Abstract

Abstract
Virtual worlds are widely regarded as a successful approach for professional team training, due to promoting collaboration through user avatars. Current theoretical models of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) do not account for the specificity of virtual worlds’ affordances for collaboration, particularly regarding non-verbal communication affordances, which led Cruz et al. to propose in iLRN in 2015 a specific protocol to collect data to support the empirical-grounded refinement of the theoretical treatment of virtual worlds in CSCW. Here, we present the results of applying this protocol to a case study in the training of aircraft maintenance practices. A training simulator platform was built with the Open Simulator platform for this purpose. Through activity observation, collected data provided a set of chains of evidence as proof elements, increasing the amount of empirical data available for future theory development.

Abstract
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have come a long way on the usage of Information Systems (IS) at the several phases of the execution of their business plan. These organizations are very peculiar in the sense that most of the IS technologies have been developed as a consequence of the research work of the HEIs, positioning them as creators and as consumers of IS technologies. In fact, a considerable part of the IS products, currently available for the education sector, was initially created in a HEI as an in-house development. For these reason, the adoption of IS technologies by HEIs has followed two distinct paths: the in-house creation, previously described; and a current market adoption, similarly to most other companies IS adoption. Up to 2013 the IS applications for HEIs was mostly provided as web applications running on the HEI local datacenters and devoted to some specific phases of the HEI business plan. Currently, in 2016, this scenario has evolved in two ways: (i) to a wider range of type of applications, including: the old type of web application; new mobile applications; and new web application, running on the cloud and used as a service, (ii) to a more extended support coverage regarding the HEI business model phases, i.e., there are more IS applications supporting more aspects of the HEIs’ activities. In 2013, it was published a study regarding the accessibility support in HEI IS applications and related user practices. Due to the advances in IS technologies and their adoption by HEIs, it is now time to update this perspective on accessibility and HEIs IS, in order to assess how the progresses on IS applications used in HEIs have dealt with the accessibility concerns. The study updates the IS accessibility features as well as the new systems and new types of systems currently in use. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

Abstract

Abstract
Analysis of automatically-generated alignments shows that ambiguous situations are quite common, preventing their application in scenarios demanding high quality and completeness, such ontology mediation (e.g. data transformation and information/knowledge integration). Even the best-performing alignment needs to be manually corrected, completed and verified before application. In this paper, we propose a decision support system (DSS) based in a general-purpose rule engine that assists the expert on improving and completing the automatically-generated alignments into fully-fledged alignments, balancing the precision and recall of the system with the user participation in the process. For that, the rules capture the preconditions (existing facts) and the actions to solve each (ambiguous) alignment scenario, in which the expert decision will be adopted in further automatic decisions. The evaluation of the proposed DSS shows the gain in reducing the need for expert's decisions while increasing the accuracy of the alignments. © 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

Abstract
Ontology matchers establish correspondences between ontologies to enable knowledge from different sources and domains to be used in ontology mediation tasks (e.g. data transformation and information/ knowledge integration) in many ways. While these processes demand great quality alignments, even the best-performing alignment needs to be corrected and completed before application. In this paper, we propose a rule-based system that improves and completes the automatically-generated alignments into fullyfledged alignments. For that, the rules capture the pre-conditions (existing facts) and the actions to solve each (ambiguous) scenario, in which automatic decisions supported by a folksonomy-based matcher are adopted. The evaluation of the proposed system shows the increasing accuracy of the alignments.