Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / As information technologies and applications become more overwhelming and diverse, persistent information overload problems have become ever more urgent.1 Fallout from this trend has most affected government, specifically criminaljustice information systems. The explosive growth in the digital information maintained in the data repositories of federal, state, and local criminal-justice entities and the spiraling need for cross-agency access to that information have made utilizing it both increasingly urgent and increasingly difficult. The Coplink system applies a concept spaceâ a statistics-based, algorithmic technique that identifies relationships between suspects, victims, and other pertinent dataâ to accelerate criminal investigations and enhance law enforcement efforts.

Genre conventions emerge across discourse communities over time to support the communication of ideas and information in socially and cognitively compatible forms. Digital genres frequently borrow heavily from the paper world even though the media are very different. This research sought to identify the existence and form of a truly digital genre. Preliminary results from a survey of user perceptions of the form and content of web home pages reveal a significant correlation between commonly found elements on such home pages and user preferences and expectations of type. Results suggest that the personal home page has rapidly evolved into a recognizable form with stable, user-preferred elements and thus can be considered the first truly digital genre.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / As Internet services based on the World-Wide Web become more popular, information overload has become a pressing research problem. Difficulties with search on Internet will worsen as the amount of on-line information increases. A scalable approach to Internet search is critical to the success of Internet services and other current and future National Information Infrastructure (NII) applications. As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this research proposes an intelligent personal spider (agent) approach to Internet searching. The approach, which is grounded on automatic textual analysis and general-purpose search algorithms, is expected to be an improvement over the current static and inefficient Internet searches. In this experiment, we implemented Internet personal spiders based on best first search and genetic algorithm techniques. These personal spiders can dynamically take a user's selected starting homepages and search for the most closely related homepages in the web, based on the links and keyword indexing. A plain, static CGI/HTML-based interface was developed earlier, followed by a recent enhancement of a graphical, dynamic Java-based interface. Preliminary evaluation results and two working prototypes (available for Web access) are presented. Although the examples and evaluations presented are mainly based on Internet applications, the applicability of the proposed techniques to the potentially more rewarding Intranet applications should be obvious. In particular, we believe the proposed agent design can be used to locate organization-wide information, to gather new, time-critical organizational information, and to support team-building and communication in Intranets.

Text in Chinese, with English abstract / With the popularization of broadband network in Taiwan, playing online-games has become one of most popular behavior. In 2003, the Taiwan on-line game market scale is up to NT $ 88.3 hundred million. In 2004 it is NT$ 92.7 hundred million. From the above data, the Taiwan on-line game market has been growing rapidly from 2000 to 2004. Focusing on the MMORPG, players exhibit switching behavior from old games to new ones. The thesis is aimed at exploring the factors of the players in the value creation process in playing on-line games, which influence his switching decision making. The research method focuses on external factors' "core services" combined with psychological factors such as "customer satisfaction", "emotion value" and "flow experience", to construct an empirical model to analyze the players' switching barriers and their switching behaviors. Our research adopts the on-line game players' emotion value factors in explaining their switching behaviors, which is different from previous related works. We take samples of Web members of Game-Based and Bahamut, which are the largest on-line game community in Taiwan, as the research objects. A total of 1749 completed questionnaires were obtained, with a response rate of 80.42 %. The explanation strength of the research model reaches 71.1%. The research scope covers the system exterior factors, players' perception factors, emotion value factors, the switching barriers and the switching behaviors. The results indicate that the development of any information system must take into consideration user' s requirements in the emotion value. It also suggests that the human requirement for final value demand should be incorporated into information design education.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The volume of qualitative data (QD)available via the Internet is growing at an increasing pace and firms are anxious to extract and understand user's thought processes, wants and needs, attitudes, and purchase intentions contained therein. An information systems (IS) methodology to meaningfully analyze this vase resource of QD could provide useful information, knowledge, or wisdom firms could use for a number of purposes including new product development and quality improvement, target marketing, accurate "user focused" profiling, and future sales prediction. In this paper, we present an IS methodology for analysis of Internet-based QD consisting of three steps: elicitation; reduction through IS-facilitated selection, coding, and clustering; and visualization to provide at-a-glance understanding.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this research proposes an intelligent agent approach to Web searching. In this experiment, we developed two Web personal spiders based on best first search and genetic algorithm techniques, respectively. These personal spiders can dynamically take a userâ s selected starting homepages and search for the most closely related homepages in the Web, based on the links and keyword indexing. A graphical, dynamic, Java-based interface was developed and is available for Web access. A system architecture for implementing such an agent-based spider is presented, followed by detailed discussions of benchmark testing and user evaluation results. In benchmark testing, although the genetic algorithm spider did not outperform the best first search spider, we found both results to be comparable and complementary. In user evaluation, the genetic algorithm spider obtained significantly higher recall value than that of the best first search spider. However, their precision values were not statistically different. The mutation process introduced in genetic algorithm allows users to find other potential relevant homepages that cannot be explored via a conventional local search process. In addition, we found the Java-based interface to be a necessary component for design of a truly interactive and dynamic Web agent.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. and Morris, M. (1996) User acceptance of new information technology - theories and models. In: M. Williams (ed.) Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 31, Medford NJ: Information Today, 3-32. ABSTRACT: Understanding the factors that influence user acceptance of information technology is of interest both to researchers in a variety of fields as well as procurers of technology for large organizations. The present chapter reviews literature which demonstrates the nature of technological acceptance is mediated by distinct factor groups related to the psychology of the users, the design process of information technology, and the quality of the technology in user terms. It is concluded that current research offers insights that can support the derivation of reliable predictions of user acceptance. However, potentially overlapping theories seem to exist independently of each other and there exists scope for a unifying framework to extend innovation diffusion concepts and systems design models (particularly user-centered design) into a formal theory of user acceptance of information technology.

Essay analyzes the question of what is the best way to index the Internet.

This paper addresses the concerns related to authority and control through focused exploration and description of one of the more popular social tagging sites, Flickr (http://www.flickr.com). After providing a brief background and introduction to Flickrâ s social and practical functionalities, this paper focuses on describing the siteâ s various tagging utilities and related exploration tools, addressing the tripartite concerns regarding the lack of vocabulary control, hierarchical organization, and the policies and procedures that allow for successful classification.

The most time consuming aspects of managing a library Web service are the creation and maintenance of site documents and assets. Although the organizational structure and contents of a Web site varies from library to library, participants in all library Web projects need to be familiar with the concepts and terminology associated with creating documents and resources for the Web. This document is not an in-depth HTML guide, but is instead a general introduction to Web content creation. Newer technologies are briefly described and references to other resources are provided. This is also an interactive document and provides the reader access to associated resources.