This study involved a qualitative investigation of consulting engineers' information needs and information-seeking behaviour within the context of their project-related work roles and tasks. The research design includes a study of various information behaviour models, a systematic review of the subject literature and the exploration of relevant qualitative research methods. Data was collected through time-line interviews. The findings show how consulting engineers' work roles and tasks determine their information needs during various engineering project stages. These factors also determine the use of various sources during information seeking. Consulting engineers use a variety of information sources but rely mainly on interpersonal communication to gather information. Digital cameras are used by consulting engineers to record progress in a project. They also use Internet technologies such as email and FTP sites to communicate project related information. Recommendations were put forward for the development of an Internet-based information service for consulting engineers. / Information science / M.Inf.

E-government is a means of improving provision of government information and services to citizens. The aim of this study was to investigate the current situation and factors influencing access of e-government information and e-government adoption in Tanzania. A triangulation approach for data gathering was adopted. Specifically, a semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 448 respondents. In addition, interviews involving five policy makers were conducted to complement the questionnaire survey. Factor analyses were performed and multiple linear regression analyses were carried out to assess the relationships between variables. The findings revealed that, the current state of e-government in the selected districts of Tanzania is characterized by web presence stage. Various enhancing factors and challenges for e-government were noted in this study. The enhancing factors include necessary knowledge, necessary resources, awareness, confidence to use the website, availability and reliability of internet connections, positive incentives that have resulted from using the internet to search for government information, and getting information on demand. Other enhancing factors are guidance for internet use, possession of ICTs, availability of up-to-date information in the website, education, income and social influence. There are some e-government adoption barriers that include worrying about security and privacy of information, lack of support from the government, unreliable power supply, inaccessibility of internet services due to geographical locations, and people not getting as much information about the services as possible. Other barriers are system quality, cultural barriers, age, and information content produced in English, which is a language that the majority do not understand. The study has implications for policy makers and to e-government project teams. Policy makers should consider e-government adoption barriers in order to formulate policies of eliminating them. Likewise, e-government project teams should consider these barriers in order overcome them before the implementation of e-government systems. / Information Science / D. Litt et. Phil. (Information Science)

Orientadores: Claudia Maria Bauzer Medeiros, André Santanchè / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-25T03:19:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Vilar_BrunoSiqueiraCamposMendonca_D.pdf: 3275725 bytes, checksum: 4ccdd82eebca5b8da9748c7c515ea4c1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: Sistemas de Gerenciamento de Workflows (WfMS -- em inglês) são usados para gerenciar a execução de processos, melhorando eficiência e eficácia de procedimentos em uso. As forças motrizes por trás da adoção e do desenvolvimento de um WfMS são aplicações científicas e de negócios. Esforços conjuntos de ambos resultaram em mecanismos consolidados, além de padrões e protocolos consensuais. Em particular, um WfMS científico (SWfMS -- \textit{Scientific WfMS}) auxilia cientistas a especificar e executar experimentos distribuídos. Ele fornece diferentes recursos que suportam atividades em um ambiente experimental, como prover flexibilidade para mudar o projeto de workflow, manter a proveniência e suportar reproducibilidade de experimentos. Por outro lado, apesar de poucas iniciativas de pesquisa, WfMSs não fornecem suporte apropriado à personalização dinâmica e baseada em contexto durante a execução; adaptações em tempo de execução normalmente requerem intervenção do usuário. Esta tese se concentra em superar essa deficiência, fornecendo a WfMSs um mecanismo de ciente do contexto para personalizar a execução de workflows. Como resultado, foi projetado e desenvolvido o DynFlow -- uma arquitetura de software que permite tal personalização aplicada a um domínio: planejamento de saúde. Este domínio foi escolhido por ser um ótimo exemplo de personalização sensível ao contexto. Procedimentos de saúde constantemente sofrem mudanças que podem ocorrer durante um tratamento, como a reação de um paciente a um medicamento. Para suprir a demanda, a pesquisa em planejamento de saúde desenvolveu técnicas semi-automáticas para suportar mudanças rápidas dos passos de fluxos de tratamento, de acordo com o estado e a evolução do paciente. Uma dessas técnicas é \textit{Computer-Interpretable Guidelines} (CIG), cujo membro mais proeminente é \textit{Task-Network Model} (TNM) -- uma abordagem baseada em regras capaz de construir um plano em tempo de execução. Nossa pesquisa nos levou a concluir que CIGs não suportam características necessárias por profissionais de saúde, como proveniência e extensibilidade, disponíveis em WfMSs. Em outras palavras, CIGs e WfMSs têm características complementares e são direcionadas à execução de atividades. Considerando os fatos citados, as principais contribuições desta tese são: (a) especificação e desenvolvimento do DynFlow, cujo modelo associa características de TNMs e WfMS; (b) caracterização das principais vantagens e desvantagens de modelos CIGs e WfMSs; (c) implementação de um protótipo, baseado em ontologias e aplicadas ao domínio da saúde e enfermagem / Abstract: Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) are used to manage the execution of processes, improving efficiency and efficacy of the procedure in use. The driving forces behind the adoption and development of WfMSs are business and scientific applications. Associated research efforts resulted in consolidated mechanisms, consensual protocols and standards. In particular, a scientific WfMS helps scientists to specify and run distributed experiments. It provides several features that support activities within an experimental environment, such as providing flexibility to change workflow design and keeping provenance (and thus reproducibility) of experiments. On the other hand, barring a few research initiatives, WfMSs do not provide appropriate support to dynamic, context-based customization during run-time; on-the-fly adaptations usually require user intervention. This thesis is concerned with mending this gap, providing WfMSs with a context-aware mechanism to dynamically customize workflow execution. As a result, we designed and developed DynFlow ¿ a software architecture that allows such a customization, applied to a specific domain: healthcare planning. This application domain was chosen because it is a very good example of context-sensitive customization. Indeed, healthcare procedures constantly undergo unexpected changes that may occur during a treatment, such as a patient¿s reaction to a medicine. To meet dynamic customization demands, healthcare planning research has developed semi-automated techniques to support fast changes of the careflow steps according to a patient¿s state and evolution. One such technique is Computer-Interpretable Guidelines (CIG), whose most prominent member is the Task-Network Model (TNM) -- a rule based approach able to build on the fly a plan according to the context. Our research led us to conclude that CIGs do not support features required by health professionals, such as distributed execution, provenance and extensibility, which are available from WfMSs. In other words, CIGs and WfMSs have complementary characteristics, and both are directed towards execution of activities. Given the above facts, the main contributions of the thesis are the following: (a) the design and development of DynFlow, whose underlying model blends TNM characteristics with WfMS; (b) the characterization of the main advantages and disadvantages of CIG models and workflow models; and (c) the implementation of a prototype, based on ontologies, applied to nursing care. Ontologies are used as a solution to enable interoperability across distinct SWfMS internal representations, as well as to support distinct healthcare vocabularies and procedures / Doutorado / Ciência da Computação / Doutor em Ciência da Computação

(anglicky) This thesis entitled Information support in a financial institution discusses how information services and resources are currently used internally in an institution focusing on the Czech banking environment. The reader is thus provided an insight directly into the organization and the position it takes towards working with information aiming at fulfilment of its employees' information needs. The thesis also reflects description of the most important information sources. Information needs of employees were analyzed and identified based on their frequency of occurrence and distribution across the bank. The following part of the work covers detailed identification of information services. The reader is hereby given the opportunity to find out where, by whom and to what extent the services are used. The conclusion deals primarily with the information models of the flow of information in the organization and the analysis of various entities affecting the relevant processes.

This study investigates, within the current health care situation, the interrelationship of the user, resources and tool in the design of a prototype WELLNESS database-driven web site. A shift has taken place in health care, in which the base of conventional medicine has broadened to integrate other systems, practices and worldviews. These include complementary and alternative medicine, health promotion, disease prevention and wellness. Emphasis is placed on the need to take personal responsibility for one's own health and wellness. The global burden of chronic disease, reaching epidemic proportions, is increasingly linked to risk factors resulting from personal lifestyle choices. The growing evidence of the user's need to make personal, informed, lifestyle choices and their reliance on the Web for health information, required investigation. WELLNESS, a specific orientation to health and wellness, formed the framework within which the user and resources were defined and the tool designed. The user was profiled as the WELLNESS health information seeker, hereby contributing significantly to an understanding of the user in this new context. The user profile informed the establishment of resource selection criteria and tool design. The identification of WELLNESS content selection criteria, within a five-dimensional model, was required to ensure quality, relevant and credible resources. The tool is comprised of the WELLNESS thesaurus and WELLNESS database-driven web site. The WELLNESS thesaurus was constructed based on a combination of relevant thesauri. It will be used as an indexing tool. An investigation of existing health information web sites highlighted the importance of designing a specific WELLNESS database-driven web site. A database host was identified against which the original study's conceptual schema was assessed. A low-fidelity prototype web site was designed as the interface between the WELLNESS health information seeker and the database of WELLNESS health information resources. This study has epidemiological, philosophical, epistemological, sociological and psychological relevance. The provision of access to WELLNESS health information resources, made available in the WELLNESS database-driven web site, for personal, informed lifestyle choice by the WELLNESS health information seeker could potentially contribute to the reduction of the global burden of chronic disease. / Information Science / D.Litt. et Phil. (Information Science)

This study investigates, within the current health care situation, the interrelationship of the user, resources and tool in the design of a prototype WELLNESS database-driven web site. A shift has taken place in health care, in which the base of conventional medicine has broadened to integrate other systems, practices and worldviews. These include complementary and alternative medicine, health promotion, disease prevention and wellness. Emphasis is placed on the need to take personal responsibility for one's own health and wellness. The global burden of chronic disease, reaching epidemic proportions, is increasingly linked to risk factors resulting from personal lifestyle choices. The growing evidence of the user's need to make personal, informed, lifestyle choices and their reliance on the Web for health information, required investigation. WELLNESS, a specific orientation to health and wellness, formed the framework within which the user and resources were defined and the tool designed. The user was profiled as the WELLNESS health information seeker, hereby contributing significantly to an understanding of the user in this new context. The user profile informed the establishment of resource selection criteria and tool design. The identification of WELLNESS content selection criteria, within a five-dimensional model, was required to ensure quality, relevant and credible resources. The tool is comprised of the WELLNESS thesaurus and WELLNESS database-driven web site. The WELLNESS thesaurus was constructed based on a combination of relevant thesauri. It will be used as an indexing tool. An investigation of existing health information web sites highlighted the importance of designing a specific WELLNESS database-driven web site. A database host was identified against which the original study's conceptual schema was assessed. A low-fidelity prototype web site was designed as the interface between the WELLNESS health information seeker and the database of WELLNESS health information resources. This study has epidemiological, philosophical, epistemological, sociological and psychological relevance. The provision of access to WELLNESS health information resources, made available in the WELLNESS database-driven web site, for personal, informed lifestyle choice by the WELLNESS health information seeker could potentially contribute to the reduction of the global burden of chronic disease. / Information Science / D.Litt. et Phil. (Information Science)

During the 21st century, electronic resources have become an important component in every sector of society and the academic sector is no exception. Academic libraries worldwide have adopted the technologies involved in electronic resources, with some replacing their traditional collections with e-resources, which are more accessible by users. This study was conducted at the University of South Africa (Unisa) and was aimed at investigating the levels of awareness and usage of e-resources by third-year students in the School of Arts. The study used the descriptive survey study design, which is quantitative in approach. The target population comprised of 5 377 third-year students enrolled in the seven departments in the School of Arts and a proportional sample of 360 students was drawn from the population by using stratified random sampling. Library staff was also included in the study, in order to determine students’ usage patterns of e-resources and to establish initiatives available at the Unisa Library to increase awareness and use of e-resources. Online questionnaires distributed via Survey Monkey were used as the data collection instrument. The study established that the Unisa Library subscribes to a wide range of e-resources and has a number of initiatives in place to encourage the awareness and usage of these resources. However, 50, 3% of the student respondents were unaware of the availability of Unisa e-resources. The study also established that the majority of students use e-resources for study and research and that, although they have basic information and communication technologies (ICTs) skills, the majority of students lack advanced information search and retrieval skills, which are required to utilise e-resources properly. The four main barriers that prevent students from accessing and using e-resources were the cost of access to the internet, unavailability of relevant literature for studies, lack of time to do online searches and preference for information freely available on the internet. To encourage increased awareness and use of e-resources, the study recommend the development of an e-resources marketing strategy, the introduction of an information literacy module for all first-year students, the provision of infrastructure and technologies for access, development of specialised library assistance services, balancing of the electronic library collections across different subjects, tutors including more e-resources references in study guides and tutorial letters and hiring of more library staff. The study concludes that the Unisa Library has a wide variety of electronic library resources and services needed in academic institutions, but awareness and usage of the resources is quite low, due to several factors highlighted in the study. Therefore, the Library should step forward and ensure that the resources are fully utilised by following the recommendations suggested in the study. / Information Science / M. Inf.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The amount of information produced in the form of electronic free text in healthcare is increasing to levels incapable of being processed by humans for advancement of his/her professional practice. Information extraction (IE) is a sub-field of natural language processing with the goal of data reduction of unstructured free text. Pertinent to IE is an annotated corpus that frames how IE methods should create a logical expression necessary for processing meaning of text. Most annotation approaches seek to maximize meaning and knowledge by chunking sentences into phrases and mapping these phrases to a knowledge source to create a logical expression. However, these studies consistently have problems addressing semantics and none have addressed the issue of semantic similarity (or synonymy) to achieve data reduction. To achieve data reduction, a successful methodology for data reduction is dependent on a framework that can represent currently popular phrasal methods of IE but also fully represent the sentence. This study explores and reports on the benefits, problems, and requirements to using the predicate-argument statement (PAS) as the framework. A convenient sample from a prior study with ten synsets of 100 unique sentences from radiology reports deemed by domain experts to mean the same thing will be the text from which PAS structures are formed.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Text mining is a process of extraction of knowledge from unstructured text documents. We have huge volumes of text documents in digital form. It is impossible to manually extract knowledge from these vast texts. Hence, text mining is used to find useful information from text through the identification and exploration of interesting patterns. The objective of this thesis in text mining area is to find compact but high quality frequent patterns from text documents related to neuroscience field. We try to prove that interactive sampling algorithm is efficient in terms of time when compared with exhaustive methods like FP Growth using RapidMiner tool. Instead of mining all frequent patterns, all of which may not be interesting to user, interactive method to mine only desired and interesting patterns is far better approach in terms of utilization of resources. This is especially observed with large number of keywords. In interactive patterns mining, a user gives feedback on whether a pattern is interesting or not. Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling method, frequent patterns are generated in an interactive way. Thesis discusses extraction of patterns between the keywords related to some of the common disorders in neuroscience in an interactive way. PubMed database and keywords related to schizophrenia and alcoholism are used as inputs. This thesis reveals many associations between the different terms, which are otherwise difficult to understand by reading articles or journals manually. Graphviz tool is used to visualize associations.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the training needs of law academics by examining their ability to use legal electronic information resources at Unisa effectively. Using the survey method, a questionnaire was used to collect data. The data was descriptively analysed. The study revealed that law academics are aware of the wide variety of electronic resources relevant to their work. Further, these academics possess the necessary basic skills to use these resources. However, the majority of academics do not have high levels of confidence in using specific electronic legal resources. This study concluded that, despite the library's provision of user training sessions for academics, training does not focus on legal electronic resources. The variety of responses revealed the diverse training needs of law academics. The study recommended that training needs analysis be conducted by subject librarians who would conduct specialised legal electronic training. / Information Sscience / M.Inf.