Collaborative approaches based upon volunteered input into shared Internet-based resources are beginning to offer a radical and new alterative to more traditional mapping. This paper explores the potential of one of the most developed of these ‘open’ maps, in a case study of the OpenStreetMap project and of the practices deployed during a ‘mapping party’ in Manchester. The successes and weaknes...

Everyday video-sharing websites such as YouTube collect large amounts of new multimedia resources. Comments left by viewers often provide valuable information to describe sentiments, opinions and tastes of users. For this reason, we propose a novel re-ranking approach that takes into consideration that information in order to provide better recommendations of related videos. Early experiments i...

The evolution of opinions in a population of individuals who constantly interact with a common source of user-generated content (i.e. the internet) and are also subject to propaganda is analyzed using computer simulations. The model is based on the bounded confidence approach. In the absence of propaganda, computer simulations show that the online population as a whole is either fragmented, pol...

Hemali Padalia, Pooja Moteriya, Yogesh Baravalia and Sumitra Chanda* 1 Phytochemical, Pharmacological and Microbiological Laboratory, Department of Biosciences (UGC-CAS), Saurashtra University, Rajkot-360005, Gujarat, India 2 Phytochemical, Pharmacological and Microbiological Laboratory, Department of Biochemistry, Saurashtra University, Rajkot-360005, Gujarat, India * Corresponding author: ema...

Streams of user-generated content in social media exhibit patterns of collective attention across diverse topics, with temporal structures determined both by exogenous factors and endogenous factors. Teasing apart different topics and resolving their individual, concurrent, activity timelines is a key challenge in extracting knowledge from microblog streams. Facing this challenge requires the u...

Hosted by: The Claude Shannon Institute for Discrete Mathematics, Coding, Cryptography and Information Security, The Boole Centre for Research in Informatics, UCC School of Engineering, UCC School of Mathematical Sciences, UCC

Citizen science refers to voluntary participation by the general public in scientific endeavors. Although citizen science has a long tradition, the rise of online communities and user-generated web content has the potential to greatly expand its scope and contributions. Citizens spread across a large area will collect more information than an individual researcher can. Because citizen scientist...

Obtaining user opinion (using votes) is essential to ranking user-generated online content. However, any content voting system is susceptible to the Sybil attack where adversaries can out-vote real users by creating many Sybil identities. In this paper, we present SumUp, a Sybilresilient vote aggregation system that leverages the trust network among users to defend against Sybil attacks. SumUp ...

When contributing content on large online platforms, producers of user-generated content have to decide where to contribute. On a complex and dynamic platform like Wikipedia, this decision is expected to depend on the way the content is organized. We analyse whether the hyperlinks on Wikipedia channel the attention of producers towards more central articles. We observe a sample 7, 635 articles ...

Interactive online help systems are considered to be a fruitful supplement to traditional IT helpdesks, which are often overloaded. They often comprise user-generated FAQ collections playing the role of technology-based conceptual artifacts. Two main questions arise: how the conceptual artifacts should be used, and which factors influence their acceptance in a community of practice (CoP). First...