Projects / Programmes
E-democracy and dynamic web interfaces
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 7.00.00 |
Interdisciplinary research |
|
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| P160 |
Natural sciences and mathematics |
Statistics, operations research, programming, actuarial mathematics |
e-democracy, on-line participation, forum interfaces, social networks, statistics, artificial intelligence
Researchers (10)
Organisations (1)
Abstract
The Internet brought new prospectives for enhancing democratic processes in contemporary societies. Within this context, the on-line communication presents one of the key components. However, the existing on-line interfaces for discussing public matters do not fully exploit potentials of the internet, as they still use the rigid options established more than a decade ago. This is particularly true for on-line forums - as the major venue for public discussion (e.g. PhPBB) – which do not take the full advantage of recent technological achievements. In particular, they do not fully exploit the information from the past (forum) behaviour of each user and they do not tailor the layout design according to the user specifics. Users are thus often fed with unimportant messages, while the relevant messages of their interest - implicit from their previous behaviour and from their social networks - are not exposed to them.
The proposed research will study the usage of the archive data (i.e. tracking history), web survey responses and other available sources of information about the users (registration information, personalization preferences) to construct the optimal on-line interface. The algorithms will be developed and the feasibility of their continuous applications (versus batch runs) will be tested. Specifically, the advanced multivariate statistical tools, stochastic algorithms, data mining, artificial intelligence approaches will be used. One of the central focuses will be also the analysis of large social networks (i.e. the tool PAJEK) which will reveal the social network structure of the (forum) participants.
The results will provide the basis for dynamic generation of the interfaces, which are tailored and optimized for each user.
Research is multidisciplinary, as it links the areas of social sciences with the areas of statistical, informatics and computer sciences. The research group is composed from leading and internationally recognized Slovenian researchers from the areas of web surveys, social network analysis, stochastic processes, artificial intelligence, data mining and e-democracy.
The results of the project have a considerable potential for a major breakthrough in designing e-democracy interfaces.
Significance for science
The presentations of the result of the project at largest international conferences confirm that the project deals with extremely relevant contemporary issue. Various on-line communities are now becoming more and more an object of numerous researches, because the participation in on-line communities is becoming increasingly important component of the lives of the citizens, including the activities related to e-democracy aspects.
The project contributes to the understanding of on-line communities by elaboration of the algorithms that can discover social ties and reconstruct the hidden structure of social networks in on-line forums, where there is no direct information available about explicit relation (i.e. citation). The development of corresponding metrics for discovering and measuring social ties is thus an important contribution to global understanding of social relations in on-line communities.
Another important result of the project is the refined web survey instrument, which enables the smooth integration of survey data collection into on-line community platforms. The archived log information of on line forums can be thus continuously combined with corresponding survey information data collection. This contributes to the improved power of the prediction of user’s behaviour, as well as for identification of users preferred topics and preferred co-users (from corresponding social networks). The latter is than the corner stone for improving and tailoring the user’s individual web interface, so that the users can see relevant information being exposed on the screen of the monitor. These all enables the participants in on-line forums related to e-democracy to be better informed. As a consequence the user can also reacts better.
It is important to note that on-line forums are the most generic form of on-line communities. The more recent formats -such as blogs, social network sites (Facebook), virtual worlds - basically use similar on-line communication principles and platforms, although it is centred around (hosting) persons and not so much on topics as it is in forums. Our research thus contributes not only to forum communication related to e-democracy, but also to the general understanding of on-line communications.
Significance for the country
Our research is highly relevant also for the on-line communities in Slovenia. Obviously, the Slovenian Internet users are also increasingly involved in these on-line activities (forums, logs, social networks, virtual words).
The latest data for Slovenia in year 2009 indicate that a third of Internet users from 10 to 74 years old have a profile in online social networks, a half of Internet users access to online e-government sites and almost two thirds of Internet users in Slovenia access to online forums.
Tools, algorithms and metrics developed for the purpose of the project can be used for improvement of online forums in Slovenia related to e-democracy, but also to other on-line communities.
An important contributions to development of Slovenia are also a free source platform for content managing named Sisplet CMS http://sisplet.org and an application for collecting of online survey data 1CS http://1cs.si.
Most important scientific results
Annual report
2008,
final report,
complete report on dLib.si
Most important socioeconomically and culturally relevant results
Annual report
2008,
final report,
complete report on dLib.si
