Torsten Reiners

Dengya Zhu, Shastri Lakshman Nimmagadda, Torsten Reiners et al.

The explosion of information constrains the judgement of search terms associated with Knowledge-Based Web Ecosystem (KBWE), making the retrieval of relevant information and its knowledge management challenging. The existing information retrieval (IR) tools and their fusion in a framework need attention, in which search results can effectively be managed. In this article, we demonstrate the effective use of information retrieval services by a variety of users and agents in various KBWE scenarios. An innovative Integrated Search Framework (ISF) is proposed, which utilises crawling strategies, web search technologies and traditional database search methods. Besides, ISF offers comprehensive, dynamic, personalized, and organization-oriented information retrieval services, ranging from the Internet, extranet, intranet, to personal desktop. In this empirical research, experiments are carried out demonstrating the improvements in the search process, as discerned in the conceptual ISF. The experimental results show improved precision compared with other popular search engines.

Marko Teräs, Hanna Teräs, Torsten Reiners

Virtual environments (VEs) are making their way into various sectors of life to enhance and support human activity, including learning. VEs have been used in various contexts for training, and in many cases they are designed to model or simulate - as accurately and authentically as possible - a specific work context. In striving for authenticity, visual and representative realism tends to receive most of the development input, despite of several studies that challenge its importance. New training avenues have raised the importance of rigorous phenomenological descriptions for a deeper understanding of user experience in the actual context of use. This paper reports the preliminary steps in a phenomenological analysis of how employees working in actual hazardous settings experience virtual safety training environments. Such open-ended research project can reveal new aspects of user experience that can advice the development and evaluation of human-computer interaction in digital technology-enhanced training contexts.