Journal of Universal Computer Science 

About: Journal of Universal Computer Science is an academic journal published by Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Computer science & Context (language use). It has an ISSN identifier of 0948-6968. It is also open access. Over the lifetime, 2587 publications have been published receiving 37843 citations. The journal is also known as: J.UCS (Print) & J.UCS (Online).

Finding Plagiarisms among a Set of Programs with JPlag

Abstract: JPlag is a web service that finds pairs of similar programs among a given set of programs. It has successfully been used in practice for detecting plagiarisms among student Java program submissions. Support for the languages C, C++ and Scheme is also available. We describe JPlag's architecture and its comparsion algorithm, which is based on a known one called Greedy String Tiling. Then, the contribution of this paper is threefold: First, an evaluation of JPlag's performance on several rather different sets of Java programs shows that JPlag is very hard to deceive. More than 90 percent of the 77 plagiarisms within our various benchmark program sets are reliably detected and a majority of the others at least raise suspicion. The run time is just a few seconds for submissions of 100 programs of several hundred lines each. Second, a parameter study shows that the approach is fairly robust with respect to its configuration parameters. Third, we study the kinds of attempts used for disguising plagiarisms, their frequency, and their success.

Information technology for knowledge management

Abstract: Knowledge has been lately recognized as one of the most important assets of organizations. Can information technology help the growth and the sustainment of organizational knowledge? The answer is yes, if care is taken to remember that IT here is just a part of the story (corporate culture and work practices being equally relevant) and that the information technologies best suited for this purpose should be expressly designed with knowledge management in view. This special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science contains a selection of papers from the First Conference on Practical Applications of Knowledge Management. Each paper describes a specific type of information technology suitable for the support of different aspects of knowledge management.

Plagiarism - A Survey

Abstract: Plagiarism in the sense of "theft of intellectual property" has been around for as long as humans have produced work of art and research. However, easy access to the Web, large databases, and telecommunication in general, has turned plagiarism into a serious problem for publishers, researchers and educational institutions. In this paper, we concentrate on textual plagiarism (as opposed to plagiarism in music, paintings, pictures, maps, technical drawings, etc.). We first discuss the complex general setting, then report on some results of plagiarism detection software and finally draw attention to the fact that any serious investigation in plagiarism turns up rather unexpected side-effects. We believe that this paper is of value to all researchers, educators and students and should be considered as seminal work that hopefully will encourage many still deeper investigations.

The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume

Abstract: To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites. With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly. These new paradigms obliterate the clear distinction between information providers and consumers. The lines between producers and consumers are blurred even more by services such as Wikipedia, where every reader can become an author, instantly. This paper presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr, and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content. It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content. The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.

A Novel Type of Skeleton for Polygons

Abstract: A new internal structure for simple polygons, the straight skeleton, is introduced and discussed. It is composed of pieces of angular bisectores which partition the interior of a given n-gon P in a tree-like fashion into n monotone polygons. Its straight-line structure and its lower combinatorial complexity may make the straight skeleton preferable to the widely used medial axis of a polygon. As a seemingly unrelated application, the straight skeleton provides a canonical way of constructing a polygonal roof above a general layout of ground walls.