User talk:Marcoulises

EKN (an acronym for the Eye Knowledge Network) is a WEB 2.0 social network website, with a clinical forum for ophthalmologist and eye-care professionals. EKN is the first forum where users can upload images and add landmarks on top of the images to highlight specific areas for better anatomic explanation.

Features
EKN exploits the Web 2.0 resources and concepts to set up a continuously growing digital library of ophthalmic multimedia data. The EKN social network is oriented to the creation of specific discussion threads and to develop connections among all threads based on similarity and analogies. All the media and the discussion threads are automatic or explicit tagged through procedures that enhance and upgrade the information content input creating the added value promised by the network theory (hybrid recommendation approach). This tagging is the base of the smart search and a recommendation system. As a consequence, the whole database is organized using multi criteria ranking of objects and users and the retrieval of the information is efficiently managed by a query engine. Remarkably, due to the delicacy of the subject, all these elements (users and data) are strictly managed according to privacy regulations and access profile rules. A fundamental aspect to improve data accessibility is the ability of suggesting to the user objects he might be interested in.

The EKN Forum frame is similar to a classical web forum: there are threads composed by a topic and posts from different users. The main difference with the classical Forums is that users can also dynamically interact with the images attached to the thread by adding tags and landmarks, pointing out regions and highlighting areas of interest. Any subscriber can upload images to his personal Media Library, both from the profile page or while posting to a discussion, images can be tagged by the author. When the user contributes with a post to a thread, he can choose to attach an image, which can be one of the images previously discussed in the specific thread, or any image in his personal Media Library.