för bokmärken”.</p><p>Hypoteserna var:</p><p>1. Om anomalier fanns i datastrukturen så skulle en Fisheye-teknik förstärka dessa.</p><p>2. En bokmärkesfunktion skall ej behövas då Fisheye-tekniken erbjuder global kontext och byte av fokus går snabbt.</p><p>Två experiment utfördes med 28 försökspersoner. I experiment 1 använde hälften av försökspersonerna ett standargränssnitt och hälften ett Fisheye-gränssnitt. De fick navigera i en datamängd sorterad på två olika sätt och ange om det upplevde sorteringen som naturlig eller konstig.</p><p>I experimet 2 ingick samma försökspersoner som i experiment 1. I detta experiment fick hälften navigera med ett Fisheye-gränsnitt med bokmärkesfunktion och hälften med ett Fisheye-gränssnitt utan bokmärkesfunktion. De skulle navigera i en datamängd och svara på ett antal frågor.</p><p>Resultaten visade att Hypotes 1 kunde förkastas. Försökspersonerna som använde sig av Fisheye-gränsittet upplevde datamängden att vara mer naturlig än den grupp som använt sig av ett standardgränssnitt. För hypotes 2 kunde inga säkra slutsatser dra på grund av att experimentet inte lyckades mäta det som avsågs att mätas.</p>

With the wide-spread adoption of hypermedia systems and the World Wide Web (WWW) in particular, these systems have evolved from simple systems with only textual content to those that incorporate a large content base, which consists of a wide variety of document types. Also, with the increase in the number of users, there has grown a need for these systems to be accessible to a wider range of users. Consequently, the growth of the systems along with the number and variety of users require new presentation and navigation mechanisms for a wider audience. One of the new presentation methods is the audio-only presentation of hypertext content and this research proposes a novel solution to this problem for complex and dynamic systems. The hypothesis is that the proposed Audio Browser is an efficient tool for presenting hypertext in audio format, which will prove to be useful for several applications including browsers for visually-impaired and remote users. The Audio Browser provides audio-only browsing of contents in a Petri-based hypertext system called Context-Aware Trellis (caT). It uses a combination of synthesized speech and pre-recorded speech to allow its user to listen to contents of documents, follow links, and get information about the navigation process. It also has mechanisms for navigating within documents in order to allow users to view contents more quickly.

In light of the massive growth of creation and consumption of video, in this thesis I explore the concept of user-enhanced video browsing and evaluate the quantitative and qualitative effects of this approach. For this purpose, I create a unique prototype based on the VLC media player. The player interprets user-generated video tagging and annotations in my designed format, and allows the viewing of multiple event layers to create a personalized video playback. I perform evaluations in two user studies for this work. Among my observations I find benefits in navigation, personalization, consumption, and comprehension. I then look at the way viewers behave when contributing data of annotations and tagging. I find their preferred tasks, their perceived quality of other contributions, as well as their opinions on this system. I conclude with a discussion of the results and list possible use-cases for this concept.

Timber harvesting results in patches of regenerating forest that are substantially different from surrounding unharvested stands, and provides an opportunity to investigate the effect of habitat change on forest fauna. In this thesis I used timber harvesting as an experimental treatment to investigate the effect of a changed resource base on the home range and resource selection of the swamp wallaby, Wallabia bicolor. I recorded habitat attributes at unharvested control, recently harvested (<12 months old), 5 year old and 10 year old sites. Initially, harvesting removed almost all above-ground plant biomass, although the nitrogen and water content of grass on recently harvested sites was relatively high. Five years after harvesting, sites were dominated by densely regenerating 1-3 m tall Eucalyptus seedlings. Relative to unharvested sites, there was substantial lateral cover and values of a forage quality index were high. In contrast, 10 year old sites supported dense, closed stands of 3-6 m tall eucalypt regeneration, had a moderate amount of lateral cover and had low values of the forage quality index. (For complete abstract open document)

Compression and information retrieval are two areas of document management that exist separately due to the conflicting methods of achieving their goals. This research examines a mechanism which provides lossless compression and phrase-based browsing and searching of large document collections. The framework for the investigation is an existing off-line dictionary-based compression algorithm. (For complete abstract open document)

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Feb. 11, 2010). Thesis advisor: Dr. Robert L. Kallenbach. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2010. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-88). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (master's)--Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 34). Also issued electronically via World Wide Web in PDF format.

The goal of this research was to facilitate the scrutiny and utilization of Web search engine retrieval results. I used a graphical keyphrase browsing interface to visualize the conceptual information space of the results, presenting document characteristics that make document relevance determinations easier.

User tracking and profiling is a growing threat to online privacy. Whilst Internet users can choose to withhold their personal information, their Internet usage can still be traced back to a unique IP address. This study considers anonymity as a strong and useful form of privacy protection. More specifically, we examine how current anonymity solutions suffer from a number of deficiencies: they are not commonly used, are vulnerable to a host of attacks or are impractical or too cumbersome for daily use. Most anonymity solutions are centralised or partially centralised and require trust in the operators. It is additionally noted how current solutions fail to promote anonymity for common Web activities such as performing online search queries and general day-to-day Web browsing. A primary objective of this research is to develop an anonymising Web browsing protocol which aims to be (1) fully distributed, (2) offer adequate levels of anonymity and (3) enable users to browse the Internet anonymously without overly complex mixing techniques. Our research has led to an anonymising protocol called Polar. Polar is a peer-to-peer network which relays Web requests amongst peers before forwarding it to a Web server, thus protecting the requester's identity. This dissertation presents the Polar model. Design choices and enhancements to the model are discussed. The author's implementation of Polar is also presented demonstrating that an implementation of Polar is feasible. / Dissertation (MSc (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Computer Science / unrestricted