Answers to these questions can be found in new research conducted by Fahamu and the Centre for Adult Education. The study was conducted in nine Southern African countries, documenting for the first time, valuable information on the training and information needs and human rights priorities of CBOs surveyed. The survey was funded by the Foundation for Human Rights (FHR) and the Open Society Init...

This article presents the findings of a recent study which identified the image resources that professional user groups acknowledged were useful to their work processes. The information behaviors relating to images of several professional user groups-archaeologists , architects, art historians, and artists-were examined in a qualitative research study conducted in 2008-2009. Presented here are ...

The Consumer Health Education Institute (CHEDI) has developed a model system to improve the quality and effectiveness of patient education and health communication. Through assessment of characteristics and preferences, segmentation into groups and matching with the appropriate materials, we have demonstrated that patients and health consumers have different health information needs and prefere...

Many abductive understanding systems explain novel situations by a chaining process that is neutral to explainer needs beyond generating some plausible explanation for the event being explained. This paper examines the relationship of standard models of abductive understanding to the case-based explanation model. In case-based explanation, construction and selection of abductive hypotheses are ...

In this paper, we propose a novel site customization model that relies on a topical ontology in order to learn the user interests as these are exemplified in their site navigations. Based on this knowledge, our mechanism personalizes the site’s content and structure so as to meet particular user needs. Experimental results demonstrate that our model has a significant potential in accurately ide...

There is a growing stream of research into organizational microblogging in recent years. Whilst the extant literature has mainly focused on technology-related factors to examine init ia l microblogging use, few studies have investigated user needs and gratifications and even less on the post initial adoption stage. Hence, the purpose of this research is to explore the factors that affect employ...

Patients’ experiences have been used as an indicator for hospital quality for a long time. The concept of patient experiences has many facets. One aspect of particular importance for optimal treatment and patients’ quality of life is efficient and understandable information and communication between patients and health professionals. In this paper, we look closer into patients’ experiences in b...

This work examines how awareness systems, a class of technologies that support sustained and effortless communication between individuals and groups, can support family communication. Going beyond the evaluation of specific design concepts, this paper reports on three studies that aimed to answer the following research questions: (a) Do families want to be aware of each other through the day? O...

Previous research has demonstrated that people listen to music for various reasons. The purpose of this study was to investigate people’s perception of music, and thus their music information needs. These ideas were examined by presenting 22 participants with 7 classical musical pieces, asking one-half of them to write words descriptive of each piece, and the other half words they would use if ...

When two communicating processes each record their own provenance, what extra information needs to be recorded in order that a satisfactory account can be given, of the combined process? We propose a set of requirements on (i) the kind of information that the processes can share and (ii) the kind of queries that should be answerable from the combined provenance graph. We describe a solution usi...