This dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the field of law and artificial intelligence. It argues that the conceptual structuring of legal knowledge within an appropriate theoretical framework is of primary importance when building knowledge-based systems. While technical considerations also play a role, they must take second place to an in-depth understanding of the law. Two alternative methods of structuring legal knowledge in very different domains are used to explore the thesis. A deep-structure approach is used on nervous shock, a rather obscure area of the law of negligence. A script-based method is applied to impaired driving, a well-known part of the criminal law. A knowledge-based system is implemented in each area. The two systems, Nervous Shock Advisor (NSA) and Impaired Driving Advisor (IDA), and the methodologies they embody, are described and contrasted. In light of the work undertaken, consideration is given to the feasibility of lawyers without much technical knowledge using general-purpose tools to build knowledge-based systems for themselves.

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The main goal of this research was to explore the use of benchmarking in the dairy industry. This includes descriptions of the various sectors in North America where benchmarking has been used successfully on a continuous basis or in research. Benchmarking methods that are currently used in the Quebec dairy industry are examined. An improvement to such methods is proposed through the use of visualization, coupled with interactivity, and with a focus on adaptability and usage. The advantages of such an interactive tool are discussed in light of on-farm decision-making, and a further use of visual slider applications is described to help with parameters of known economic importance.

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.

Individuals are generating, storing and accessing more information than ever before. The information comes from a variety of sources such as the World Wide Web, email and books. Storage media is becoming larger and cheaper. This makes accumulation of information easy. When information is kept in large volumes, retrieving it becomes a problem unless there is a system in place for managing this. This study examined the techniques that users have devised to make retrieval of their documents easy and timely. A survey of user document management techniques was done through interviews. The uncovered techniques were then used to build an expert system that provides assistance with document management decision-making. The system provides recommendations on file naming and organization, document backup and archiving as well as suitable storage media. The system poses a series of questions to the user and offers recommendations on the basis of the responses given. The system was evaluated by two categories of users: those who had been interviewed during data collection and those who had not been interviewed. Both categories of users found the recommendations made by the system to be reasonable and indicated that the system was easy to use. Some users thought the system could be of great benefit to people new to computers.

Open access and open resources have gained much attention from the world in the last few years. The interest in sharing information freely by the use of the World Wide Web has grown rapidly in many different fields. Now, information is available in many different data forms because of the continuous evolution in technology. The main objective of this thesis is to provide content creators and educators with a solution that simplifies the process of depositing into digital repositories. We created a desktop tool named ORchiD, Open educational Resources Depositor, to achieve this goal. The tool encompasses educational metadata and content packaging standards to create packages while conforming to a deposit protocol to ingest resources to repositories. A test repository was installed and adapted to handle Open Educational Resources. The solution proposed is centered on the front-end application which handles the complex objects on the user desktop. The desktop application allows the user to select and describe his/her resource(s) then creates the package and forwards it to the specified repository using the deposit protocol. The solution is proved to be simple for users but also in need of further improvements specifically in association to the metadata standard presented to user.

Recording university lectures through lecture capture systems is increasingly common. However, a single continuous audio recording is often unhelpful for users, who may wish to navigate quickly to a particular part of a lecture, or locate a specific lecture within a set of recordings. A transcript of the recording can enable faster navigation and searching. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies may be used to create automated transcripts, to avoid the significant time and cost involved in manual transcription. Low accuracy of ASR-generated transcripts may however limit their usefulness. In particular, ASR systems optimized for general speech recognition may not recognize the many technical or discipline-specific words occurring in university lectures. To improve the usefulness of ASR transcripts for the purposes of information retrieval (search) and navigating within recordings, the lexicon and language model used by the ASR engine may be dynamically adapted for the topic of each lecture. A prototype is presented which uses the English Wikipedia as a semantically dense, large language corpus to generate a custom lexicon and language model for each lecture from a small set of keywords. Two strategies for extracting a topic-specific subset of Wikipedia articles are investigated: a naïve crawler which follows all article links from a set of seed articles produced by a Wikipedia search from the initial keywords, and a refinement which follows only links to articles sufficiently similar to the parent article. Pair-wise article similarity is computed from a pre-computed vector space model of Wikipedia article term scores generated using latent semantic indexing. The CMU Sphinx4 ASR engine is used to generate transcripts from thirteen recorded lectures from Open Yale Courses, using the English HUB4 language model as a reference and the two topic-specific language models generated for each lecture from Wikipedia. Three standard metrics – Perplexity, Word Error Rate and Word Correct Rate – are used to evaluate the extent to which the adapted language models improve the searchability of the resulting transcripts, and in particular improve the recognition of specialist words. Ranked Word Correct Rate is proposed as a new metric better aligned with the goals of improving transcript searchability and specialist word recognition. Analysis of recognition performance shows that the language models derived using the similarity-based Wikipedia crawler outperform models created using the naïve crawler, and that transcripts using similarity-based language models have better perplexity and Ranked Word Correct Rate scores than those created using the HUB4 language model, but worse Word Error Rates. It is concluded that English Wikipedia may successfully be used as a language resource for unsupervised topic adaptation of language models to improve recognition performance for better searchability of lecture recording transcripts, although possibly at the expense of other attributes such as readability.

Mergers of higher education institutions in South Africa have had a significant impact on the higher education sector. Unfortunately, libraries are not often regarded as a key component in a merger between two institutions. Rather as a result of the merger, libraries have to find how they fit into the broader picture. Very little research has been published in terms of the effects these mergers have had on library catalogues. In this study, the merging of the library catalogues of the Edminson Library at the Edgewood College of Education in Pinetown and the E.G. Malherbe Library of the University of Natal on the Durban campus was researched to determine how these library catalogues were merged and how successful this process was. To meet the objectives of this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the major role-players who were involved in, or affected by this process. Considering that this was the first time that a study of this nature pertaining to the merger of library catalogues was conducted in South Africa, a literature review was conducted to investigate similar studies involving library catalogue mergers. Important themes from the literature were identified. Unpublished material such as minutes of meetings and annual reports formed an integral part of the information gathering process. An analysis of the information collected at the interviews was done through content analysis. The evidence from all these sources finally resulted in conclusions and the lessons learnt throughout the process of the merger. / Thesis (M.I.S.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

Mergers of higher education institutions in South Africa have had a significant impact on the higher education sector. Unfortunately, libraries are not often regarded as a key component in a merger between two institutions. Rather as a result of the merger, libraries have to find how they fit into the broader picture. Very little research has been published in terms of the effects these mergers have had on library catalogues. In this study, the merging of the library catalogues of the Edminson Library at the Edgewood College of Education in Pinetown and the E.G. Malherbe Library of the University of Natal on the Durban campus was researched to determine how these library catalogues were merged and how successful this process was. To meet the objectives of this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the major role-players who were involved in, or affected by this process. Considering that this was the first time that a study of this nature pertaining to the merger of library catalogues was conducted in South Africa, a literature review was conducted to investigate similar studies involving library catalogue mergers. Important themes from the literature were identified. Unpublished material such as minutes of meetings and annual reports formed an integral part of the information gathering process. An analysis of the information collected at the interviews was done through content analysis. The evidence from all these sources finally resulted in conclusions and the lessons learnt throughout the process of the merger. It was found that the merging of library catalogues should never be underestimated in terms of complexity and the volume of work involved. The merging of library catalogues involves extensive commitment of senior staff and must be organised to ensure that the service to existing users is not hampered during the procedure. The findings indicated that, while there had been a lack of appropriate management of the merger both employees and management had learnt from, and developed in, the process. The merging of library catalogues seldom occurs more than once in a librarian‟s term of office and therefore it is imperative that managers involved in this process ensure that they do it right the first time. Library catalogue mergers do not necessarily lead to savings, which is contrary to what is sometimes assumed by the initiators of mergers. The lessons learnt and the recommendations made can be used for future library catalogue mergers. / Thesis (M.I.S.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.