The purpose of this Master's thesis is to study metadata and its use at Web sites of six Swedish universities and colleges. Each Web site has been examined at three different hierarchical levels and the total number of examined Web pages is 258. 16 questionnaires have also been sent to webmasters at the six universities and colleges. The results show that metadata refers to the data which can assist to organize, describe, identify, locate, evaluate and retrieve resources on the Internet. Even though there are several different metadata formats available on the Internet, the commercial Search engines only support the HTML's title tag and the meta tags with the attributes keywords and description.

High demands are set on all equipment used in emergency service work, where small margins can be the distinguishing factor between life and death during a rescue operation. It is important that tools such as ladders quickly and easily can be dismounted from a vehicle and still satisfy the regulatory requirements for securing loads during transport. The existing solution for getting ladders down from the roof of a fire engine requires a large manual effort from the user in an ergonomically unsound posture.In this degree project a new ladder holder is developed with focus on the user to solve the ergonomic problems and at the same time create a more compact design that can be adapted to several different types of ladders. After an initial pre-study with user-interviews and measurement of forces and distances a set of requirements was formulated that came to govern the project's direction. Creative methods were used to generate concepts that improved the function and through design solutions, calculations and testing in CAD a base for manufacturing of a new product was created.The result is a completely new type of ladder holder that minimizes the user's manual effort and simplifies the securing of ladders in the holder.

This master thesis was a continuation of a previous study in the diesel exhaust characterization, which is part of the academical work embedded in the EMIR-1 project. The main objective of this thesis work was to finish the installation and make the proper modifications of the particulate mass measuring system located in one of the engine test cells at KTH, in order to be able to measure the mass of the particles from the exhaust of diesel engines.This experiment requires a diluted flow sample from the exhaust that should be sent to the device that makes possible the measurement of particle mass, called TEOM. In the first stage of this project, the objective was to study and make the proper modifications in the existing KTH diluter because there were several problems to obtain a constant dilution ratio from it during tests.This modifications were made and it resulted in a great improvement in the maximum inlet and outlet flow that this diluter can handle. Therefore another modification is proposed for controlling the inlet exhaust flow so it will be possible to regulate the dilution ratio and make it constant along a wide range of engine loads and speeds.The second and most important stage was to make particulate mass measurements possible by analyzing the frequency signal from the TEOM device. The idea was to obtain the frequency of oscillation from the tapered element in the TEOM, and therefore with the proper correlations, be able to predict the particulate mass concentration in the exhaust flow from the engine.An electrical problem in the TEOM circuit was detected and corrected, so the signal that carries the frequency from the TEOM can be analyzed properly.

The purpose of our study was to look at the connection between theories, research work and concepts when it comes to teenagers and the testing of drugs. The theories we have used are Erikssons development theory, psychoanalysis and labelling theory. Concepts that we focused on for our study were youthculture, the search for identity and the testing of drugs. We did this by asking students, in ninth grade, to fill in questionnaire and interviews.Teenagers find themselves in a confusing stage in life and in a search for their identities they test many different things. The youthculture can be a contributing factor to them testing drugs.

With the technological development of the last decades, an increasing number of genealogists are carrying out their research online. The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine how and why genealogists' information behavior has been influenced by the use of online services for genealogy. Using a conceptual model of genealogists' information behavior as theoretical basis for the study, I examine how the use of online services affect genealogists? search process, what information they are looking for and what information resources they use.

The object of this study is to examine the effective functionality of an OPAC-system while a few participants interacted with the catalogue. I?ve used Carl Martin Allwood?s (1998) four designed usability factors to be able to estimate the effective functionality of the online catalogue. Theoretic basis is Human Computer Interaction together with Allwood?s four defined usability factors.

This thesis deals with subject-based hierarchical search-services on the World Wide Web. The purpose is to investigate how systems of this kind facilitate information retrieval through subject-based information seeking. Its starting point is taken from the study of texts and qualitative analyses of search-services on the World Wide Web. Important aspects and features of the Internet and the World Wide Web are explained as well. Three systems are examined: Mölndals Stadsbiblioteks Länkkatalog, Svesök, and Alta Vista.

Internet har en allt större roll i vårt samhälle och sökmotorerna är ett av de vanligaste sätten att leta sig fram till relevanta webbplatser. Sökmotorernas algoritmer visar sig dock bli allt mer invecklade och effektiva genom att blanda in användaren och hämta information om dennes intressen. Sökmotorerna hämtar resultat som inte bara är relevanta i förhållande till sökfrasen, utan också i förhållande till användaren. Sökmotorn skapar en profil av varje användare och med den preciseras resultatet. I studien använder vi oss av litteratursökningar och intervjuer för att undersöka vilken inverkan profilerna har på resultatet samt vilka åsikter användare, inom målgruppen studenter, har angående resultatet och profilerna.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the possibilities and challenges facing an archive, Svenskt barnbildarkiv (SBBA), if to publish its material online. Our context for this study is image indexing. Our main questions are: How can SBBA index their pictures for a possible publication on the Internet? Are there any pros or cons in the determination of topics in children?s images, and in that case, which? What search paths are important when indexing children?s pictures, and why are they important? To answer these questions, the thesis is built on a wide study of interdisciplinary literature. But also on SBBA: s own handbook for image ?registration?, and on interviews with the persons working at the archive SBBA, in Eskilstuna.

GKN Aerospace Sweden (GAS) utvecklar och tillverkar motorkomponenter för både den civila och militära flyg-och rymdindustrin. En av produkterna som GKN tillverkar är en outlet guide vane(OGV), vars funktion är att omdirigera det axiella luftflödet från fläkten. OGVn är den mekaniska länken mellan kärnstrukturen och fläkthuset. Ett viktigt mål är att minska vikten på motorn samtidigt som dess diameter ökar när motorerna blivit allt större.For att lösa detta krävs ett material med hög hållfasthet i förhallande till vikten. Ett examensarbete som föregår detta har utvecklat ett koncept som innefattar en OGV i en viss GKN-utvecklad tekonologi.

I have in my thesis produced a start of a multiplayer, voxel, strategy sandbox game withadvanced AI. The world is made out of voxels in the form of blocks that both the players andother units can affect and change. In a world where every block follows the laws of physicsfor both fluids and physics. The game is designed for several players that fights for controllover land and resources..

The content of the following report is the summarized result of three students thesis at Blekinge Institute of Technology in co-operation with Water Jet Sweden AB. This report will give the reader a description of principles how to measure the abrasive mass flow in a waterjet cutting system. The work began with a visit to Water Jet Sweden AB to get a closer look at the problem. When the analysis of the problem was done the criteria were defined in the form of demands and desires. The main task of the criteria was to guide the search for the solution.

The research objective of this thesis was to conduct a holistic evaluation of an operational information system. By holistic evaluation we mean that an equal focus was placed on both the system system perspective and its users user perspective, in the actual environment where the system and its users function contextuality. In addition, the methodological objective of the study was to test a new research approach in a real life setting. The participants of the study were twenty newspaper journalists employed at Göteborgs-Posten GP. The information system NewsLink is a manually indexed full-text database containing all articles published in GP since 1994.

The content of the following report is the summarized result of three students thesis at Blekinge Institute of Technology in co-operation with Water Jet Sweden AB. This report will give the reader a description of principles how to measure the abrasive mass flow in a waterjet cutting system. The work began with a visit to Water Jet Sweden AB to get a closer look at the problem. When the analysis of the problem was done the criteria were defined in the form of demands and desires. The main task of the criteria was to guide the search for the solution. The work proceeded with an extensive search for abrasive flow meters along with obtaining information about flow measurement in general. When the search for abrasive flow meters resulted in nothing all the efforts were concentrated on finding a principle of measurement that could cope with the criteria.

This is a heuristic evaluation of Umeå university library?s Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). It makes use of four of Nielsen?s ten heuristics, flexibility and efficiency to use, match between the system and real world, visibility of system status, and aesthetic and minimalist design. The evaluation was done by having 3 evaluators inspect the interface individually, as per Nielsen?s (1990) recommendation of 3-5 evaluators.