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A Challenge in the Use and Collection of Application’s Cultural Knowledge to Promote the Growth

of the OMCS-Br Cultural Knowledgebase

Aluno: André de Oliveira BuenoOrientadora: Júnia Coutinho Anacleto

PPG-CCData: 07/06/13

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Providing cultural context to design applications – an experience report

Aluno: André de Oliveira BuenoOrientadora: Júnia Coutinho Anacleto

PPG-CCData: 07/06/13

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• Introductiono Motivationo Problemo Research Question

• The OMCS-Br Project• A solution to support culturally contextualized

designo The Cultural Filtero The Web Search Tool

• Conclusions

Agenda

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Introduction

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• We are seeing a constant evolution on how ICT are being capable of offer support for users in their context of life;

• HCI is evolving for what is called the third wave:– Context sensitive ICT solutions (Boedker, 2006);

– Contexts of Everyday Life:• ranging from embodiment to situated meaning to values and social issue

(Odom et al, 2008)• ranging from the arts to sociology to policy (Harrison et al. 2007)

• Context aware solutions based on ubiquitous and pervasive hardware support are studied and provided. (Soldatos et al., 2007)

Motivation

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• HCI theories and methods still remain not enough to design covering the context demands. (Odom, 2008)

• ‘Context’ has a broader meaning, embracing the intangible aspects of the interaction among users and ICT solutions, such as: – Sociality– Emotion– Experience– Culture

Problem

Culture: values and behaviors shared by a group of individuals. Each culture can have its own values,

behaviors which may be defined by certain elements such as language, colors, symbols, or icons. (Carol L., 2007)

• Designing systems for cultural diferences remains a challenge. (Galadhar, 2009)

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• Culture • Cultural Knowledge

– Common Sense

How to consider culture:

Common sense: the knowledge that most people agree with in a certain community at

a certain period of time. (Anacleto et al., 2006)

• OMCS-Br knowledgebase: structured statements with a defined semantic network (Minsky, 1986):

– Quantifies common sense– Accessible

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How to support ICTs developers in the task of culturally contextualizing their

applications’ design?

Research Question

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• Projects arise in order to collect the human knowledge and, from these data, creating software which best suits to the user;

Related Work

CYC(LENAT et al., 1990)

ThoughtTreasure

(MUELLER, 1998)

(SINGH et al., 2002)

(ANACLETO et al., 2006)

Collects the contributors’ information

Do not collect the source of the common sense

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• The OMCS-Br Project

OMCS-Br Project

OMCS

Application

ConceptNet

Site

http://www.sensocomum.ufscar.br

processing

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OMCS-Br Knowledgebase

End User’s Information

Applications using Common Sense

Information such as: -Age- Gender-Level of education- Geographical location-etc.

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OMCS-Br Knowledgebase

Cultural Contextualized Data

Applications using Common Sense

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A solution to support culturally

contextualized design

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OMCS-Br Knowledgebase

Design of the Cultural Filter

Cultural Filter

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The Cultural Context Filter Architecture

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The Cultural Filter Functionalities

1. Manages the generation of the required cultural context;

2. Gives access for any developer to the Brazilian cultural knowledge collected by the OMCS-Br project;

3. Support RIA (Rich Internet Applications) applications;

4. Starts using the Client-Server model, what makes applications lighter (good for mobile applications);

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• Examples of Parameters to define a Cultural Filter:

Age: Number; Range = [Number... Number]; Qualitative = Child, teenagers, young, adult, etc.;

Gender: Male, Female, Both; Male, Female, Others, All;

Location: Geographical Coordinates; City; State; Region;

Economic Status: Wealthy or Poor;

The Cultural Filter Parameters

There’s the possibility of inserting different fields according to the project database scheme in use.

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• Examples of Extensible Parameters:

Religion: Name of the religion;

Race: White, black; White, black, both; White, pardo, black, others; White, black, pardo, indian, others;

Etc.

The Cultural Filter Parameters

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Age: Range = [Number...Number];

Gender: Male, Female, Both;

Formal Education: Imcomplete-Pre School Pre-School Incomplete elementary Elementary Incomplete High School High School College Masters PhD

Location: City; State; Region;

The OMCS-Br Cultural Filter

It is proven that these parameters are providing cultural contexts.

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The OMCS-Br Cultural Filter

• Example of possible use of the cultural filter in XML:

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• Using the data from the OMCS-Br knowledgebase to culturally contextualize applications:

Define filter parameters

1º

Filter the knowledgebase

2º

Use the slice of the

Knowledgebase

3º

Application Process

- Age- Gender- Education- Location Slice of the

Knowledgebase

BrazilianKnowledgebase

Generate cultrally

contextualized application

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• The Filter Interface:

The Cultural Filter

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• How to use the filter:

The Cultural Filter

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• Defining a new Cultural Filter:

The Cultural Filter

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• Existing Cultural Context Filters:

The Cultural Filter

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Proof of Concept

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• The Web Search Tool:

Proof of Concept

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• The Web Search Tool:

Proof of Concept

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Conclusion

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• An approach to provide cultural context for developing contextualized ICT solutions;

• Releasing the OMCS-Br knowledgebase for developing culturally contextualized ICT solutions;

• A module to collect and feedback the OMCS-Br knowledgebase through the use of the contextualized applications;

• Another result from this project is a web tool interface allowing to visualize the knowledge for a certain cultural context

Contributions

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• Formalize the Cultural Filter model in a general form in order to allow anyone who has a database to use it;

• Implement the Cultural Filter and the cultural knowledge for the OMCS-Br as webservices;

Future Works

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• Bueno, A. O.; Anacleto, Junia C. Allowing Software Developers to Develop Culture-Sensitive Applications by Providing them the OMCS-Br Cultural Knowledgebase. In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013), Paris, 2013.

• Bueno, A. O.; Anacleto, Junia C. Releasing the OMCS-Br Knowledgebase to Facilitate Insertion of Culture into Applications: a Brazilian Experience. In: International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2013), Boston, 2013.

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Publications

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• Contacts:

o andre.obueno@dc.ufscar.br

o junia@dc.ufscar.br

• URLs:

o http://lia.dc.ufscar.br

o http://www.sensocomum.ufscar.br

o http://lia.dc.ufscar.br/Filtro

Thank you!