During the past several years nearly every new application and idea created by the software industry has made the jobs of employees more complex and difficult, rather than simplifying their responsibilities. Often the users have to access several applications to do their assigned tasks. For example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system allows the user to review inventory and backlog information. However, for checking inventory status of a particular part, it is necessary to open the ERP system and navigate through numerous screens. Then a second application or system has to be launched to enter the purchase order. Any problems or issues that may be encountered may require access to customer information that is housed in the customer resource management (CRM) system. Thus employees or users responsible for making strategic decisions have even more difficulty trying to do their jobs effectively.Many Organizations use custom made distributed applications running on the intranet to full fill their local needs. These applications are either desktop applications or web applications. These applications are made up of distinct components running in separate runtime environments, usually on different platforms connected via a network. Typical distributed applications are two-tier (client-server), three-tier (client-middleware-server), and multi-tier (client-multiple middleware-multiple servers). In spite of having these custom made solutions, there are still a huge number of multiple information files being used and transferred among different departments. These files are in the shape of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Power Point presentations, Pictures etc. scattered over the Intranet owned by different departments or users. These files or scattered information can be centralized under one umbrella, for that we need a better content management solution. In many cases the data sources, systems, and applications located throughout the organization need to be combined to present the summarized information or desired report format that executives expect to review. The IT department likely has several initiatives and activities associated with taking the information available from transactional systems and converting it to a format needed to maintain an enterprise information system (EIS) or decision support system (DSS), or the systems that provide the summarized information this group of employees needs to make strategic decisions. To find an answer to a question, make a decision, or take some action, employees spend an enormous amount of time traversing the maze of these disconnected applications and systems.This is only part of the problem. Corporate wide systems are complex and designed for a specific purpose and function, so the IT department is required to deploy many different and often unrelated applications and modules to fill the information and processing needs of the entire organization. In addition, an incredible amount of training time is needed for an employee to learn how to effectively use such a complex suite of applications and all of the processes and steps involved to complete their assigned responsibilities. Only a small fraction of the organization's employees know how to use all of the functions of one system, much less all of the systems and databases that affect their job.

Ante la explosión de información en la Internet y la automatización en las bibliotecas es necesario educar al usuario en las destrezas de información. La referencia presencial y virtual se han centrado en la solución inmediata de las necesidades de información en los usuarios. Este servicio satisface sus necesidades de información inmediatas, pero no lo dota de las destrezas de información necesarias para resolver los problemas de información de forma independiente. Mucho se ha discutido sobre los temas de referencia virtual y destrezas de información, pero se tratan, en la mayoría de los casos, de forma separada. Con esta problemática en mente, se elaboró y distribuyó un cuestionario para auscultar la opinión de los bibliotecarios de la Universidad de Puerto Rico sobre las destrezas de información integradas al servicio de referencia virtual. Se concluyó que la mayoría de los encuestados tienen más conocimiento acerca de las destrezas de información que de la referencia virtual. La mayoría opinó sobre la importancia de la integración de las destrezas de información a la referencia virtual. El producto final de esta investigación fue la elaboración de una página Web que incluye recursos de referencia virtual, módulos instruccionales y/o tutoriales seleccionados que apoyan el modelo Big 6, herramientas de acceso a los módulos y/o tutoriales a través de buscadores personalizados, entre otros. La página Web fue evaluada y validada por bibliotecarios expertos en referencia virtual y en destrezas de información y por estudiantes de bachillerato, quienes en su mayoría describieron el producto como excelente.

This thesis describes research which explores the importance and feasibility of involving older people as equal partners in the creative design of digital devices for an ageing population. In exploring this topic, I have carried out two preliminary studies, a pilot study and a major empirical study. Firstly, I invited three groups of people, including very old people, active older people and postgraduate students, to evaluate a mock-­‐up model of an interactive device intended for older people that was designed using a standard design process. The results of this study suggested that products without an adequate contribution from older people would not always meet their needs. Secondly, I carried out observations of very old people, active older people, and young designers to identify factors that influence the way in which both older people and young designers can be involved in the creative design process. These factors included experiences with technology, processes and approaches currently applied with older people and designers, factors that stimulate or inhibit creativity, and practical constraints such as health issues. The results of these observations fed into the design of a pilot study, where I tested the content of a creative design process and a procedure for analysing data for the main empirical study. The main study involved three creative workshops where the same creative methods were employed with different sets of people: young designers, mixed groups (with older people and designers) and older people only. The results show that older people are able to participate in a creative design process; however, certain practical constraints have to be taken into account. Also, older people perform better when they work together with designers. Finally, the mixed groups with older people, who have relevant life experiences, and designers, who are familiar with the newest technology, may be more suitable for designing appropriate products for the older population.

Advances in ubiquitous computing have resulted in changes to the way we access and use everyday applications, e.g. reading mail and booking tickets. At the same time, users interact with these applications in a variety of ways, each with different characteristics, e.g., different degrees of bandwidth, different payment schemes supported and so on. These are highly dynamic interactions, as some of the applications might become unavailable (either temporarily or permanently) or their behaviour may change. As the user has to deal with a large number of proactive and dynamic applications every day, he will need a personal assistant that possesses similar characteristics. The agent paradigm meets this requirement, since it exhibits the necessary features. As a result, the user will provide its personal agent assistant with a goal, e.g. I need a smartphone which costs less than three hundred pounds, and the agent will have to use a number of applications offering information on smartphones so that it finds the requested one. This, in turn, raises a number of issues regarding the organisation and the degrees of access to these services as well as the correctness of their descriptions. In this work, we propose the organisation of applications around the concept of artificial agent societies, to which access would be possible only by a positive evaluation of an agent's application. The agent will provide the Authority Agent with the role it is applying for and its competencies in the context of a protocol, i.e., the messages that it can utter/understand. The Authority Agent will then check to see if the applicant agent is a competent user of the protocols; if yes, entry is granted. Assuming that access is granted, the next issue is to decide on the protocol(s) that agent receives. As providing the full protocol will cause security and overload problems, we only need to provide the part required for the agent to play its role. We show how this can be done and how we can repair certain protocols so that they are indeed enactable once this role decomposition is performed.

This thesis examines the development of human resource management in three UK public sectors local government, the health service and higher education. The focus of the study is the problem of the lack of use of computerised personnel information systems by personnel specialists to develop the human resource management function. The literature of strategic management, human resource management and the fit between them are reviewed together with the history and the development of personnel systems in the UK. Senior personnel practitioners and their organisations in the three sectors were evaluated with respect to the stage of development of organisational planning and the contribution made by personnel practitioners using questionnaires, and in-depth interviews. The backgrounds and management styles of the practitioners were examined in order to evaluate their perceptions of: human resource management, computer systems and organisational planning. The degree to which practitioners made use of their computerised information systems for administrative and strategic purposes and the problems they perceived were evaluated in order to judge their degree of evolution from 'traditional personnel practice' to 'human resource management'. The research findings indicated that, although there were are number of significant differences between the three sectors studied, these had little effect when considering the broad issues embedded in the six hypotheses. The evaluation of these hypotheses indicated that the practitioners were making substantial use of their systems for administrative but not for strategic purposes. The number of perceived forces discouraging use and development of computerised personnel information systems was found to outnumber the perceived encouraging forces and were aggregated into a forcefield diagram. Furthermore it was shown that most practitioners had not yet evolved into proactive human resource managers. Suggestions for 'best practice' with respect to choice, use and development of CPIS are provided.

People’s activities on the internet have expanded from mainly retrieving information to communicating with each other in virtual settings. Thus, research investigating social interactions in online communities is becoming more and more important. However, the multi-faceted approaches of existing studies for the analysis of online communities make it difficult to combine the findings into a comprehensive understanding. This shows the need for holistic investigations of online communities. This thesis provides such a holistic approach by investigating a combination of different aspects of a selected online support community for older people. MOSuC (Model of Online Support Communities), a model describing the key aspects of online support communities was developed based on existing theories of computer-mediated communication (CMC) as well as theoretical perspectives on social support. Five studies were conducted, each addressing one of the different aspects of the case study community: (i) the message content, (ii) the conversations structure, (iii) the social network of related community members, (iv) the roles that online community members take on, and (vi) the taget population’s needs concerning the exchange of social support in online communities. The findings of these individual studies were then combined in context of MOSuC in order to provide a holistic description of the community. As a result, this thesis provides detailed insight into the characteristics of the case study community as well as the interplay and dependencies between different aspects of the community. Based on the integration of multiple studies, the thesis sheds light on two main issues: the characteristics of the individual aspects of the community as well as how these aspects are related to and affect each other. In addition to the findings of the studies, the thesis also contributes MOSuC, which serves both as a theoretical framework of the aspects of online support communities, as well as a practical tool for integrating the individual studies. In addition, the application, modification and integration of multiple methods in this thesis provide a novel methodological way for an integrative analysis of online support communities.

XML has become the standard way for representing and transforming data over the World Wide Web. The problem with XML documents is that they have a very high ratio of redundancy, which makes these documents demanding large storage capacity and high network band-width for transmission. Because of their extensive use, XML documents could be retrieved according to vague queries by naive users with poor background in writing XPath query. The aim of this thesis is to present the design of a system named “XML Compressing and Vague Querying (XCVQ)” which has the ability of compressing the XML document and retrieving the required information from the compressed version with less decompression required according to vague queries. XCVQ first compressed the XML document by separating its data into containers and then compress these containers using the GZip compressor. The compressed file could be retrieved if a vague query is submitted without the need to decompress the whole file. For the purpose of processing the vague queries, XCVQ decomposes the query according to the relevant documents and then a second decomposition stage is made according to the relevant containers. Only the required information is decompressed and submitted to the user. To the best of our knowledge, XCVQ is the first XML compressor that has the ability to process vague queries. The average compression ratio of the designed compressor is around 78% which may be considered competitive compared to other queriable XML compressors. Based on several experiments, the query processor part had the ability to answer different kinds of vague queries ranging from simple exact match queries to complex ones that require retrieving information from several compressed XML documents.

The problem with e-texts are related to the way texts are displayed on a screen, with multiple and different aspects that affect legibility, making readers prefer to read a paper format rather than e-resources. This research describes the factors that affect the legibility of online texts aimed at obtaining a better understanding of the usability of electronic Arabic texts for learning purposes within the field of electronic reading; mainly reading Arabic texts for students aged 9 to 13. This study sets out three particular aims: (1) building a reading strategy for Arabic schoolbook in both formats electronic and paper format based on users’ cognitive and behavioural processes; (2) defining the influence of three typographical variables that affect reading Arabic texts on a screen (font size, font-type and line length); and (3) studying the efficiency of reading Arabic texts and the related factors impacting the efficiency of reading and comprehension. Based on the nature of the research questions and objectives, positivism and phenomenology are adopted as the underlying philosophy for this research. The empirical research was divided into three phases; the first phase focused on collecting data about using the internet among students in primary schools by means of a questionnaire. This has helped in the selection of samples and determined the extent of the students’ reluctance to read from a screen. The second phase was to investigate the reading process of school book in two formats [ paper and electronic format] to build reading model based on users’ cognitive and behavioural processes. The third phase was to examine the factors that affect negatively the usability of electronic texts by examining three issues: font size [10, 14, 16 and 18], font type [Arabic traditional, Arial, Times New Roman, Simplified Arabic, and Courier New], and line length [single column and double columns]. Observation was applied as a tool to collect the data. The study has made a significant contribution to the understanding of electronic reading of Arabic language. This contribution addressed five aspects: (1) Two models of reading process for schoolbook using Arabic language were built according to users’ interaction with the school textbook in two formats ( electronic and paper). These models will not only help define the interaction amongst users and e-books, but will also help designers to understand user behaviour of e-books and thereby to establish the most appropriate functions/features when building an e-book interface. (2) Identify the optimal font size for reading an Arabic script from screen by children aged 9 to 13. (3) Based on collecting data from experiments (2) and (3) and comparing this date with other researches that have done in the same field, new model explains the interaction between three topographical variables [font size, font type and line length] and their relationships with independent variables were provided. (4) Test a new display technique to improve the legibility of reading Arabic online texts by using colour to increase the ability to focus vision when moving from one line to another so as to improve the screen display. And (5) according to quantitative and qualitative several of the rules were recommended for designers and educators to follow when designing and presenting Arabic text on screen. On the other hand, some recommendations for future research have been derived from this thesis, such as the following. (1) Investigating the effect of the colour factor on improving the legibility of Arabic texts on screen for children, e.g. using different colours to distinguish between dots and vowels. (2) Exploring and developing an e-reading model based on all the factors recorded in the empirical studies in the reading field which will lead to building a theory on e- reading. (3) Investigating the influence of a variable effect reading process and the variables that have a positive or negative impact on it. (4) Applying a model that used colour to increase the ability to focus using different age-range and type of information such as journals or books.

Harmony is a major theme in Chinese culture. It is reflected in many forms, e.g. painting and garden design. However, calligraphy gives a straight forward insight into harmony in two dimensions. The main hypothesis was that the principles for building a harmonious calligraphic character could be converted from holistic to deductive and computable ones. These could then be applied to the design of harmonious screen interfaces, which would give visual pleasure. The first aim was to investigate and discover the quantifiable features of harmony in Chinese regular script calligraphy. Calligraphy has been associated in China with harmony and elegance for over 1500 years. There are features that are commonly accepted to establish harmony which can be quantified. However, the principles of Chinese calligraphy are embedded within Chinese culture. Direct translation does not convey the meaning. An extensive study was made of the literature on Chinese calligraphy and a practical exploration of characters was made. This resulted in a small number of principles which were needed to be satisfied for the character to appear harmonious. These were tested on several groups of participants. These principles were then converted into a mathematical form for Chinese regular script calligraphy, and for application to harmonious screen interface design. The mathematical forms were then tested on both Chinese regular script calligraphy and also on interface designs with groups of participants. Finally, an application for comparing harmony in Chinese calligraphic characters and interface designs was created. The “Harmony” application can be used to calculate how a Chinese calligraphic character or an interface design satisfies the principles of harmony and it can give an indication of how harmonious they are.

This research considers the ongoing challenge of semantics-based search from the perspective of how to exploit Semantic Web languages for search in the current Web environment. The purpose of the PhD was to use ontology-based query expansion (OQE) to improve search effectiveness by increasing search precision, i.e. retrieving relevant documents in the topmost ranked positions in a returned document list. Query experiments have required a novel search tool that can combine Semantic Web technologies in an otherwise traditional IR process using a Web document collection.