Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-92). / This study aims at investigating a framework that utilises the latest advances in KMS technology. This research outlines the framework and describes a system developed around this. The framework is based on fundamental knowledge management concepts, Resource Description Framework (RDF) and basic modeling concepts and tools. It also incorporates notions of knowledge quality measure and a simple inference mechanism in order to probe, learn and adapt the KMS with the changing needs of its users.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-80). / Peer to peer computing (P2P) is an architecture that enables applications to access shared resources, with peers having similar capabilities and responsibilities. The ubiquity of P2P computing and its increasing adoption for a decentralized data sharing mechanism have fueled my research interests. P2P networks are useful for sharing content files containing audio, video, and data. This research aims to address the problem of simple and flexible access to data from a variety of data sources across peers with different operating systems, databases and hardware. The proposed architecture makes use of SQL queries, web services, heterogeneous database servers and XML data transformation for the peer to peer data sharing prototype. SQL queries and web services provide a data sharing mechanism that allows both simple and flexible data access.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 52-58). / The Internet has potential to deliver information to Web users that have no other way of getting to those resources. However, information on the Web is scattered without any proper semantics for classifying them and thus this makes information discovery difficult. Thus, to ease the querying of this huge bin of information, developers have built tools amongst which are the search engines and Web directories. However, for these tools to give optimal results, two factors need to be given due importance: the users' ability to use these tools and the bandwidth that is present in these environments. Unfortunately, after an initial study, none of these two factors were present in Mauritius where low bandwidth prevails. Hence, this study helps us get a better idea of how users use the search tools. To achieve this, we designed a survey where Web users were asked about their skills in using search tools. Then, a jump page using the search boxes of different search engines was developed to provide directed guidance for effective searching in low bandwidth environments. We then conducted a further evaluation, using a sample of users to see if there were any changes in the way users access the search tools. The results from this study were then examined. We noticed that the users were initially unaware about the specificities of the different search tools thus preventing efficient use. However, during the survey, they were educated on how to use those tools and this was fruitful when a further evaluation was performed. Hence the efficient use of the search tools helped in reducing the traffic flow in low bandwidth environments.

Includes bibliographical references. / Objective: To determine the accuracy, measured by error rate, with which Clinical Research Workers (CRWs), with minimal experience in data entry, could capture data on a feature phone during an interview using two different mobile phone applications, compared to the accuracy with which they could record data on paper Case Report Forms (CRFs). Design: A comparative study was performed where 10 participating CRWs performed 90 mock interviews using either paper CRFs or one of two mobile phone applications. The phone applications were a commonly used open source application and an application custom built for this study that followed a simplified, less flexible user interface paradigm. The answers to the interview questions were randomly generated and provided to the interviewees in sealed envelopes prior to the scheduling of the mock interview. Error rates of the captured data were calculated relative to the randomly generated expected answers. Results and Conclusion: The study aimed to show that error rates of clinical research data captured using a mobile phone application would not be inferior to data recorded on paper CRFs. For the custom application, this desired result was not found unequivocally. An error in judgment when designing the custom phone application resulted in dates being captured in a manner unfamiliar to the study participants, leading to high error rates for this type of data. If this error is condoned by excluding the date type from the results for the custom application, the custom application is shown to be non-inferior, at the 95 confidence level, to standard paper forms when capturing data for clinical research.

Conventional electricity usage monitoring involves complex data collection via costly and intrusive hardware installation. There is a perceived need for a simple and affordable tool that provides users with feedback about their electricity consumption without the hardware installation. This study involves the design and development of a user driven mobile and desktop application that provides users with information on electricity usage patterns and historical trends. The application was designed using Ionic Framework, a tool ideal for the design of hybrid applications that are compatible with both desktop Windows devices and mobile Android devices. The goal of the research will be that the user will track their appliance usage on the application whilst taking electricity meter readings at regular intervals to calculate appliance-specific consumption. The data is added to the mobile or desktop application, which then provides users with a comprehensive display of the electricity usage patterns and trends. The objective is to provide users with the information required so that they can start understanding their electricity consumption better and it is a first step towards empowering the user to make smart decisions at home that will reduce their electricity consumption. The USE (Usefulness, Satisfaction, Ease of Use and Ease of Learning) questionnaire was used to gather user experience feedback from participants about user experience. The USE questionnaire tests the perceived Usefulness, Satisfaction, Ease of Use and Ease of Learnability The 31 individuals who initially volunteered to take part in the study are all residents of the City of Cape Town Municipality, aged between 20 and 80 years old. Not all participants are home owners; some are tenants in their premises. The sample group was selected on a convenience basis, and social media group posts were also used to reach individuals with a potential interest in the study. The two motivating factors that were considered to identify individuals who could potentially have an interest in the study were cost saving and environmental impact. 21 volunteers completed the study and returned the USE questionnaire. The study findings showed that all participants believe that using the application helped them to better understand their electricity consumption.

The social benefits derived from analysing crime data need to be weighed against issues relating to privacy loss. To facilitate such analysis of crime data Burke and Kayem [7] proposed a framework (MCRF) to enable mobile crime reporting in a developing country. Here crimes are reported via mobile phones and stored in a database owned by a law enforcement agency. The expertise required to perform analysis on the crime data is however unlikely to be available within the law enforcement agency. Burke and Kayem [7] proposed anonymising the data(using manual input parameters) at the law enforcement agency before sending it to a third party for analysis. Whilst analysis of the crime data requires expertise, adequate skill to appropriately anonymise the data is also required. What is lacking in the original MCRF is therefore an automated scheme for the law enforcement agency to adequately anonymise the data before sending it to the third party. This should, however, be done whilst maximising information utility of the anonymised data from the perspective of the third party. In this thesis we introduce a crime severity scale to facilitate the automation of data anonymisation within the MCRF. We consider a modified loss metric to capture information loss incurred during the anonymisation process. This modified loss metric also gives third party users the flexibility to specify attributes of the anonymised data when requesting data from the law enforcement agency. We employ a genetic algorithm(GA) approach called "Crime Genes"(CG) to optimise utility of the anonymised data based on our modified loss metric whilst adhering to notions of privacy denned by k-anonymity and l-diversity. Our CG implementation is modular and can therefore be easily integrated with the original MCRF. We also show how our CG approach is designed to be suitable for implementation in a developing country where particular resource constraints exist.

Includes bibliographical references. / The digital divide is largely seen as the main problem that developing economies and societies must overcome to gain economic productivity and social welfare. In this document we state that modern western perception of the digital divide lured advancement of ICT into developing countries especially in Africa. ICT must not be seen as a goal in itself but as a means to service human needs. This study attempts to analyze the willingness of people to adopt existing ICT infrastructures and the factors impeding its use in the DRC's cities of Kinshasa and Kananga

No description available.

SignSupport is a collaborative project between the Computer Science departments of the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. The intention of the software is to assist Deaf users to communicate with those who can hear in domain-specific scenarios.The penultimate version of this software is a mobile application that facilitates communication between Deaf patients and hearing pharmacists through the use of Sign Language videos stored locally on the mobile device. In this iteration, adding any new content to the mobile application necessitates redevelopment, and this is seen as a limitation to Sign Support. The architecture hinders the addition of new domains of use as well as extending the existing domains. This Dissertation presents the development and assessment of a new mobile application and data structure, together called SignDIn, and named as an amalgamation of the words 'Sign', Display' and'Input'. The data structure facilitates the easy transfer of information to the mobile application in such a way as to extend its use to new domains. The mobile application parses the data structure, and presents the information held therein to the user. In this development, the Dissertation sets out to address the following:1.How to develop a generalisable data structure that can be used in multiple contexts of Sign Language use.2. How to test and evaluate the resulting application to ensure that parsing the data structure does not hinder performance. The first objective of this research aims to develop a data structure in a generalised format so that itis applicable to multiple domains of use. Firstly, data structure technologies were evaluated and XML selected as the most appropriate out of three candidates (Relational Databases and JSON being the other two) with which to build the data structure. Information was collected from the International Computer Driver's Licence (ICDL) and Pharmacy domains and an XML data structure designed passing through three stages of development. The final outcome of the data structure comprises two XML types: display XMLs holding the display information in a general format of screen, video, image, capture and input; and input XMLs holding the list of input options available to users. The second objective is to test the performance of the mobile application to ensure that parsing the XML does not slow it down. Three XML parsers were evaluated, SAX Parsing, DOM Parsing, and the XML Pull Parser. These were evaluated against the time taken to parse a screen object as well as the screen object throughput per second. The XML Pull Parser is found to be the most efficient and appropriate for use in SignDin.

Over time, there has been a high failure rate of information systems development (ISD) projects, although Agile development has brought recent improvements. Knowledge management is also known to be one of the critical factors to Agile and project success; however, there are some knowledge transfer studies in Agile development. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to present a theoretical model examining what makes individuals successful at transferring knowledge in teams using Scrum, Agile’s most popular methodology. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted at two Scrum companies in Cape Town. Participants interviewed ranged from project managers and Scrum masters to software developers, business analyst and testers. The interviews were all transcribed, then analysed using thematic analysis. The findings produced new relationships between characteristics already well known to impact knowledge transfer as well as newly defined characteristics impacting knowledge transfer in Scrum teams: empathy and articulation skills of the source. The results have shown that the recipient should perceive the person wanting to transfer knowledge as having these characteristics to enable successful knowledge transfer: empathy, motivation, capability, credibility, articulate and ability to communicate enough. The contribution of this study to practice is a list of attributes for HR managers to help improve the knowledge transfer of Scrum team members. The contribution to Scrum research is a new theoretical model that suggests which characteristics a person needs to transfer knowledge successfully in Scrum teams, adapted from Joshi, Sarker and Sarker’s (2007) knowledge transfer model. This model can also be extended in the future by looking more deeply into the new relationships between constructs, such as how motivation together with capability of the source affect knowledge transfer in Scrum teams.