Le point de départ de notre analyse est celui de la construction de l'identité digitale considéré comme un processus complexe qui peut être également abordé sous plusieurs angles. En mutation constante, les différents acteurs présents sur Internet possèdent plusieurs rôles dans cette construction identitaire de l'individu en ligne. D'une part l'émergence du web social, sous la forme du profil, fait de l'utilisateur un acteur pluri-positionnel (énonciateur, récepteur, transmetteur, etc.) et lui donne, en outre une identité relationnelle. D'autre part, les contraintes imposées par le réseau et les enjeux situés à des différents niveaux, suggèrent la remise en cause hiérarchie horizontale de nœuds, – unités minimales qui composent le réseau –, et à son tour les nœuds incarnés par les utilisateurs. Cependant, pourrait un nœud être social ? La communication digitale interactive pourrait-elle se fonder sur de présupposés qui excluent l'individu ? Au-delà de cette identité relationnelle du web social, est-il possible de concevoir une identité digitale qui soit homologable à l'identité nominale d'un individu d'une société quelconque ? Les conditions, les prémisses et la confluence de plusieurs pratiques digitales sont les facteurs à analyser afin de trouver des réponses possibles à ce type de problématique. Certes, les critères à prendre en considération pour envisager une telle identité, ainsi que la préservation de l'identité réelle de l'utilisateur en tant que citoyen sont les axes fondamentaux de notre analyse. Une analyse qui se contente de faire l'état de lieu et l'état de l'art de l'Internet contemporain par rapport à l'individu, tel que nous le concevons à nos jours. / On the basis of this analysis, we propose to take into consideration the digital identity as a complex process of construction, which may be regarded from several angles. In a constant mutation, a variety of stakeholders present in the Internet perform different roles in the on line individual's construction identity. On the one hand, an emergence of social web converts the user, in the form of a social media profile, into a multi-positional actor ( sender, transmitter, receiver, etc.) and gives him/her a relational identity as well. On the other hand, the constraints imposed by the net and the issues placed in different levels of analysis may suggest to review the horizontal hierarchy between nodes, being these ones the web's minimal units which in turn are embodied by the users. Therefore, could a node be social ? The digital interactive communication could it be based in presumptions excluding the individual ? Beyond the relational identity of social web, could it be conceived a digital identity equivalent to the real identity of an individual on any society? Conditions, premises and the confluence of different digital praxis are indeed the elements to be analysed in order to find suitable answers to our general problem. Certainly, the criteria to take into consideration a concept such an identity, and the preservation of user's real identity as a citizen are the main axis of our analysis. More precisely, an analysis which is focused in the current state of contemporary Internet regarding the individual, as we conceive him nowadays.

Betrieb eines Knotens in einem Distributed Semantic Social Network. Der Knoten umfasst Funktionen zur Erstellung einer persönlichen Beschreibung, zur Verwaltung von Freundschaftsbeziehungen und zur Kommunikation mit anderen Teilnehmern des Netzwerks. Die entstandene Implementierung ist bereits auf leistungsschwacher, kostengünstiger und energieeffizienter Hardware praktisch im Einsatz. Zusätzlich wurden ihre Skalierungseigenschaften in einem Testaufbau mit mehreren Knoten untersucht.

Le Web2.0 est envisagé comme un espace ouvert aux services et met les gens au centre de cette optique. Le succès de contenus générés par utilisateur laisse entrevoir une nouvelle perspective en permettant aux utilisateurs de créer eux-même leurs propres services. La première contribution de la thèse consiste à en fournir un état de l'art complet. Nous donnons une description précise des UGS, puis analysons leurs défis par un parcours de différentes technologies. Notre deuxième contribution repose sur la conception et l'implémentation d'une plate-forme de mashups simple dont le but est une plus grande motivation dans l'utilisation des mashups. Nous présentons, pour le consommateur, un système de mashup basé sur les activités quotidiennes en reliant les événements du calendrier à des gadgets utiles. Le système, appelé EBSP, a été évalué par 131 utilisateurs finaux pour tester sa convivialité. De plus, il est utilisé comme un exemple représentatif dans la proposition d'un modèle d'acceptation par l'utilisateur des mashups de consommateur. Notre troisième contribution focalisée sur le problème d'utilisation de l'annotation sociale à soutenir la découverte widget web. Un modèle de découverte de gadgets amélioré est proposé en se basant sur des annotations sociales. En utilisant le service en ligne Widgetbox.com, nous démontrons la validité et l'efficacité de notre modèle. En quatrième lieu, nous avons conçu un système original en ligne de réseaux sociaux orienté activités. Le système, appelé Dig-Event, fournit un espace social ouvert pour les utilisateurs afin de partager les événements et découvrir les activités d'intérêt mutuel parmi les contacts sociaux / Web 2.0 is envisioned as an open garden for services and it puts people into the centre of the vision. The success of the user generated content raises the new idea of enabling end-users to create their own services. The first contribution of the thesis is to provide a comprehensive survey of the state–of-the-art development in this area. We give the specific description of UGS, and then go through different technologies to analyze their challenges. Our second contribution lies in designing and implementing a simple mashup platform which provides the greater motivation for mashups usage. We present a consumer mashup framework based on daily activities, by relating every-day calendar events to useful gadgets. The system, named EBSP, was evaluated by 131 end-users to test for its usability. Also, as a representative example, the system is used in a proposed user-acceptance model for consumer mashups. Our third contribution focuses on the problem of using social annotation to support web widget discovery. An enhanced web gadget discovery model is proposed based on social tagging. Using the online service Widgetbox.com, we demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed model. Fourthly, we designed a novel system for activity-oriented online social networking named Dig-Event. Dig-Event provides an open, social space for users to share events and discover the activities of mutual interests among social contacts. It allows users to share their activities, to customize their social circles, to conduct events, and to socialize around them. The features of event recommendation and integration with existing social networks further boost the event socializing experience

Text in English / Accompanied DVD with printed record / In this dissertation, I explore music styles from Tshianzwane village in HaMakuya, in the Limpopo Province of South Africa, particularly malende, tshigombela, and children‘s songs. I consider the music styles as embedded in their extra-musical physical structure and abstractions; social rituals; frame of reference; forms of habitus; social order; cultural capital; social meanings, behaviour, power hierarchy, status, space, agency, institutions; formal-informal education and means; symbols; musical instruments; dance; religion; ancestor worship; traditional health practice; norms and values; mentorship and rites of passage. I further explore how and why music performers and other cultural patterns at Tshianzwane interpenetrate with each other and their living space through social roles; demonstration-imitation learning method; enculturation; dialectics of normative-interpretive, embodiment-hexis or cues, internalizationexternalization, surface-deep structure, conscious-unconscious level, qualitativequantitative understanding of music styles and genres and local-foreign context; means of communication; reinterpretation and redefinition of concepts. In conclusion, I consider how people and cultural patterns at Tshianzwane, through interpenetration, form progressing and changing social web; social connections; attachments; trance; state of flux in cultural patterns; synthesis of cultural patterns; embedded contexts; shared culture and resultant cultural patterns. Since cultural patterns, as a result of interpenetration, reflect each other, I point out the challenges in socio-spatial mapping of forms of habitus and cultural patterns. In my dissertation, I use John Blacking‘s work as my primary theoretical framework. Furthermore, I use Pierre Bourdieu‘s theoretical framework, and Hugh Tracey‘s and David Dargie‘s audio CDs on African tribal music to enrich my theoretical ground. I collected my field data at Tshianzwane in collaboration with Joseph Morake and Ignatia Madalane (students), Dr Susan Harrop-Allin (supervisor), Samson Netshifhefhe, Obert Ramashia, Paul Munyai and Musiwalo (informants). / M. Mus. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology

The Social Web, or Web 2.0, has recently gained popularity because of its low cost and ease of use. Social tagging sites (e.g. Flickr and YouTube) offer new principles for end-users to publish and classify their content (data). Tagging systems contain free-keywords (tags) generated by end-users to annotate and categorise data. Lack of semantics is the main drawback in social tagging due to the use of unstructured vocabulary. Therefore, tagging systems suffer from shortcomings such as low precision, lack of collocation, synonymy, multilinguality, and use of shorthands. Consequently, relevant contents are not visible, and thus not retrievable while searching in tag-based systems. On the other hand, the Semantic Web, so-called Web 3.0, provides a rich semantic infrastructure. Ontologies are the key enabling technology for the Semantic Web. Ontologies can be integrated with the Social Web to overcome the lack of semantics in tagging systems. In the work presented in this thesis, we build an architecture to address a number of tagging systems drawbacks. In particular, we make use of the controlled vocabularies presented by ontologies to improve the information retrieval in tag-based systems. Based on the tags provided by the end-users, we introduce the idea of adding “system tags” from semantic, as well as social, resources. The “system tags” are comprehensive and wide-ranging in comparison with the limited “user tags”. The system tags are used to fill the gap between the user tags and the search terms used for searching in the tag-based systems. We restricted the scope of our work to tackle the following tagging systems shortcomings: - The lack of semantic relations between user tags and search terms (e.g. synonymy, hypernymy), - The lack of translation mediums between user tags and search terms (multilinguality), - The lack of context to define the emergent shorthand writing user tags. To address the first shortcoming, we use the WordNet ontology as a semantic lingual resource from where system tags are extracted. For the second shortcoming, we use the MultiWordNet ontology to recognise the cross-languages linkages between different languages. Finally, to address the third shortcoming, we use tag clusters that are obtained from the Social Web to create a context for defining the meaning of shorthand writing tags. A prototype for our architecture was implemented. In the prototype system, we built our own database to host videos that we imported from real tag-based system (YouTube). The user tags associated with these videos were also imported and stored in the database. For each user tag, our algorithm adds a number of system tags that came from either semantic ontologies (WordNet or MultiWordNet), or from tag clusters that are imported from the Flickr website. Therefore, each system tag added to annotate the imported videos has a relationship with one of the user tags on that video. The relationship might be one of the following: synonymy, hypernymy, similar term, related term, translation, or clustering relation. To evaluate the suitability of our proposed system tags, we developed an online environment where participants submit search terms and retrieve two groups of videos to be evaluated. Each group is produced from one distinct type of tags; user tags or system tags. The videos in the two groups are produced from the same database and are evaluated by the same participants in order to have a consistent and reliable evaluation. Since the user tags are used nowadays for searching the real tag-based systems, we consider its efficiency as a criterion (reference) to which we compare the efficiency of the new system tags. In order to compare the relevancy between the search terms and each group of retrieved videos, we carried out a statistical approach. According to Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test, there was no significant difference between using either system tags or user tags. The findings revealed that the use of the system tags in the search is as efficient as the use of the user tags; both types of tags produce different results, but at the same level of relevance to the submitted search terms.

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web in the last decade makes it the largest publicly accessible data source in the world, which has become one of the most significant and influential information revolution of modern times. The influence of the Web has impacted almost every aspect of humans' life, activities and fields, causing paradigm shifts and transformational changes in business, governance, and education. Moreover, the rapid evolution of Web 2.0 and the Social Web in the past few years, such as social blogs and friendship networking sites, has dramatically transformed the Web from a raw environment for information consumption to a dynamic and rich platform for information production and sharing worldwide. However, this growth and transformation of the Web has resulted in an uncontrollable explosion and abundance of the textual contents, creating a serious challenge for any user to find and retrieve the relevant information that he truly seeks to find on the Web. The process of finding a relevant Web page in a website easily and efficiently has become very difficult to achieve. This has created many challenges for researchers to develop new mining techniques in order to improve the user experience on the Web, as well as for organizations to understand the true informational interests and needs of their customers in order to improve their targeted services accordingly by providing the products, services and information that truly match the requirements of every online customer. With these challenges in mind, Web mining aims to extract hidden patterns and discover useful knowledge from Web page contents, Web hyperlinks, and Web usage logs. Based on the primary kinds of Web data used in the mining process, Web mining tasks can be categorized into three main types: Web content mining, which extracts knowledge from Web page contents using text mining techniques, Web structure mining, which extracts patterns from the hyperlinks that represent the structure of the website, and Web usage mining, which mines user's Web navigational patterns from Web server logs that record the Web page access made by every user, representing the interactional activities between the users and the Web pages in a website. The main goal of this thesis is to contribute toward addressing the challenges that have been resulted from the information explosion and overload on the Web, by proposing and developing novel Web mining-based approaches. Toward achieving this goal, the thesis presents, analyzes, and evaluates three major contributions. First, the development of an integrated Web structure and usage mining approach that recommends a collection of hyperlinks for the surfers of a website to be placed at the homepage of that website. Second, the development of an integrated Web content and usage mining approach to improve the understanding of the user's Web behavior and discover the user group interests in a website. Third, the development of a supervised classification model based on recent Social Web concepts, such as Tag Clouds, in order to improve the retrieval of relevant articles and posts from Web social blogs.

Cette recherche vise à comprendre de quelle manière l’exploitation des sites du Net participatif et de leur dimension sociale peut favoriser les apprentissages en classe de langue. Notre recherche s’appuie sur deux expériences de terrain réalisées auprès de deux publics différents, un public en FLE en 2012 et en 2013, à l’Alliance française Paris Île-de-France, et un public faiblement ou non scolarisé, en 2014, aux Cours Municipaux pour Adultes de la Ville de Paris, en post-alphabétisation. Dans une approche sociocritique, nous avons analysé des dispositifs pédagogiques dans lesquels les apprenants ont posté des messages sur des forums de discussion, des avis et des commentaires sur différents sites dont TripAdvisor, YouTube, Doctissimo, Le Parisien. Essentiellement qualitative, notre analyse a tout particulièrement interrogé la prise en compte de la dimension interactionnelle et sociale du Net participatif qui est sa caractéristique et son avantage principal. L’expérience en FLE nous a permis, en adoptant une approche émique, de repérer un certain nombre de conditions, favorables et défavorables, à l’intégration du Net participatif en classe de langue, de montrer le rôle déterminant de la culture d’usage dans l’appropriation de l’outil par les apprenants et de mettre en avant les notions de besoin et d’utilité de la tâche. À partir de ces conclusions, nous montrons qu’en post-alphabétisation les sites du Net participatif utilisés semblent avoir répondu aux besoins des apprenants faiblement ou non scolarisés. Grâce à la socialisation des écrits qu’il permet, et à l’engouement certain qu’il suscite chez ce public, le Web participatif, crée un effet d’entraînement dans les tâches de lecture-écriture. Nous émettons l’hypothèse que l’hybridité entre oral et écrit et entre langage et action des messages de forums de discussion et des sections commentaires lève certaines inhibitions généralement constatées chez ce public et facilite le processus d’écriture. Ainsi, nous avons repéré sur ce deuxième terrain le potentiel du Net participatif en tant que levier d’acquisition de la littératie traditionnelle et numérique chez un public en insécurité scripturale, et examiné les liens synergiques qui peuvent se créer entre ces deux littératies. Nous dégageons l’intérêt heuristique que présente le Net participatif dans les tâches de lecture-écriture, quel que soit le public, et nous montrons les avantages d’une démarche centrée sur l’apprenant. / The aim of this research was to understand and evaluate the use of some sites of the participative web, viewed in their social dimension, to meet the learning needs of learners in language courses. Our study was based on two field experiments conducted on two different types of audiences, one in 2012 and 2013 with French as a Foreign Language (FFL) students at the Alliance française Paris Île-de-France, and another in 2014 with learners with low levels of education at the Cours Municipaux d’Adultes de la Ville de Paris (adult training provider of the City of Paris) in a post–literacy programme. Following a sociocritical approach, we worked on case-based scenarios in which learners were asked to post messages on discussion forums and in the comments section of online magazines on websites such as TripAdvisor, YouTube, Doctissimo and Le Parisien. In a qualitative analysis, we took into account the interactional and social dimensions of the Web 2.0 which are its distinctive features and main advantages. In FFL our experiment enabled us, through an emic approach, to pinpoint some conditions necessary for the effective use of the participative web in language courses, to show the decisive role of culture of use in tool appropriation and to underline the two notions of need and purpose. Our first results led us to show in a second experiment that in post-literacy programmes, the participative websites seemed to answer the needs of learners with low levels of education. Socialization of writing skills and the keen interest these tools arouse in this type of audience were the main factors of improved achievements. The fact that the participative web seemed to improve the performance of reading and writing tasks leads us to formulate the hypothesis that the hybridization of written and oral languages and of language and action found in discussion forum messages and comments section frees this second type of learners from some of the anxieties generally observed at a low education level and helps the writing process. We suggest from our findings that the participative web is a potential lever for the acquisition of traditional and digital literacies in learners with writing skill insecurities, and examine the synergies that could be created in the acquisition of these two literacies. We look into the heuristic value of the participative web in writing-reading skills, regardless of the learner's level of education, and we discuss the benefits of a learner-centered approach.

The AEC industry has long been in need of effective modes of information exchange and knowledge sharing, but their practice in the industry is still far from satisfactory. In order to maintain their competence in a highly competitive environment and a globalized market, many organizations in the AEC industry have aimed at a move towards the development of learning organizations. Knowledge management has been seen as an effective way to have every member of an organization engaged in learning at all levels. At the very centre of knowledge management and learning is knowledge sharing through effective communication. Unfortunately, however, there is a big gap in the AEC industry between existing practice and the ideal in this area. In order to effectively coordinate information and knowledge flow in the AEC industry, this present research has developed a framework for an information system – a Construction Information and Knowledge Protocol/Portal (CIKP) which integrates within it a publish/subscribe system, Semantic Web technology, and Social Web concepts. Publish/subscribe is an appropriate many-to-many, people-to-people communication paradigm for handling a highly fragmented industry such as construction. In order to enrich the expressiveness of publications and subscriptions, Semantic Web technology has been incorporated into this system through the development of ontologies as a formal and interoperable form of knowledge representation. This research first involved the development of a domain-level ontology (AR-Onto) to encapsulate knowledge about actors, roles, and their attributes in the AEC industry. AR-Onto was then extended and tailored to create an application-level ontology (CIKP-Onto) which has been used to support the semantics in the CIKP framework. Social Web concepts have been introduced to enrich the description of publications and subscriptions. Our aim has been to break down linear communication through social involvement and encourage a culture of sharing, and in the end, the CIKP framework has been developed to specify desired services in communicating information and knowledge, applicable technical approaches, and more importantly, the functions required to satisfy the needs of a variety of service scenarios.

The AEC industry has long been in need of effective modes of information exchange and knowledge sharing, but their practice in the industry is still far from satisfactory. In order to maintain their competence in a highly competitive environment and a globalized market, many organizations in the AEC industry have aimed at a move towards the development of learning organizations. Knowledge management has been seen as an effective way to have every member of an organization engaged in learning at all levels. At the very centre of knowledge management and learning is knowledge sharing through effective communication. Unfortunately, however, there is a big gap in the AEC industry between existing practice and the ideal in this area. In order to effectively coordinate information and knowledge flow in the AEC industry, this present research has developed a framework for an information system – a Construction Information and Knowledge Protocol/Portal (CIKP) which integrates within it a publish/subscribe system, Semantic Web technology, and Social Web concepts. Publish/subscribe is an appropriate many-to-many, people-to-people communication paradigm for handling a highly fragmented industry such as construction. In order to enrich the expressiveness of publications and subscriptions, Semantic Web technology has been incorporated into this system through the development of ontologies as a formal and interoperable form of knowledge representation. This research first involved the development of a domain-level ontology (AR-Onto) to encapsulate knowledge about actors, roles, and their attributes in the AEC industry. AR-Onto was then extended and tailored to create an application-level ontology (CIKP-Onto) which has been used to support the semantics in the CIKP framework. Social Web concepts have been introduced to enrich the description of publications and subscriptions. Our aim has been to break down linear communication through social involvement and encourage a culture of sharing, and in the end, the CIKP framework has been developed to specify desired services in communicating information and knowledge, applicable technical approaches, and more importantly, the functions required to satisfy the needs of a variety of service scenarios.

La Web Social y la Web Semántica han impactado en la forma en que la creación de conocimiento se ha llevado a cabo en la Web. La Web Social promociona la participación de los usuarios para crear y editar contenido y conocimiento en la Web. La proliferación de contenido y la necesidad de tener una administración automatizada de esta información disparó la aparición de la Web Semántica. Actualmente, la Web Social y la Web Semántica conviven y comparten un mismo tema: un mejor manejo del conocimiento. Sin embargo, la mayoría de la información en la Web Social no es parte de la Web Semántica, y la información de la Web Semántica no es utilizada para mejorar a la Web Social. Esta tesis presenta un enfoque innovador para estimular una co-evolución entre la Web Semántica y la Web Social: las fuerzas que impulsan la Web Social y las herramientas que llevan a cabo la Web Semántica trabajando en conjunto con el fin de tener beneficios mutuos. En este trabajo afirmamos que la co-evolución entre la Web Social y la Web Semántica mejorará la generación de información semántica en la Web Semántica, y mejorará la producción de conocimiento en la Web Social. Esto invita a responder las siguientes preguntas: ¿Cómo puede incluirse la generación de datos semánticos en las actividades de los usuarios de la Web Social? ¿Como puede definirse la semántica de un recurso web en un entorno social? ¿Cómo puede inyectarse en la Web Social las nuevas piezas de información extraídas de la Web Semántica? ¿Poseen las comunidades de la Web Social convenciones generales que deban ser respetadas? Con el fin de mejorar la Web Semántica con las fuerzas de la Web Social, en este trabajo se proponen dos enfoques de Social Semantic Tagging: P-Swooki que permite a usuarios de una wiki semántica gestionar anotaciones semánticas permitiendo completar el proceso de construcción de conocimiento, y Semdrops que permite a los usuarios describir en forma semántica cualquier recurso de la Web tanto en un espacio de conocimiento personal como en un espacio compartido. Además, con el fin de mejorar el contenido de la Web Social, proponemos BlueFinder: un sistema de recomendación que detecta y recomienda la mejor manera de representar en un sitio de la Web Social, información que es extraída de la Web Semántica. En particular, BlueFinder recomienda la manera de representar una propiedad semántica de DBpedia en Wikipedia, respetando las convenciones de la comunidad de usuarios de Wikipedia. / Tesis realizada en co-tutela con la Universidad de Nantes (Francia). Director de tesis por la Universidad de Nantes: Pascal Molli; co-director de tesis por la Universidad de Nantes: Hala Skaf-Molli. Grado alcanzado por la Universidad de Nantes: Docteur de l'Université de Nantes.