The IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2002 was held in Lisbon, Portugal at the IST Congress Center, November 13-15, 2002.

This Conference´s purpose was to address the main issues of concern within WWW/Internet. The conference was able to cover both technological as well as non-technological issues related to WWW and Internet developments. It served as a forum that gathered researchers, practitioners, students and anyone that was working or studying in the field of the WWW/Internet.

The IADIS WWW/Internet 2002 Conference had about 240 submissions from more than 30 countries. Each submission has been anonymously reviewed by at least two independent reviewers, to ensure the final high standard of the accepted submissions. The final result was the approval of 58 full papers, which meant that the acceptance rate was below 25%. The other papers were accepted as short papers and posters.

The Conference Program was organized into thirty-nine thematic areas, namely Accessibility, Adaptive Web Systems, Collaboration, Cyber Law, Data Mining, Database Planning and Development, Digital Libraries and E-Publishing, Digital Textuality, E-Business and E-Commerce, E-Learning, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Evaluation and Assessment, Geographical Information Systems, Global Tendencies in WWW/Internet, Groupware, Human Computer Interaction, Information Architectures, Information Visualization, Intelligent Agents, Interfaces, Languages, Metadata, Multimedia, Portal strategies, Protocols and Standards, Quality in WWW/Internet Systems, Searching and Browsing, Security Issues, Storage Issues, System Integration, Technology Strategies, Tele-Work, WWW/Internet Case studies, Web Personalization, Wireless Applications, Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Communities, Virtual Reality and XML. The program featured an opening and closing sessions, 40 parallel paper sessions, 3 Keynote Presentations, 4 Corporate Sessions, 2 Doctoral Consortium Presentations and a Poster Session. In addition to the presentation of papers the conference offered 5 post-conference Tutorials Presentations.

The Conference Proceedings was both published in Book (ISBN: 972-9027-53-6) and CD-ROM by IADIS Press.

Overall the Conference offered an opportunity to all their participants to discuss with success the most significant aspects regarding the theme WWW/Internet. It served as a forum that gathered researchers, practitioners, students and anyone that was working or studying in the field of the WWW/Internet.

The Keynote Presentations were:

FROM ADAPTIVE HYPERMEDIA TO THE ADAPTIVE WEB by Professor Peter Brusilovsky, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Abstract:

Web systems suffer from an inability to satisfy heterogeneous needs of many users. A remedy for the negative effects of the traditional "one-size-fits-all'' approach is to develop systems with an ability to adapt their behavior to the goals, tasks, interests, and other features of individual users and groups of users. Adaptive Web is a relatively young research area. Started in with a few pioneering works on adaptive hypertext in early 1990, it now attracts many researchers from different communities such as hypertext, user modeling, machine learning, natural language generation, information retrieval, intelligent tutoring systems, cognitive science, and Web-based education. Currently, the principal application areas of adaptive Web systems are education, information retrieval, and kiosk-style information systems. Most recent systems are exploring new promising application areas such as e-commerce, medicine, and tourism. Research-level systems constitute the majority of adaptive Web systems, but a few successful industrial systems show the commercial potential of the field. This talk will provide an introduction to the field of adaptive Web, review major adaptation techniques, and present several examples of adaptive Web systems in different application areas (including author's own work on adaptive electronic textbooks and adaptive performance support systems).

ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS OF AN E- LEARNING ENVIRONMENT by Professor Hermann Maurer, Graz U. of Technology, Austria

Abstract:

There is agreement today that e- Learning must not be seen as just offering material in the form of some "electronic book". Rather it has to be imbedded in a sophisticated e- Learning environment and the material has to be highly interactive. However, both terms allow a very broad range of interpretations and indeed most are too narrow. We will discuss that the environment must provide not just course material of good quality, for various types of pedagogical approaches and cognitive styles, but also has to provide an extensive digital background library, advanced collaboration and communication features and many types of administrative functions. We will further argue that interactivity must go well beyond what is usually offered. In particular we show what it means that learners can seriously work and modify the material at issue, for themselves and others. We claim that the notion of systems that are much more active, including the "active document concept" and systemic actions such as the generation of knowledge landscapes and hints to the learners are essential. The importance of similarity- and connection recognition will also be emphasized. We conclude the presentation by indicating how a simple yet powerful start of an e-Learning set-up is possible.

CRAFTING STRATEGY FOR THE SUCCESSFUL E-LEARNING BUSINESS by Professor Dias de Figueiredo, University of Coimbra, Portugal

Abstract:

This presentation addresses a number of strategy issues in setting up a successful e-learning business. It starts by arguing that the future of e-learning is not to be found just on content and delivery, but also, and very much, on context and activity – that is, on making learning happen within activity rich, interaction rich, and culturally rich social environments that never existed, that the intelligent use of technology is making possible, and where completely different paradigms apply. This is supported with a brief description of the emerging field of Educational Context Design (ECD), and the illustration, through a set of examples, of how ECD-based learning contexts can be created. The presentation then moves on to the questions of business strategy in setting up an e-learning venture. In spite of the lessons learned from e-business enterprises that collapsed for lack of strategy and appropriate business models, many e-learning projects being launched at present suffer from exactly the same shortcomings. To help e-learning entrepreneurs set up and tune their business, the presentation reviews the key concepts of the value chain of e-learning, stresses the place and role of strategy in its establishment, characterizes the main features of any sound business model for e-learning, illustrates some of the more typical business models, and ends up summarizing some key concerns that should be kept in mind when setting up an e-learning business.

Abstract:

This tutorial offers an overview of planning and developing workshops in the use of multimedia elements to visualize information in the classroom. Attendees should understand a range of technology alternatives available for developing visual communication materials. Several techniques to develop multimedia materials will be introduced to attendees. Materials and resources on multimedia technology will be available for attendees. The objectives of the tutorial are to help attendees:

- Understand the planning and development of workshops for faculty in the use of multimedia elements for visualizing information
- Understand a range of technology alternatives for developing multimedia elements for visualizing information
- Learn about materials and resources for use in developing workshops.

Abstract:

In certain applications, experiments distributed in time or space deal with the same subject and bring their lighting. Of each experiment, one can build a prediction, a knowledge, according to various techniques of learning. The problem is to answer the following question: how automatically to treat the results obtained by learning on distributed experiments? The meta-learning answers this question. It is a question of building a meta-knowledge, metadata. It makes it possible to define a final prediction and to explain the variations observed on the predictions resulting from each learning. This tutorial presents a state of the art of the meta-learning of distributed and independent experiments. The strategy of voting is thorough and an original strategy, the meta-analytical strategy, is proposed. The talk is based on experiments.

It is not a discussible matter that the return on investment (ROI) companies expect from the Internet based marketing and advertisement techniques has been decreasing in general, after an euphoric period, for the last two years. Consequently, the investment volume is accordingly decreasing, promoting strategic partnerships between companies and organizations and so bringing the Internet advertisement business into a span. In such a framework, new, innovative, low cost, easy to implement, content related Internet marketing tools could bring some “new air” into the business. The entertainment/advertisement relation is the most “assumed to work” trade-off client motivation technique. Nevertheless there is another view into this issue that can be brought into consideration: Comprehension/advertisement trade-off The base of this binomial is the belief that advertisement success depends on how well you direct it to the right target group. We believe that by associating the advertisement directly to the contents of a website, not interfering with its readability in any way, keeping total independence from the content communication concept, gives the advertisement supplier a much more solid and reliable starting point to the advertisement consumer, making it possible to build up a consume-effective click-through rate. By this mean, new advertisement scopes can be opened and the interested market broadened to other non-usual investors. The tutorial we propose to present replies to all these requisites, and gives a new dimension to content related advertisement in the Internet. A very strong focus on technology was necessary to develop a general and broad scope solution to accomplish this goal. Communication issues, database integrity issues and security issues are a part of the total solution framework, providing a totally independent main solution. Platform integration and system architecture concepts where developed trying to keep the level of intrusion in the client interface as low as possible. A” near to zero” degree of coding customisation was accomplished. Nevertheless, other new technologies question the structure of the solution and constant attention to these new players is needed to keep this edge solution there, on the edge.

Abstract:

The rapid growth on technology-supported learning has led the community of designers and developers of learning resources to a point where they have an enormous variety of tools to help their work. However, these tools usually use proprietary solutions, making it very difficult to reuse the learning content outside the scope of the system where it was created. It is also very difficult to provide a mechanism for searching, accessing and integrating such contents. The use of metadata has been proposed as a solution to this problem. Addressing specifically the area of e-learning, IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) is working in an IEEE Specification known as IEEE Learning Object Metadata. In this specification, a Learning Object (LO) is defined as "any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology-supported learning". Examples of LO are instructional content, multimedia content, instructional software, learning objectives, organizations and persons. The IEEE LOM Base Document was built over proposals from other standards initiatives like IMS Project, the European project ARIADNE and Dublin Core. Besides these initiatives other proposals are emerging like SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) and EML (Educational Modelling Language). This tutorial presents basic concepts about metadata and its role in searching and accessing information. Discusses the most important and promising initiatives towards setting standards in learning domain, focusing in e-learning. As the syntax language used by many of the proposals is XML, a brief introduction to this language is also presented.

Considering the role-played by Internet in the modern society, a new range of possibilities has been opened. In this context it’s my personal belief that this project (interactive forum/library) can make the difference in international political and cultural dynamics. I present here, before the specialists, an original project for the development of a platform for respect and mutual understanding between the different cultural and political background of individuals. Aiming this objective we start by the idea that you can only fear or reject something that you don’t know or fully understand. Personal interests are not bound to disappear. Free markets, concurrence and the development of technology makes mankind walk forward. But there must be space and wide diffusion of the character that has distinguished man from other animals besides nationalities, religions, regional specificities or all frontiers we are here together. Survival can’t mean the annihilation of the differences. Can we prove to be truly sapiens? Or is our specie in danger of extinction? By investigating and establishing these different identities we are developing the self-esteem that will be decisive in the appeal for new publics that can profit from technologies in ways otherwise unthinkable, as they would be tempted to reject them. We could expect a new breath for the Information Society. We would be asserting to the extension of the idea, giving substance to the word globalization. This objective can be reach by the development of this space (interactive forum/library)
1. Understand diversity to enhance unity
2. Wide range of languages in which the information is vehicular
3. Comparative study of religions, political systems, public institutions and cultural backgrounds
4. Identify the elements that characterize and distinguish the different communities, preserve specificities, creation of self-esteem – the absence of this regard is the main reason why the so called globalization is associated with the idea of the homogenization of the society
5. Promoting the interchange of people, knowledge and commercial activities.
This would be a challenge for the specialists in international relations, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, artist working closely with new technologies specialists all over the world – to develop this kind of investigation and publication of results. For the economic structures it would correspond to an extension in markets and a good investment. An investment in future generations.

Committees:

Conference & Program Chair: Pedro Isaías, Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University), Portugal