Personal collections, be they books, music, or artefacts have significance to the owner, and provide conversation and engagement with visitors. For example visitors of physical libraries may browse the spines, select a book, and begin a conversation. When the collection is digital it cannot be engaged with in the same manner and it becomes more difficult to share and explore with others. Physical data visualisation is becoming more popular, supported by new technologies, such as 3D printing, and the resurgence of crafting. This paper reports our investigation of digital library and eBook metadata visualisation using knitting. We report on our design considerations, a digital prototype to explore knitted library shawls, and a knitted prototype for a personal digital library.

Abstract Within the software engineering community, deciding how to collect, store and use personal data has become about more than just understanding our users. This paper considers ethical data use that includes cultural considerations and data ownership rights. We discuss indigenous data sovereignty as a concept and how it potentially impacts technological solutions that gather personal data from users. We propose an extension to typical user-centred design processes, which we call participatory data design. This incorporates the use of frameworks and tools that specifically focus on managing data within the cultural context it is gathered from. We also present a specific example of how we have used this approach in the context of a data collection project from Māori workers in New Zealand forestry. We conclude with a discussion of the wider implications of this approach.

The users of mobile devices increasingly use networked services to address their information needs. Questions asked by mobile users are strongly influenced by contextual factors such as location, conversation and activity. We report on a diary study performed to better understand mobile information needs. We find that the type of questions recorded by participants varies across their locations, with differences between home, shopping and in-car contexts. These variations occur both in the query terms and in the form of desired answers. Both the location of queries and the participants' activities affected participants' questions. When information needs were affected by both location and activity, they tended to be strongly affected by both factors. The overall picture that emerges is one of multiple contextual influences interacting to shape mobile information needs. Mobile devices that attempt to adapt to users' context will need to account for a rich variety of situational factors.

Event notification services are used in various applications such as digital libraries, stock tickers, traffic control, or facility management. However to our knowledge, a common semantics of events in event notification services has not been defined so far. We propose a parameterized event algebra which describes the semantics of composite events for event notification systems. The parameters serve as a basis for flexible handling of duplicates in both primitive and composite events.