Community question-answering (CQA) systems, such as Yahoo! Answers or Stack Overflow, belong to a prominent group of successful and popular Web 2.0 applications, which are used every day by millions of users to find an answer on complex, subjective, or context-dependent questions. In order to obtain answers effectively, CQA systems should optimally harness collective intelligence of the whole online community, which will be impossible without appropriate collaboration support provided by information technologies. Therefore, CQA became an interesting and promising subject of research in computer science and now we can gather the results of 10 years of research. Nevertheless, in spite of the increasing number of publications emerging each year, so far the research on CQA systems has missed a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey. We attempt to fill this gap by a review of 265 articles published between 2005 and 2014, which were selected from major conferences and journals. According to this evaluation, at first we propose a framework that defines descriptive attributes of CQA approaches. Second, we introduce a classification of all approaches with respect to problems they are aimed to solve. The classification is consequently employed in a review of a significant number of representative approaches, which are described by means of attributes from the descriptive framework. As a part of the survey, we also depict the current trends as well as highlight the areas that require further attention from the research community.
The process of semantic web service composition arranges several web services into one composite service to realize complex workflows with an exploitation of semantics. This paper proposes a framework to automatic semantic web service composition. Its advantage is that a huge amount of computation is performed during preprocessing and the composition approach is designed to exploit the parallel execution of processes which is nowadays supported in multiprocessor platforms. The framework is built to suit the WS Challenge competition requirements.
In the current time of globalization, collaboration among people in virtual environments is becoming an important precondition of success. This trend is reflected also in the educational domain where students collaborate in various short-term groups created repetitively but changing in each round (e.g. in MOOCs). Students in these kind of dynamic groups quite often encounter various difficulties, which are obvious mainly when students' characteristics do not complement each other. In spite of various group formation methods aimed to solve the group compatibility problem, most of the existing approaches do not consider dynamic groups. We describe (i) a proposal of a novel group formation method based on Group Technology approach, which considers feedback on students' collaboration to improve group formations; (ii) an application of the method as a part of a collaborative platform PopCorm, which provides students in the created groups with a set of real-time collaboration tools; (iii) a long-term experiment in which the groups created by our method achieved significantly better results in comparison with the reference approaches. Our results indicate that considering feedback from students' collaboration can improve the group formation process as the groups created by our method achieved higher collaboration quality with next iterations.
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