E‐activity and Intelligent Web Construction: Effects of Social Design

Citation

Fourie, I. (2012), "E‐activity and Intelligent Web Construction: Effects of Social Design", Online Information Review, Vol. 36 No. 4, pp. 620-621. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521211254095

This work is presented as a reference text based on international input. The intention of the book is to introduce and discuss innovative technologies, their applications and e‐activity, including artificial intelligence techniques, social scientific methodologies, interface, and network and distributed computing. Although contributors are mostly from Japan and Malaysia, there are some from the USA, Greece and Spain.

A wide variety of topics fitting in with the theme of the effects of social design with regard to electronic activity and intelligent web construction is discussed. The typical style of Information Science Reference contributes to the usefulness of this edited collection as a reference source: the brief table of contents is followed by a detailed table of contents with extensive abstracts for each chapter. Each chapter is then introduced with an introduction, conclusion and a list of references.

The 18 chapters are divided into three sections: innovative technologies in e‐activity, analysis and social design, and intelligent web construction and e‐support. In Section 1 chapters include the following: inexpensive, simple and quick photorealistic 3 DCG modelling; the development of a 4D visualisation tool for construction planning; advances in privacy preserving record linkage; construction of a traceability system by using a simple and handy type of RFID reader; parallel computing for mining association rules in distributed P2P networks; multi‐agent based formal verification of data in RFID middleware; and a tele‐immersive collaborative environment with a tiled display wall.

On analysis and social design Section 2 includes chapters on e‐innovation as source of business value in firms, the Kaohsiung County unified broadband network, the role of semiconductor distributors in the Japanese semiconductor market, and modern diffusion of products with complex network models. The chapters in Section 3 address e‐co‐creation of knowledge through informal communications; need and possible criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of computer‐mediated communication; a study of image quality assessment with scale space approach using an index of visually evoked potentials; visual inspection system and psychometric evaluation with correlation for multiple perceptions; improvement of lecture speech recognition by using unsupervised adaptation; benefits and challenges of e‐learning: university student perspectives; and an email‐based mobile communication system for interactive lecture support.

Although a useful reference source on the topics mentioned here, the potential reader should note that references are not quite as up‐to‐date as one might expect, with few references later than 2008. Also, US$180.00 is, in my opinion, quite expensive – something I have noted with other IGI publications. Overall, however, E‐activity and Intelligent Web Construction is recommended for researchers and developers in the field.