Capturing and using Mashup technology in extending the web contents of an online scrapbooking tool

Abstract

Web research activities include gathering, managing, extending and publishing Web contents. While current tools have useful features to assist users to perform these four activities, there is still room for improvement in regard to Web contents capturing and extension. Currently, there is high overhead or interaction cost involved to collect and to extend Web contents. It was also found that there are limitations in existing online scrapbook tools in terms of their contents capturing and extension features. To overcome the shortcomings, an online scrapbooking tool, e-Scrapbook, developed in this project, has an intuitive Web contents capturing capability that is built into Firefox Web browser as an extension. Contents extension or enrichment is often cumbersome as it involves complex programming. The Web contents gathering module was developed using XUL (a Firefox Programming language) and JavaScript. DOM, AJAX and mashup, and the .NET platform were used as a rapid approach to implement the contents extension capability of the system. This feature makes it possible to search for related contents to the previously captured contents on the Web. The Goal, Operators, Methods, and Selection rules (GOMS)-like approach was used for interactive cost analysis to assess the efficiency of e-Scrapbook in facilitating Web contents clipping and extension. The results of analyses show that the e-Scrapbook system can save up to 57% of the total number of steps needed by conventional method to gather Web contents. The results also show that up to 43.8% of the steps involved in contents extension are saved using e-Scrapbook as compared to using the conventional method. With regard to usability, the results from a usability test that involved fifteen (15) participants show that e-Scrapbook has good usability design. The usability test was conducted using a questionnaire survey that was designed based on System Usability Scale (SUS). The SUS score of 74.17 is reflective of the positive feedback from the users.