The Invisible Web Weblog

These days I am busy with marking a pile of exam papers and reading my students' assignments. This is very encouraging for me that some of them have done their coursework very well which shows their enthusiasm for learning. Hopefully, in the next semesters I can involve them with more inquiry-based and reflective learning tasks to prepare them to be independent and lifelong learners.

The 2nd ACM International Workshop on ‘ Improving Non English Web Searching ’ will be held in conjunction with ACM CIKM 2008. The main aims of this workshop are to identify the problems in web searching when working with non-English languages and to propose solutions and tools so as to improve web retrieval systems.

June came and this is the exam time again. Now, I am preparing my exams for the next week and will be busy very soon with a pile of papers to mark.

The 6th International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations (ITNG ’09) will take place in 27-29 April, 2009 in Las Vegas. Its Web technologies track covers topics like Web algorithms and techniques, Web user studies, search engines, log analysis, Web mining, multimedia Web, Web interfaces, Web architectures; e.g. performance, fault tolerance, design, etc.

Webology is going to publish a special issue on Folksonomies, the Web and Search Engines. Folksonomy is a user-generated system that allows users to tag their favorite web resources with their chosen natural-language words or phrases. These tags can be used to classify web resources and to express users' preferences. Folksonomy may be generated and shared collaboratively by the creators and consumers of web content. Contributions to this issue should address folksonomies, taxonomies, knowledge organizartion, the Web and search engines. The topics are folksonomies, taxonomies, search engines,social bookmarking, social tagging, social classification, social softwares, social networks, social indexing, collaborative tagging, controlled vocabulary, knowledge organization, knowledge management and the role of the folksonomy in information retrieval. Submissions should follow the Author Guidelines of Webology avilable at this link .

My recent paper entitled "Exploratory nature of, and uncertainty tolerance in, qualitative research" was published in New Library World, Vol. 109 No. 5/6, 2008, pp. 273-286. The abstract is as follows: Purpose – This paper seeks to depict an overall picture of an exploratory research journey to exemplify how qualitative studies on little understood phenomena can be done successfully. The paper aims to show how the author adopted an appropriate approach and an apposite methodology to cope with the uncertainty, stress and ambiguity arising during exploratory research. Design/methodology/approach – The paper was developed based on a reflective and narrative approach by the author to highlight the pivotal milestones of the reported research. The paper narrates how the research naturally evolved through seven stages including origination, orientation, exploration, elucidation, consolidation, reflection and culmination. Findings – Dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity is inevitabl...

I had a workshop on "Qualitative Research in Library and Information Science" in Kermanshah on Thursday 22 May 2008. The workshop aimed to illustrate an introduction to this issue for LIS students.