The Invisible Web Weblog

The recent issue of the International Journal of Information Management, includes the following research papers: On the motivating impact of price and online recommendations at the point of online purchase, The cognitive selection framework for knowledge acquisition strategies in virtual communities, Knowledge management and communication in Brazilian agricultural research: An integrated procedural approach, The intellectual development of the technology acceptance model: A co-citation analysis, The scope of external information-seeking under uncertainty: An individual-level study Information and communication technologies (ICTs) and farmers’ decision-making across the agricultural supply chain, Understanding the dynamics of users’ belief in software application adoption, Enterprise Information Portals in support of business process, design teams and collaborative commerce performance.

The Special Interest Group on International Information Issues (SIG-III) of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) announced its eleventh competition for papers to be submitted for the 2011 Annual Meeting. Topics include the following 7 core areas: 1. Intercultural Information Ethics: Critical reflection on the ethical challenges related to the global and cross-cultural production, storage, and distribution of information, as well as the ethical dimensions of the global development and implementation of information systems, infrastructures, and policies. 2. Information Behaviour: Information needs, information seeking, information gaps and sense-making in various contexts including work, interests or every-day life activities by individuals or groups. 3. Knowledge Organization: Indexing, index construction, indexing languages, thesaurus construction, terminology, classification of information in any form, tagging (expert, user-based, automatic), filt...

The 14th International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2011) will take place in Poznan, Poland, June 15-17, 2011. The conference theme is: Towards Flexible, Personalized and Adaptive Business Applications. The topics include the following issues: Business Process Management - Semantic business process management - Adaptive and dynamic processes - Supply chain processes - ERP implementations - Integration of data and processes - Collaborative BPM Ontologies - Creation, learning, population, evolution and evaluation - Ontologies for enterprise content management - Natural language processing and cognitive science - Semantic integration of heterogeneous semi-structured sources - Interoperability of heterogeneous information systems - Business models for Web information integration Contexts - Location-aware and geography-centric information systems - Wireless and mobile applications - Multi-agent distributed systems - Semantic web personaliza...

Today afternoon I delivered a presentation at the third meeting of LIS journals’ chief editors in Tehran. The topic of my presentation was about the process of Peer Review and the possible challenges and difficulties that a journal’s editorial board in general, and reviewers in particular, might encounter during refereeing process. I also suggested a number of research topics on this issue that might be useful for those who are working on this field. I will upload the PowerPoint file of this presentation on my homepage for everyone who might be interested to find out more details about it.

Today morning I had a workshop in Tehran entitled "Essential Skills for Teachers and Students to Evaluate the Quality, Usability and Authenticity of Electronic Resources". I'll upload the PowerPoint file on my homepage for everyone who might be interested to find out more details about this event.

13th ISSI (International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics) Conference will take place in Durban, South Africa from 4th to 8th July 2011. The conference topics include: theory, methods and techniques in Scientometrics and Infometrics, citation and co-citation analysis, indicators, Webometrics, mapping & visualization, research policy, productivity & publications, journals, databases and electronic publications, scholar collaborations, country level studies and patent analysis. For more details, please have a look at the conference’s website .

I have written a column in IBNA today entitled “Science in Scientometrics Scale”. In this brief note, I explained that, regarding the dynamic and multi-faceted nature of science and science progress, this is a very challenging and difficult task to quantify scientific achievements. I believe Scientometrics will be more successful if experts in this area can develop more sophisticated and efficient tools to assess the scientific current trends and issues. The full text of this column is available here .

CLEF 2010: Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation will be held from 20 to 23 September, in Padua. This event is an examples of research activities on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) studies. According to their call for paper , the relevant topics for the conference include: novel methodologies for the design of evaluation tasks, especially user-centric ones; alternative methods for improving and automating ground-truth creation; task-oriented and easy to communicate metrics; innovative techniques for analyzing the experimental results, including statistical analysis, data mining, and information visualization; infrastructures for bringing automation and collaboration in the evaluation process; component-based evaluation approaches; analysis of the impact of multilingual/multicultural/multimodal differences on interface and search design; multilinguality and multimodality in relevant application communities – e.g. digital libraries, intellec...

Yesterday I was the external examiner for a doctorial thesis in LIS. It was about the evaluation of user interface in Persian web-based digital libraries. Being an examiner, is a good opportunity to review all the required features that we usually expect of a thesis. I did my assessment in seven levels including: originality of the topic, links with the literature body, soundness of the methodology, value of the findings, thoroughness of the analysis, applicability of the results, and coherence and consistency of the thesis. While I was reading this thesis, in the past few days, I was thinking about what makes a PhD thesis different from a master dissertation. In summary, I think a doctorial thesis should have all the required characteristics of a master dissertation, along with five main distinctive aspects including: an original topic, a comprehensive and an analytical literature review, a sound and rigorous methodology, a deep and thorough analysis of the collected data, and finally...

Recently, I made up a new phrase which I would like to call it ‘Desalination of Information’. This is a metaphoric view about the way that people can purify the material that they get from the web. In fact, if we assume the web as ‘an ocean of information’ then end users who are thirsty for drinkable water require desalinated water from that ocean which can be achieved through ‘Desalination of Information’. Therefore this is a process which happens through three stages: 1. Desalination of Information by producers of information who upload information on the web. Of course it does not mean putting control on free publication or censorship. It just means enhancing the information literacy skills of producers to publish better materials. 2. Desalination of Information by search tools which enable people to access less salty information. Search tool designers should enhance the customizing facilities to help in the desalination process of information. 3. Most importantly, Desalination of I...

Since 1998 I have been interested in different methods that we can evaluate websites. I remember in 1999 I initially wanted to carry out my MA dissertation about the evaluation of library websites. However, I changed my idea later on and I did my dissertation about users’ satisfaction with the computerized information services. However, I remained interested about this topic. This link provides you with a good guideline about the assessment of ‘Content Accessibility’ as part of the evaluation of websites. Although this document has been published seven years ago, some of the fundamental aspects of it are still valid. Moreover, if you come across some points which are not valid anymore, it is good to see how the criteria for evaluation change over the time.