Maintaining topic integrity in online discussions can be problematic for instructors. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of topic drift yields insight into how online classroom discussions can be effectively managed, enabling facilitators to assure conversational flow while limiting unproductive digressions. This paper presents an analysis of topic drift in asynchronous learning environmen...

This paper explores visualizations of document collections, which we call topic maps. Our topic maps are based on a topic model of the document collection, where the topic model is used to determine the semantic content of each document. Using two collections of search results, we show how topic maps reveal the semantic structure of a collection and visually communicate the diversity of content...

TELEIOS is a recent European project that addresses the need for scalable access to petabytes of Earth Observation data and the discovery of knowledge that can be used in applications. To achieve this, TELEIOS builds on scientific databases, linked geospatial data, ontologies, and techniques for discovering knowledge from satellite images and auxiliary data sets. In this paper we outline the kn...

This paper raises some issues and questions intended to spark debate, raise some hackles and spur action. It may upset some people in the process, but hopefully the debate will enrich the topic map community as a whole. The hope of the author is that by bringing these items to light, smart people with good ideas and lots of energy may step forward in order to solve these problems. So why aren't...

The visualization of large text databases and document collections is an important step towards more exible and interactive types of information access and retrieval. This paper presents a probabilistic approach which combines a statistical, model{ based analysis of a given set of document with a topological visualization principle. Our method can be utilized to derive topic maps, which represe...

Cet article décrit un outil permettant de soutenir des activités coopératives distribuées en conception mécanique à l’aide d’annotations. La conception assistée par ordinateur donne lieu à l’utilisation et à la création d’un grand nombre de documents et de commentaires liés aux documents qu’il faut classifier finement pour permettre leur réutilisation tout au long du projet. L’article se focali...

Topic Maps ermöglichen, semantische Navigationsstrukturen über Dokumente im Web zu modellieren. Nach einer kurzen Vorstellung der wichtigsten Elemente des Standards untersuchen wir die Anwendbarkeit am Beispiel der Modellierung der Kompetenzen von wissenschaftlichen Mitarbeitern, um Experten für den Review von Fachartikeln auffinden und auswählen zu können. Dabei wird der Standard im Kontext de...

Geo-centric web interface such as MSN Virtual Earth (http://local.live.com) and Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) are useful to visualize spatially and geographically related data such as addresses, neighborhoods, weather, traffic, and so on. Desires to augment additional useful information to these interfaces have led people to create custom applications that overlay their own data on top o...