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Glossary Definitions - Show Terms | Show Definitions | Search | Edit The following list is the complete set of glossary entries, including the beginning of each entry's definition. Click on the glossary terms shown in bold type to display each term's full definition. This list is ordered alphabetically, use the alphabet index below to jump to the corresponding section of the glossary. A Activity: An activity is a form of doing directed to an object. An object can be a material thing but it can also be less tangible, such as in the case of a plan. In Activity Theory, activity is the smallest unit that still preserves the meaningful context and quality behind any complex series of actions. Activities... (Trevor Collins, 08 December 2010) Activity theory: Activity Theory is a philosophical and cross-disciplinary framework for studying different forms of human practices and development processes, with both individual and social levels interlinked at the same time (Kuutti 1996). The origins of the theory can be found in the work of Russian psychologist... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Algorithm: A well-defined method or systematic procedure to solve a problem. In mathematics an algorithm is as a set of rules for performing a calculation or solving a mathematical problem. In the case of computers and Artificial Intelligence, an algorithm refers to a routine(s) in a computer program used to calculate... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Artificial neural networks: ANNs are programs designed to simulate the way a simple biological nervous system is believed to operate. They are based on simulated nerve cells or neurons, which are joined together in a variety of ways to form networks. These networks have the capacity to learn, memorize and create relationships amongst... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) B Browsing: In browsing, the user navigates in the Collection Documents. Navigation can be done via links between individual documents like in the WWW, via some hierarchical structure, or via a flat organization such as points on this display that represent documents. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) C Clustering: Clustering in general, is defined as grouping similar objects together by optimizing some similarity measure for each cluster such as the within group variance. Since clustering generally works in an unsupervised fashion, it is not necessarily guaranteed to group the same type (class) of objects together. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Collaborative design: The term is used to define design as an activity that involves the coordinated action of both developers and users sharing the object of design (Diaz-Kommonen 2002). (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Collection documents: A collection documents refers to a set of documents. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Content word: Word that carries semantic meaning. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Culture heritage: Cultural heritage is a broad term meant to include all forms of cultural and artistic expression inherited from the near or distant past of a given country or cultural area. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) D Design toolbox: Collection of instruments used by the designer. The design toolbox can include tools such as the software used in graphic design, the languages used to design an interface, as well as the methods used in collaborative design, human computer interaction design and participatory design, among others. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Document: A document refers to a piece of textual information we are interested in. It can refer to a scientific article, an e-mail message or as in our case a piece of text about one item of our information about cultural heritage. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) H Human computer interaction: HCI is the study of how people design, implement, and use interactive computer systems, and how computers affect individuals, organizations, and society. HCI is a research area of increasingly central significance to computer science, other scientific and engineering disciplines, and an ever expanding... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) I Information retrieval: Information Retrieval (IR) is about the process of providing answers to user's information needs. It is thus concerned with the collection, representation, storage, organisation, accessing, manipulation and display, of the information items necessary to satisfying those needs. IR generally investigates... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Interface: In a general sense, it is the portion of a program that interacts between a user and an application, meaning it is what you see on the computer screen. It usually refers to "user interface," which consists of the set of operating system commands, graphical display formats, and other features designed... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Inverse document frequency: Abbreviated as IDF, the number of documents in which the term occurs. So common words will have low IDF and words unique to a document will have high IDF. This is typically used for weighting the parameters of a model. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) L Latent semantic analysis: LSA or LSI which stands for Latent Semantic Analysis or Latent Semantic Indexing is interpreted in two ways. One way to interpret LSA is as a expedient for obtaining approximate estimates of the contextual usage substitutability of words in larger text segments, and of the kinds of meaning similarities... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Latent semantic indexing: See Latent Semantic Analysis (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) M Mediation: Originally conceived by Lev Vygotsky, in Activity Theory the concept is used to explain how artifacts, such as tools, act as mediators between the different elements of an activity. In the case of 'tools as mediators' between the actor and the object of doing, for example, the object is not manipulated... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Multi-word concept: Multi-word concept is represented for two or more words which, together mean a specific concept. For example, in the computer field, word Information by itself means a concept, the word Retrieval means other concept, but together form a specific concept. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) P Projection: Projection is a mathematical operation, which maps a set of one dimension to a set of lower dimension. In the context of relations, this means deletion of some of the attributes of a relation. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Q Query: A string of words that characterizes the information that the user seeks (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) S Scenario: A tool used by designers to create a representation that can be understood by both users and developers. Scenarios are used to make communicaitons more efficient by linking elements from a design situation to a hypothesized effect (Diaz-Kommonen 2002) A description of an activity in narrative form that... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Searching: In the task of searching, the user poses a query and the system tries to locate documents corresponding to the query. The internet search engines are a familiar example of tools that specialize in this tasks. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Self-organizing map: SOM is a feed-forward neural network approach that uses an unsupervised training algorithm and through a process called self-organization, configures the output nodes into a topological representation of the original data. SOM is a neural network technique that learns without supervision. In contrast... (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Semantic space: Is derived on the basis of analyzing relationships among linguistic objects-such terms, sentences, or documents-in the entire Collection Documents. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Similarity: The measure of how alike two documents are, or how alike a document and a query are. A popular method is to compute the cosine of the angle between the vectors. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Singular value decomposition: SVD is an operation, which decomposes any rectangular matrix into three others, the product of which, reconstructs the original matrix perfectly speaking mathematically. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Som_pak: The Self-Organizing Map program package. This software package contains all programs necessary for the correct application of the SOM algorithm in the visualization of complex experimental data. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Stemming: Is the process of removing prefixes and suffixes from words in a document or query in the formation of terms. This is done to group words that have the same conceptual meaning, such as WALK, WALKED, WALKER, and WALKING. Hence the user doesn't have to be so specific in a query. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Stop list: Is a list of commonly used words that do not carry semantic meaning. It also refers to words that have a high frequency across a collection. Some systems have a predetermined stop list. However, the stop list could depend on context. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) T Term: A term refers to a content word in a collection of documents. It also can be described as phrasal concept. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Term frequency: Abbreviated as TF, the number of times a particular term occurs in a given document or query. This count is used in weighting the parameters of a model. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Tool: A tool is any instrument that is used in the transformation of the object of the activity into an outcome. In the development of the activity, tools themselves are transformed. In this manner tools carry with them the culture and history of the activity. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) V Visualization: With visualization, the user can view the similarities, differences, overlaps, and other relationships between collections of documents. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) Vrml: VRML, which is pronounced either "vee-are-em-ell" or "VER-mul", is an abbreviation for Virtual Reality Modeling Language. You might see some references to "Virtual Reality Markup Language", which is what VRML was called at the very beginning -- taking its cue from HTML: Hypertext Markup Language VRML... (Eoin Kilfeather, 23 October 2002) W Weighting: Usually referring to terms, the process of giving emphasis to the parameters for more important terms. A popular weighting scheme is TFxIDF. Other possible schemes are Boolean (1 if the term appears, 0 if not), or by term frequency alone. (Media Lab/UIAH team, 23 October 2002) |
