Legal Information Portals (LIPs) are central information offerings that give various user groups digital access to the law, including legislation, legal acts, or even court decisions. LIPs could ...provide access to complex legal content in a user-friendly yet accurate way, while exploiting the benefits of open data to enable easy access to legal content for other applications. However, the development of LIPs traditionally adheres to formal legal criteria, leaving users out in the cold. As a result, even the most modern LIPs fall short of providing a user-centric offering. To address this issue, we present a multicentric quality framework to help providers develop and evaluate LIPs by assessing their data quality, data portability, and usability. We apply the framework to the LIPs of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (the DACH region: D: Deutschland Germany, A: Austria, CH: Confoederatio Helvetica Switzerland) to illustrate its use and identify quality differences between their current systems. Our quality framework for LIPs helps decision-makers better understand and exploit the possibilities for the dissemination of legal information as part of their open justice initiatives. We contribute to the literature by complementing previous conceptual works with a concrete, comprehensive measurement schema that also serves as a basis for assessing user requirements and data portability configurations in other domains with high content complexity.
•We provide a multicentric quality framework for Legal Information Portals (LIPs).•The framework considers usability, data quality, and data portability.•It provides practitioners with a comprehensive and actionable framework.•For illustration, we apply the framework to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.•We outline the further possibilities of LIPs as part of open justice initiatives.
The paper focuses on the design and implementation of the Hellenic Legislation Portal aiming at becoming a central hub for legal resources produced in Greece. Though the project focuses on current ...law production the goal of the portal is to gradually incorporate all legislation issued from the foundation of the Modern Greek state and the publishing of the Government Gazette (1833 onwards). The project had to ensure its compatibility and interoperability with N-lex and EUR-Lex environments and align standards and terminology with its European counterparts as well as to accommodate local needs. The present study provides both the technical as well as the administrative challenges of the project. The case study presents the initial phase of the project and incorporates data deriving from the early implementation stages. The challenges emerging from the over-regulated and fragmented Hellenic legislation are discussed in relation to the technical issues arising from these particular elements. Furthermore, the adaptation of the ontological model (ELI) and the increasing need for securing semantic alignment and thematic specifications are presented.
Despite the proliferation of health and nursing informatics applications in the past decade, factors influencing consumer acceptance of the applications are not well understood. This study was ...conducted to investigate factors affecting acceptance of a consumer-used nursing informatics application (ie, online health information portal) within the framework of the Technology Acceptance Model. A cross-sectional study was conducted in which 201 Chinese young adults were invited to participate in usability testing with a typical health information portal and to complete a self-report questionnaire measuring the model's constructs and five hypothesized variables drawn from consumer and portal characteristics. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test research hypotheses. Fifteen of the 22 research hypotheses were supported. Perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness predicted satisfaction and behavioral intention, respectively, over and above the portal and consumer characteristics examined in the study. All portal and consumer characteristics had significant, although varied, impacts on the original model constructs. This study demonstrated that an adapted Technology Acceptance Model, extended with portal and consumer characteristics, provides an effective means to understand consumer acceptance of health portals. The findings hold important implications for design and implementation strategies to increase the likelihood of acceptance of consumer-used nursing informatics applications.
An enterprise information portal (EIP) is viewed as a knowledge community. Activity theory provides a framework to study such a community: members of an EIP conduct specific tasks that are assigned ...through a division of labor. Each member of an enterprise information portal can undergo three distinct types of learning processes: learning-by-investment, learning-by-doing, and learning-from-others. Through these three types of learning processes, each member achieves specialized knowledge that is related to his or her own task. Cumulative knowledge resulting from the learning processes is considered in terms of two distinct attributes: depth and breadth of knowledge. This paper formulates a mathematical model and defines the goal of an EIP member as maximizing the net benefits of knowledge resulting from individual investment and effort. Numerical examples are provided to analyze patterns of optimal investment and effort plans as well as the resulting accumulated knowledge. The results provide useful managerial implications. In business conditions characterized by high interest rates or high internal rate of returns, it is preferable for members to delay spending their resources for learning. Intensive investment and efforts to obtain knowledge are preferable when the discount rate of costs is high, when knowledge is durable, when the value of knowledge is high, when the initial level of knowledge is high, when the productivity of the learning process is high, and when sufficient knowledge is transferred from other members. On the other hand, the size of the EIP has a positive or negative effect depending on the attribute of knowledge and the productivity of learning processes. Further properties of the optimal decisions and learning processes are analyzed and discussed.
The web is an extremely powerful resource that has the potential to improve education and health. It enables access to new markets. There are, however, fundamental problems with web access in ...emerging regions. The primary issue is that internet connectivity is not keeping up with web complexity and size. Recently an innovative technology is developed in the form of contextual information portals (CIP) to mitigate the effect of low connectivity. CIP provides offline searchable and browse-able information portal. The information in CIP is composed of vertical slices of the internet about specific topics. CIP is an ideal tool for developing regions which have limited access to internet. It can be used in schools and colleges to enhance lesson plans and educational material. Although, as a standalone portal CIP provides an interactive searching and browsing interface enabling a web-like experience, however, a fundamental problem that users face is broken links. This is because crawling the web for constructing a collection for CIP only makes available a portion of webpages but not all possible documents. This creates several broken links. To address this problem we develop a broken link repairing system (brLinkRepair) for repairing broken links. brLinkRepair is useful when a user tries to navigate between pages through links and pointed pages of links are missing from the CIP. We provide an information retrieval system for repairing broken links. For each broken link our system recommends related pages that are similar to pointed pages. To further improve the effectiveness of system we combine all information sources using learning to rank approach. Our results indicate learning to rank (by combining information sources) improves effectiveness.
This paper explores inclusive research design (IRD) as an integral component in what we term community partnership research in the information management and systems field. It aims to unravel the ...challenges and complexities of the double hermeneutic spiral associated with designing and doing this type of research in order to identify principles and processes appropriate to the engagement of all partners - in the community that provides the setting for the research and in the academy - in the iterative, ongoing design of the research. The research reported in the paper was undertaken within an interpretivist framework, using literary warrant analysis, autoethnography and a second generation grounded theory approach to data analysis. It involved in-depth analysis of our experiences over the last 10 years in community partnership research relating to smart health information portals, including reflection on our particular roles and interests in the research, as well as our changing needs, values and expectations. The paper concludes by presenting an IRD framework for community partnership research in information management and systems.
The current research activities of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IMI—BAS) include the study and application of knowledge-based methods for the ...creation, integration and development of multimedia digital libraries with applications in cultural heritage. This report presents IMI-BAS’s developments at the digital library management systems and portals, i.e. the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library, the Bulgarian Folklore Digital Library and the Bulgarian Folklore Artery, etc. developed during the several national and international projects:
- ―Digital Libraries with Multimedia Content and its Application in Bulgarian Cultural Heritage‖ (contract 8/21.07.2005 between the IMI–BAS, and the State Agency for Information Technologies and Communications;
- FP6/IST/P-027451 PROJECT LOGOS "Knowledge-on-Demand for Ubiquitous Learning", EU FP6, IST, Priority 2.4.13 "Strengthening the Integration of the ICT research effort in an Enlarged Europe"
- NSF project D-002-189 SINUS ―Semantic Technologies for Web Services and Technology Enhanced Learning‖.
- NSF project IO-03-03/2006 ―Development of Digital Libraries and Information Portal with Virtual Exposition ―Bulgarian Folklore Heritage‖‖.
The presented prototypes aims to provide flexible and effective access to the multimedia presentation of the cultural heritage artefacts and collections, maintaining different forms and format of the digitized information content and rich functionality for interaction. The developments are a result of long-standing interests and work in the technological developments in information systems, knowledge processing and content management systems. The current research activities aims at creating innovative solutions for assembling multimedia digital libraries for collaborative use in specific cultural heritage context, maintaining their semantic interoperability and creating new services for dynamic aggregation of their resources, access improvement, personification, intelligent curation of content, and content protection. The investigations are directed towards the development of distributed tools for aggregating heterogeneous content and ensuring semantic compatibility with the European digital library EUROPEANA, thus providing possibilities for pan-European access to rich digitalised collections of Bulgarian cultural heritage.
Addressing the diversity in information requirements across the enterprise is a central challenge in enterprise content management. Enterprise information portals (EIPs) hold promise in this regard, ...offering each user a gateway to customized and personalized content. However, in large organizations EIP implementers face the complexity of tailoring portals for potentially thousands of users. A conceptual framework based on marketing fundamentals is developed to inform EIP implementation in this respect. It is argued that EIP implementers should view their user community as a number of distinct segments in order to address divergent needs more specifically (as opposed to a 'one size fits all' approach). For each identified segment, a 'mix' of content (product), distribution (place), promotion and price (cost) should be considered. The framework is applied to two cases of EIP implementation in large organizations. It is proposed that segmentation enables better planning of the overall EIP implementation effort. Considerations such as the number of user segments, customization, and personalization of content, and the funding of EIP development in large organizations are also discussed. The concepts elaborated here also hold theoretical relevance for other IS implementation contexts that involve very large user communities with diverse information requirements.
Using data mining techniques, this study examines the Bachelor of Arts (General) degree's data available in the University of South Africa's institutional information and analysis portal (IP) ...maintained by the Department of Information and Strategic Analysis (DISA). The purpose of this was to draw a demographic profile of the students and demonstrate the potential use of an IP in monitoring and evaluating the performance of individual qualifications as far as registrations, cancellations and graduation rates are concerned. Data were analysed in order to determine the students' age, gender, occupational, home language and geographic distributions and the relationships between the "incoming", "re-entering", "degree completed" and "graduation" headcounts. It was observed, among other findings, that the BA(G) degree attracts students with diverse characteristics; there is a general continued decline in the number of students registering as well as completing the qualification; the number of students cancelling registrations in BA(G) has continued to grow since 2005; and that there is a significant positive correlation between (a) the "incoming" and "graduation" headcounts; (b) "incoming" and "degree completed" headcounts; (c) "degree completed" and "graduation" headcounts; and (d) "graduation" and "total registration" headcounts. Other findings as well as conclusions and recommendations are offered.
O artigo apresenta uma análise da cobertura pré-eleitoral dos portais das revistas Veja e CartaCapital na internet, a partir da busca sobre o tema “Eleições 2014”. O período de análise vai de janeiro ...de 2013 a fevereiro de 2014, portanto, antes das definições oficiais das candidaturas. Considera-se que as informações oriundas da imprensa são importantes para o debate público e que Veja e CartaCapital, além de manterem sua versão impressa, reproduzem seus conteúdos para o ambiente online para não perderem público. Nosso objetivo é comparar a produção de conteúdo, o volume de citações dos principais pré-candidatos e a interatividade nas publicações dos dois veículos na internet. Com isso, acreditamos ser possível fazer inferências e considerações sobre a participação dos webleitores e a respeito das tendências de cobertura de cada veículo no período eleitoral. O método de análise é comparativo e os resultados mostram algumas distinções e outras similaridades entre os dois portais.
PDF
