Part of the School of Computer Science’s Information Management Group.
Closed projects are research projects which have now mostly ended. While the closed projects are no longer actively investigated, they are maintained here as the results drawn from the research continues to be valid and may act as a guide for future research projects.
HuCEL investigates methods to extract keywords from the main content of a news Web pages to automatically generate search queries that scan the Web for related events, and display this additional information to users next to the original story. A technical evaluation of the methods indicates that users found queries to be related to the story, demonstrating that the algorithm produced quality keywords. A qualitative and quantitative user study of the links generated by the HuCEL platform also demonstrates that users found these associations to be related to the story under discussion.
COHSE investigates methods to improve significantly the quality, consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents). It produced a COHSE (Conceptual Open Hypermedia Services Environment) using three leading-edge technologies: an ontological reasoning service, a Web based open hypermedia link service and the integration of the ontology service and the open hypermedia link service.
DANTE is looking at how visually impaired people access Hypermedia environments, of which the Web is the most popular example. The main goal is to devise a tool that uses a model-driven approach to analyse and transform Web pages to increase mobility in virtual environment.
TOWEL seeks to find solutions to problems encountered by both visually impaired and sighted users when traveling in the World Wide Web. Drawing similarities between real-world travel metaphors of visually impaired people and web-based travel metaphors of both visually impaired and sighted people, enhances an understanding of the problem and therefore enables solutions to these travel problems to be more easily identified.
RIAM investigates ways in which to integrate, to mutual advantage, research into the Accessible and Mobile World Wide Webs (Web), to develop a common infrastructure, and to validate this infrastructure using existing Web documents and Mobile client simulators. The research will investigate the use of Web documents and document objects in order to ensure device independence and place the Mobile Web in a position to access the entire Web. We assert that if the Web is accessible then it is also Mobile, and will validate our assertions by running a series of iterative experiments, testing the results of these experiments against our objectives, and using the results to refine our models and software tools.
SADIe is an investigation into a solution to transcode web pages in order to aid visually impaired users based on an anntation of the Cascding Style Sheet (CSS) of a Website. SADIe provides the accuracy of semantic transcoding, without the time consuming tediousness of annotating every web page. Yet we also get the ability to transcode thousands of webpage in a similar fashion to rule-based transcoding, but with a higher degree of accuracy.
ViCRAMaims to relate the user’s implicit understanding of a visually complex Web page with its layout. In this way, Web page designs can be associated with a common Web behaviour and visual complexity that will give further insight into accessible Web page design.