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.

La réutilisation est une pratique courante lors du développement de logiciel. Bien souvent, cette réutilisation se fait à travers l’utilisation des librairies. Cette dernière met ses fonctionnalités à disposition des développeurs en utilisant les Interfaces de Programmation d’Application (API). En théorie, les développeurs qui utilisent les API n’ont pas forcément besoin de se préoccuper de comment les éléments internes de cette API fonctionnent. En effet, les API mettent leurs fonctionnalités à disposition des développeurs sans forcément dévoiler ce qui se passe à l’interne. Cependant, pour utiliser correctement une API il est nécessaire de respecter des contraintes d’utilisation qui sont à la fois implicites et explicites ainsi que des modèles d’utilisation. L’usage des librairies et des API est très commun dans le domaine du développement de logiciel. Cela permet aux développeurs d’utiliser les fonctionnalités proposées par l’API et ainsi de se concentrer directement sur la tâche qu’ils doivent effectuer. Toutefois, apprendre et se familiariser avec les contraintes d’usage des API sont des tâches ardues et exigent un effort cognitif considérable de la part du développeur. Les chercheurs ont tenté de corriger ce problème en étudiant les modèles d’utilisation et en analysant les traces d’utilisation de code client pour s’assurer de leurs conformités. Néanmoins, les analyses dynamiques ne sont pas possibles pendant les phases précoces de développement du logiciel, car cela requiert une implémentation minimum et l’exécution du code. Nous proposons l’outil Temporal Usage PAttern Checker (Tupac). Une approche basée sur l’analyse statique interprocédural pour vérifier la conformité du code client aux modèles d’utilisation pendant la phase de développement. Tupac peut être déployé dans un envi- ronnement de développement (IDE) et ainsi fournir des informations relatives à l’utilisation des API plus tôt pendant la phase de développement du logiciel. Nous avons évalué notre approche sur quatre projets Java avec quatre API. Les résultats ont démontré que Tupac a une bonne précision et un taux de rappel intéressant. De plus, nous avons pu conclure qu’en moyenne cela prend une demi-seconde pour vérifier la confor- mité d’un patron pour un projet tout entier. Cela démontre que Tupac peut être déployé dans un rythme de codage régulier. / In modern software development, reuse takes the form of using libraries that expose their functionality via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In theory, APIs allow developers to write client code that reuses library code without needing to know its internals. In practice, correctly using APIs requires respecting explicit and implicit constraints and usage patterns. This allows developers to use functionality proposed by API so that they can focus directly on the task they want to achieve. APIs require a significant effort from the developer to learn various usage constraint. Ignoring such patterns could lead to errors and design flaws. These often cannot be detected prior to integration and system testing. Researchers have attempted to solve this problem by extracting API usage patterns and analyzing client code traces for conformance. However, dynamic analysis is still impossible to perform early without a minimum of integration and execution. We propose the Temporal Usage PAttern Checker (Tupac) for API, an interprocedural static analysis approach that can verify that client code conforms to temporal API usage patterns as it is being developed. Tupac can be deployed inside an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), thus providing developers with feedback about API usage much earlier in the development process. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach on four projects with four different APIs. Our evaluation shows that Tupac has good precision and interesting recall. Crucially, we also show that it takes, on average, half a second to check an entire project for conformance to a pattern, meaning that it can realistically be deployed in the regular coding rhythm

Human activities affect the climate. If the utilization of fossil and other hazardous fuel methods is eliminated, it would reduce the impact on climate change. By investigating fuel usage patterns in three rural areas of Kenya, looking at social, economic and ecological factors, a foundation to facilitate future local actions towards sustainable fuel consumption can be made. With the help of local surveys performed in Siaya, Kwale and Embu, correlations could be found. The data was not extensive enough to generate general conclusions but can act as a beginning to a foundation for future sustainable actions. More data should be retrieved and investigated regarding methods and local conditions included in this project to work as a well-rounded foundation for future local actions regarding fuel methods and practices. / Klimathot och miljöpåverkan är till stor del konsekvenser av mänskliga aktiviteter och vanor. Fossila bränslen genererar utsläpp och bidrar till ökade globala temperaturer, vilket kan innebära förödande effekter. Klimatförändringar innebär att balansen i ekosystem hotas, arter utrotas och händelsekedjor utan kända slut sätts i rullning. Genom att använda alternativ till fossila bränslen kan påverkan på klimatet från bränslen minskas. Ökad användning av förnyelsebara bränslen och hållbara alternativ är en stor del av ett framtida hållbart samhälle. I delar av mindre utvecklade länder är användningen av träbaserade bränslen högt. Att införa hållbara, billiga och tillgängliga alternativ i dessa områden kan göra skillnad. Rapporten strävar efter att undersöka sociala, ekonomiska och ekologiska korrelationer relaterade till bränslekonsumtion, i tre olika områden i Kenyas landsbygd. Egenskaper i lokala material, sociala förutsättningar och tillgängliga bränslealternativ diskuteras. Eventuella mönster och förutsättningar kan vara till stor nytta när nya aktioner mot ett hållbart samhälle ska utföras. Genom att använda data bestående av lokalt besvarade enkäter i de tre områdena Siaya, Kwale och Embu, kunde samband hittas. Data var inte omfattande nog för att dra definitiva slutsatser men arbetet kan verka som början på en grund av kunskap, att använda vid kommande beslut för framtida bränslenyttjande i Kenya och dess landsbygd. Korrelationer mellan utbildningsnivå på ansvarig för hushållet och huvudsaklig arbetssyssla visar att lokalbor med lägre eller ingen utbildning huvudsakligen arbetar med jordbruk. En utförd variansanalys visar att det är en signifikant skillnad i markstorlek mellan de undersökta områdena. Kol och andra träbaserade bränslen används till hög grad och det är ofta äldre kvinnor som står för insamlandet av ved. Värdet av tid värderas inte lika högt som pengar. Nästan alla hushåll i studien var villiga att prova alternativa bränslen, med hälsoskäl som största anledning. Inget utav hushållen svarade att miljöpåverkningar var den största anledningen. Detta skulle kunna förklaras med att fokus ligger på direkta problem som påverkar vardagen och att det kan vara svårt att se bortom dessa. Lösningar fokuserade på hälsoproblem och andra faktorer kan ha positiv inverkan även på miljön. Då data från enkäterna inte inkluderar kvantiteter eller priser går det inte att dra definitiva slutsatser gällande de tre områden som undersöks. Studien visar att platserna har liknande situationer med små skillnader och potentiella åtgärder för nya bränslevanor skulle kunna vara lönsamma i alla tre områden, där det finns material lokalt som kan verka som substitut för bränslen som inte är bra för miljön. Etanol eller biogas kan verka som bra alternativ till kol och andra träbaserade bränslen. Fler alternativ bör undersökas och mer data gällande bland annat kvantitet och priser bör insamlas för att kunna dra bra slutsatser som kan ligga grund för hållbara beslut gällande Kenyas bränslekonsumtion.

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.

Thesis (M.A. (Information Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) plays a critical role in assisting library patrons to effectively and efficiently locate information resources from the academic library. This study examined awareness and usage of the existing OPAC functionalities and capabilities among undergraduate students at the University of Venda (UNIVEN). The research methodology for the study was guided by the adoption of quantitative research approach and descriptive survey design. The data collection tool used was a google forms questionnaire, through which the link was distributed to all undergraduate students at UNIVEN via e-mail. Systematic random sampling method was used to arrive at a sampling frame of five hundred and sixty-three (563) participants represented in all eight (8) schools that comprise UNIVEN academic structure. The findings of the study revealed that the majority of undergraduate students rated their level of awareness as average. Their major source of awareness of OPAC is library training. Most of respondents were not aware and familiar with OPAC functionalities such as Boolean operators, truncation marks and advanced search. The study further revealed positive attitudes and promising perceptions towards OPAC. In terms of usage, the findings show that most of the respondents occasionally use OPAC, and the majority use a title search entry to conduct their search on OPAC and they prefer to use a simple search option. Furthermore, most of participants showed that their purpose of OPAC usage is to locate books in the library. The major challenge encountered by respondents in using OPAC was slow internet connectivity and their lack of skills in searching information from OPAC. Based on these findings, this study recommends that librarians ought to promote the importance of using all OPAC functionalities to improve awareness and optimal usage of the OPAC functionalities as an information retrieval tool. There is a need for intensified training on advanced search options, such as Boolean operators, Truncation marks and advanced search, through one-on-one instruction and Lib-guides.