Community Portals Research Articles

Cultural education of children and teenagers and the challenges ahead of cultural institutions

Development of talents and competence in the contemporary culture and aesthetic education of children and adolescents occupy a special place in the educational research of the twenty-first century. Recommendations for how to best shape these competence from early childhood have become a driving force behind the designing and implementation of various educational initiatives at schools and in non-formal educational settings. In the difficult time of the new pandemic (2020), activities aimed at developing social skills in young audiences have become particularly relevant. Even though, due to spreading restrictions, these were mostly transferred to the Internet, many cultural institutions have tried to re-establish and maintain effective relationship with their audiences. Recent years have shown how important it has become to build relationship and develop social skills in direct contact with culture, art and other people. In their research analyses, the authors of this paper have focused primarily on the programs of leisure activities addressed to children and adolescents. The research involved the analysis of the websites of selected cultural institutions (programs), educational websites (reviews) and community portals (comments), with a particular emphasis on the competition for the most development-enhancing initiative for children. Data were also obtained via interviews with program organizers. Analysis of cultural institutions’ programs show their involvement in the cultural education of children and youth. Non-formal education in cultural institutions is focused on the development of creativity and cultural and social competence.

Historical Overview of the Development of the Symbiota Specimen Management Software and Review of the Interoperability Challenges and Opportunities Informing Future Development

Symbiota (Gries et al. 2014) is an open-source software platform designed to function as a biodiversity Content Management System (CMS) for specimen-based datasets. Primarily in North America though also increasingly on other continents, the Symbiota software platform has risen to prominence in the past ten years as one of the more heavily accessed mid-level aggregation tools for assembling, managing, and distributing datasets associated with biological collections. There are more than 50 public Symbiota portals being managed and promoted by various biodiversity projects and communities. Together, these portals assist in the distribution and mobilization of more than 55 million specimen and 20 million image records associated with hundreds of institutions. The central premise of a standard Symbiota installation is to function as a mini-aggregator capable of integrating multiple occurrence datasets that collectively represent a community-based research data perspective. Datasets are typically limited to geographic and taxonomic scopes that best represent the community of researchers leading the project. Symbiota portals often publish "snapshot records" that originate from external management systems but otherwise align with the portal's community of practice and data focus. Specimen management tools integrated into the Symbiota platform also support the ability to manage occurrence data directly within the portal as “live datasets”. The software has become widely adopted as a data management platform. Approximately 550 specimen datasets consisting of more than 14 million specimen records are being directly managed within a portal instance. The appeal of Symbiota as an occurrence management tool is also exemplified by the fact that 18 of the 30 federally funded Thematic Collection Networks (https://www.idigbio.org/content/thematic-collections-networks) have elected to use Symbiota as their central data management system. Symbiota's well-developed data ingestion tools, coupled with the ability to store import profile definitions, allows data snapshots to be partially coordinated with source data managed within a variety of remote systems such as Specify (https://specifysoftware.org), EMu (https://emu.axiell.com), Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT, https://gbif.org/ipt) publishers, as well as other Symbiota instances. As with Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) publishing models, data snapshots are periodically refreshed, based on transfer protocols compliant with Darwin Core (DwC) data exchange standards. The Symbiota data management tools provide the means for the community of experts running the portal to annotate and augment snapshot datasets with the goal of improving the overall fitness-for-use of the aggregated dataset. Even though a data refresh from the source dataset would effectively replace the data improvement with the original flawed data, the system’s ability to maintain data versioning of all annotations made within the portal allows data improvements to be reapplied. However, inadequate support for bi-directional data flow between the portal and the source collection effectively isolates the annotations within the portal. On one hand, the mini-aggregator model of Symbiota can be viewed as compounding the further fragmentation of occurrence data. Rather than conforming to the vision of pushing data from the source, to the global aggregators and ultimately the research community, specimen data are being pushed from source collections to a growing array of mini-aggregators. On the other hand, community portals have the ability to incentivize experts and enthusiasts to publish high-quality, "data-intelligent" biodiversity data products with the potential of channeling data improvements back to the source. This presentation will begin with a historical review of the development of the Symbiota model including major shifts in the evolution of the development goals. We will discuss the benefits and shortcomings of the data model and provide a description of schema modifications that are currently in development. We will also discuss the successes and challenges associated with building data commons directly associated with communities of researchers. We will address the software’s role in mobilizing occurrence data within North America and the efficacy of adhering to the FAIR use principles of making datasets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (Wilkinson et al. 2016). Finally, we will discuss interoperability developments that we hope will improve the flow of data annotations between decentralized networks of data portals and the original data providers at the source.

Admissibility of the Use of Electronic Means of Evidence Obtained Unlawfully in a Civil Proceeding

The admissibility of the use of evidence obtained unlawfully, referred to as the fruit of the poisonous tree, still remains an unresolved issue on the basis of Polish procedural law. The author in her paper will focus on such forms of evidence, which are more and more often the subject of evidentiary procedures, noting that this mainly concerns the content of private conversations conducted with the use of messengers and community portals, call recordings, and telephone billings, data obtained from mobile phones, or so-called print screens, which are often obtained in an illegal manner, interfering with the sphere of privacy of the other person.

SPONTANICZNOŚĆ CZY ODGÓRNE STEROWANIE? FUNKCJONOWANIE ZJAWISK SPOŁECZNYCH POWIĄZANYCH Z KULTURĄ MASOWĄ NA PRZYKŁADZIE FANDOMU GWIEZDNYCH WOJEN

The article is devoted to the issue of the impact of the new media on the mass culture. Authors have explored community portals using modern methods of quantitative and qualitative data analysis. The results show that belief in the more democratic, egalitarian character of the new media compared to the traditional corporate model of the mass-media industry may be a delusion as large mass media corporations have also had a great impact on the functioning of social networking sites.

Mapowanie zagrożeń epidemicznych jako przykład wielopostaciowości administracji publicznej

The article is dedicated to pointing out and discussing the challenges which are encountered by epidemiological supervisory authorities in the face of globalization. In the first part, an analysis of the International Health Regulations (IHR), which create the basis of the global epidemiological supervision, is presented. In the light of these regulations, the decision instruments necessary to estimate the risk in the case of infectious diseases will be determined. In the second part, the author discusses an extremely interesting problem connected with the so-called spatial epidemiology, which deals with mapping of the location and intensity of diseases. Determining the appropriate repositories, using information based on unofficial reports and activities of electronic media and community portals in it, will be important for the conducted analysis. It is significant, because more and more often the opinion that progress in fighting epidemics can be made through using the so-called cognitive surplus appearing on the basis of crowdsourcing in the decision making process is winning more and more popularity.

Book review of: Klaudia Śledzińska (ed.). Responsibility – Participation - Conscious Citizenship – The Dilemmas of Global Education. Warszawskie Wydawnictwo Sociologiczne. Warszawa 2017.

Book review of: Klaudia Śledzińska (ed.). Responsibility – Participation - Conscious Citizenship – The Dilemmas of Global Education. Warszawskie Wydawnictwo Sociologiczne. Warszawa 2017.

Praktyczne, aspekty gromadzenia, opracowania i udostępniania informacji specjalistycznej. Casus informacji genealogicznej

Genealogical research is enjoying a great interest of scientists as well as fans investigating their family roots in our times. Although no precise definition of genealogical information exists, in practice it assumes strictly determined forms which makes it hard to mistake it for any other type of specialist information (e.g. medical, European or legal information). Its description is complex and based on special systems of numbering of ancestors, descendants and kinships as a distinctive feature. Similarly to other types of information, genealogical information is diversely presented. This thesis finds its confirmation in a number of genealogical initiatives carried out in the network environment: web pages of institutions dealing with genealogy, services devoted to family search, databases specializing in the storage of genealogical data, and specialist community portals enabling to create family trees. The article is an attempt to discuss the nature of genealogical information, most commonly used systems of genealogical numbering and model electronic resources dedicated to this area.

Social media for informal science learning in China: A case study

This article reports a case study on a popular informal science learning community via social media in China, named GuoKr (meaning “nutshell” in English). Data were collected through a variety of Chinese social media and social networking sites, web-based community portals, and discussion boards. Content analyses and data mining were conducted to investigate how GuoKr successfully attracted and engaged public in informal learning on scientific topics in particular. The study found three key characteristics that contributed to the success of such learning communities: (a) utilizing a variety of social media to empower participants with just-in-time, accidental learning opportunities; (b) daily tweets related to emerging or ongoing social events or hot topics to provide brief but intriguing knowledge “bites”, which often leads to extended readings and related resources; and (c) the integration of social media and traditional face-to-face local events to engage the public in science-related learning and knowledge sharing. Practical and research implications are discussed with suggestions for future research as related to ubiquitous learning communities for informal science learning.

Procuring the Dropbox Using Honey Encryption Technique

Cloud Computing is the important aspect in Information Technology, which is believed to be suitable for Small business purposes for accessing the resources .Cloud Community portals are used for storing, accessing, synchronizing and for backup the files .The main concern in cloud portal is the security issues in public cloud like Drop box. Drop box are used to access the data whenever needed. In this paper, the attack of Drop box by means of Spam mails is taken into consideration and encryption techniques such as Honey Encryption is used for avoidance of attacks caused by Spam mails such as data stealing, guessing of passwords etc.

Community-Based Participatory Research as Worldview or Instrumental Strategy: Is It Lost in Translation(al) Research?

Community involvement in community-wide interventions is important for a variety of scientific, ethical, and pragmatic reasons. However, the specific meaning of community involvement depends on the details of how it is enacted. Katz et al. outline an ambitious effort to blend the science of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with the processes of community-based participatory research (CBPR) in translational research. RCTs provide the science, while CBPR provides the processes of tailoring and implementation. Katz et al. offer a detailed example of how research might occur through the use of community portals and community health advisors as local advocates for the delivery of interventions. Their examples are rich and raise fundamental issues regarding the importance of CBPR and the role of local participation in translational research more generally.

A risk management model for securing virtual healthcare communities

Virtual healthcare communities aim to bring together healthcare professionals and patients, improve the quality of healthcare services and assist healthcare professionals and researchers in their everyday activities. In a secure and reliable environment, patients share their medical data with doctors, expect confidentiality and demand reliable medical consultation. Apart from a concrete policy framework, several ethical, legal and technical issues must be considered in order to build a trustful community. This research emphasises on security issues, which can arise inside a virtual healthcare community and relate to the communication and storage of data. It capitalises on a standardised risk management methodology and a prototype architecture for healthcare community portals and justifies a security model that allows the identification, estimation and evaluation of potential security risks for the community. A hypothetical virtual healthcare community is employed in order to portray security risks and the solutions that the security model provides.

Practice‐oriented toolkits for virtual communities of practice

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the collaborative practices of virtual teams carrying out knowledge‐based work and the tools required/used to assemble “collective” artefacts.Design/methodology/approachThe vast majority of recent work on communities of practice is devoted to community management (i.e. discovering, building, and maintaining communities), dismissing or undermining community practices and how they are technologically mediated (i.e. the practice‐specific tools and artefacts involved). This paper investigates existing practices and makes use of scenarios to envision new distributed collective practices in a designated application domain. The instruments used include both empirical tools (i.e. survey of current practice and expert interviews) and analytical tools (i.e. scenarios of use, walkthroughs, and virtual prototyping) to provide insight towards the design of practice‐oriented toolkits.FindingsThe proposed approach is validated in the context of an electronic village of local interest with a thematic focus on regional tourism, highlighting the key role of “collective” knowledge management in information‐based industries whose products are non‐material (intangible) and knowledge is central to gaining competitive advantage. The results include a general model for practice‐oriented toolkits conceived of as separate software components from (but interoperable to) the community support system and devised to establish a place for engaging in the practice the community is about. This model is then used to build an operational toolkit for assembling vacation packages by cross‐organization virtual communities of practice.Practical implicationsVirtual communities of practice (or partnerships) necessitate smooth integration of community management and practice‐specific tasks and tools. Community management tasks can be supported by augmenting capabilities of existing community portals to allow for community registration, role undertaking, declaration of virtual assets, etc. Practice‐oriented tasks should be designed in such a way so as to capture and accommodate domain‐specific vocabulary.Originality/valueModel‐based techniques and domain‐specific design languages are used as the unifying mechanism (i.e. software factory) for integrating community management and practice‐oriented artefacts. These techniques are designed and implemented into a software platform so as to facilitate the systematic accumulation and reuse of knowledge towards the construction of collective artefacts.

Sharing information across community portals with FOAFRealm

Community portals such as blogs, wikis and photo-sharing sites have become the new channels for information dissemination on the web. They contain a huge amount of valuable information that is often voluntarily delivered by experts. The most useful results of searching the web very often come from some sort of a community site. We present a method of sharing information across multiple community portals through a Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering (SSCF) system. It utilises FOAFRealm, a user profile management system which extends the popular 'Friend of a Friend' (FOAF) metadata and enables users to share the bookmarks and community documents that they create. Moreover, the proposed solution allows both a seamless connection of different portals and the easy identification of contributors. We describe the required infrastructure, including the components that enable content sharing and browsing. Finally, we demonstrate a verification of our idea.

Application of Social Software in Tourism Industry

Despite many controversies that arose around terms linked to the second wave in the Inter- net evolution more and more companies use social software in their web activity. Nowadays organizations from different industries apply single tools (e.g. blogs or discussion lists), build complex community portals or use already functioning ones. The paper examines premises and possibilities of business application of user-fed Web 2.0 solutions in tourism industry. Introduction: Web 2.0 in business Over the last few years a new trend in functioning and utilization of the Internet has emerged. This new trend is known as Web 2.0, what is to symbolize the second wave in the Internet evolution. The term Web 2.0 appeared for the first time in 2004 in conjunction with a confe- rence organized by O'Reilly Media 1 . It has been quite imprecise and controversial from the very beginning like the phenomenon of the second wave itself. One of its' opponents, Tim Berners-Lee claims, that cooperation and interaction, which suppose to be the hallmarks of Web 2.0, were the immanent elements of the first wave of the Internet evolution 2 . From this point of view Web 2.0 is only a marketing buzzword, a new package for an already known product. One should agree with the father of WWW up to a certain degree at which only a potential of the web is concerned. However, considering an actual realization of that potential, ena- bled by new technological developments in web structures and content creation tools, and manifesting in more and more active user attitudes, it appears that Web 2.0 differs from its' predecessor in an architectural as well as utilitarian way. According to T. O'Reilly Web 2.0 is a multidimensional concept 3 based on the perception of web as an interactive platform for providing services 4 rather than static software as it was before. Shape and configuration of those services can be dynamically changed while control over their content (data) is in hands of users. It means, that an architecture of web solutions is only outlined (often with the vital participation of advanced users) and then it emerges and evolves during development of user's activity. To the most popular Web 2.0 tools belong: community portals 5 (the most advanced and complex tools), blogs (virtual diaries, often in photo and video form), tools for immediate di- scussion and opinion exchange - internet forums (asynchronous) and chats (synchronous), wiki mechanism (supporting individual creation of sites content by their users), RSS (applied

Investigating online community portals for enhanced alumni networking

PurposeThe core purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which web portal technology and online communities could be successfully applied by the alumni offices of higher education institutions in South Africa (using the University of Johannesburg as a case study) to create information‐sharing with and amongst its alumni affinity groups, in order to build and maintain valuable relationships, networks and partnerships.Design/methodology/approachThis research project falls under Pasteur's quadrant of use‐inspired research. Using quantitative empirical research, a total number of 10,380 questionnaires was distributed to graduates of the University of Johannesburg at the Autumn graduation ceremonies in April 2006, thereby making it a self‐selecting, purposeful (purposive) and convenient sample.FindingsBased on the literature study, the results of the empirical research and the case study, the final conclusion made from this research project is that an online community portal can enhance to a large extent the networking of alumni in the South African higher education sector. In addition, the research data collection instrument is transferable to a number of other higher education settings. In particular, the user‐centric information resource questions provide useful insights into alumni information‐seeking behaviour and needs.Research limitations/implicationsDue to the University of Johannesburg Alumni being used as a case study for this research project, the research findings are tailored for implementation by this entity. However, the processes that were followed for this research project in terms of conducting a needs analysis with regard to the information needs of the alumni target audience and the types of questions that were posed could be guiding principles for other South African higher education sector (SAHES) institutions that want to develop such a tool for managing their alumni's information needs. In addition, the framework for the study predicts continuing alliances among academic services, placement services, library services, and fund development on higher education campuses.Originality/valueThe paper should prove useful to other academic institutions since it develops a helpful tool to assist in managing alumni networking behaviour, needs and resources.

Interpreting the success and failure of regional internet community portals in promoting e‐commerce adoption by SMEs

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the impact of cultural factors on the success or failure of three Western Australian (WA) government‐funded collaboratively‐owned regional internet community portals designed to encourage small to medium‐sized enterprise adoption of e‐commerce. Two portals were rural/country‐based and the third was in metropolitan WA.Design/methodology/approachHofstede's cultural dimensions theory is used to interpret the findings of study which employed the structured case study methodology using a multiple‐case embedded‐design.FindingsAustralia with cultural traits of high individualism, masculinity, low power distance and moderately low uncertainty avoidance, would not be a laggard in adopting technological innovation. In such a culture, the individual's perceived usefulness and personal gain will be the most important factors in technology acceptance. However, this research highlights a need for caution in using national culture to examine IS adoption. In this study, the collectivist culture of the rural communities was instrumental in initially sustaining their portals, as participants placed the community's perceived usefulness and gain from the portal above that of the individual. The individualistic nature of the owners and the communities catered for by the metropolitan portal resulted in its failure.Research limitations/implicationsWhile culture is an important construct in the success of community‐based IS endeavours, it should be examined at the local level instead of a national one. The limitations of this paper are that culture is examined only from the perspective of collectivism or individualism, and that the study is based only in Australia.Practical implicationsCultural contexts underlying regional collaborative IS efforts can in some cases be leveraged to achieve intended outcomes. In others, they can indicate that the initiatives are not suitable and would require significantly greater resources.Originality/valueThis study contributes to knowledge in the area of the role of culture in community‐based IS initiatives by showing that outcomes of similar initiatives can differ based on sub cultural differences within a national culture.

Community-driven ontology construction in social networking portals

The goal of the work presented here is to introduce community-driven ontology management as a new approach to ontology construction and demonstrate the added value to community portals of being community driven. The three main parts of the work are (i) the development of a framework allowing and motivating collaborative ontology construction and reuse for the end users (a person or a community), (ii) building a prototype on the basis of this specification, namely the People's portal, and (iii) the application of the developed infrastructure to scenarios in semantically-enhanced community portals with the involvement of real users. The development of the framework for community-driven ontology construction is aimed at enriching the established practices for ontology development and population with community-supporting features. The objective of community-driven ontology management is to provide the means and motivations for a large number of users to “weave” and adopt the Semantic Web. The People's portal infrastructure allows end users to define the content structure (i.e., develop ontologies), to populate ontologies, and to define the ways in which the content is managed on various semantically-enhanced community portals where the infrastructure is applied. An analysis of the functionalities of existing (Semantic) Web community environments and the empirical results obtained in this work are indicative of its feasibility and of the advantages of community-driven ontology construction. In practice, the communities were capable of introducing on the community portals such ontology items as Classes, Subclasses, Properties, Instances, ontology mappings, and of reusing these items afterwards.

From business concept innovation to a business system: a case study of a virtual city portal

The growing ubiquity of information technology is enabling the development of new services which consumers can access with existing devices such as mobile or smart phones, PDAs, home and public computers. The services are accessed via community portals that host a variety of services in one convenient virtual place, like a virtual city. The function of the portal is to provide services to citizens whose needs can be better met via a virtual interface. The main argument of this paper is that including the customer into the innovation process and creating a business system based on value flows are the key elements of creating new business models in e-services. In this paper we introduce the business concept innovation process for applying e-government in cities in the form of a virtual city portal. Furthermore, we introduce a value flow-based business system for implementing the portal.

E-forecasting: challenges and opportunities

The major advantage of electronic markets over nonelectronic traditional market places is that trading partners use more sophisticated methods, rules and systems of information exchange. The internet has inevitably boosted this advantage over the last decade, making electronic markets the dominant 'playing field' for various industrial and business activities. Forecasting is one of them; it is important to firms because it can help ensure that resources are used effectively. In the market there are a number of off-the-self system products that provide forecasts. The new trend of moving traditional software packages to web services has pushed forecasting to a new dimension – e-forecasting, as called by the authors. In this paper we explore the challenges and opportunities arising from e-forecasting. Two very fertile e-areas for possible application are discussed in detail: e-government and forecasting community portals.

Developing Business Community Portals for SMEs – Issues of Design, Development and Sustainability

Governments worldwide are using funding initiatives to encourage small businesses to adopt e‐commerce technology. In Australia both State and Federal Governments have encouraged e‐commerce uptake through the funding of Internet portal developments that have a specific community or business focus. The success of such portals, as with many Web developments, has been mixed and there is little evidence of any evaluation of the effectiveness of such investments. This paper reports on research into an Australian B2B business community portal from launch to closure. A survey and in‐depth interviews with portal participants were undertaken. The research sought to understand how the portal had been developed, and what factors may have contributed to its demise. The findings identified a number of factors, not discussed in the literature, that are important in portal development. These include: how the development process is undertaken; technological readiness of the small business owners; meeting business expectat...