This paper introduces symbolic data analysis, explaining how it extends the classical data models to take into account more complete and complex information. Several examples motivate the approach, before the modeling of variables assuming new types of realizations are formally presented. Some methods for the (multivariate) analysis of symbolic data are presented and discussed. This is however far from being exhaustive, given the present dynamic development of this new field of research. 

Usability guidelines are supposed to help web designers to design usable sites. Unfortunately, studies carried out that applying these guidelines by designers is difficult, essentially because of the way of structuring or fonnulating them. One possible way to help designers in their task is to provide them with tools that evaluate the designed site (during or after design) and alerts them about usability errors. Ideally, these tools would support an appropriate guidelines definition language that enables structuring any guideline in an evaluationoriented fonn. In this paper we propose a framework and guideline definition language for usability (automatic) evaluation.

Abstract.A novel approach is presented for automatically evaluating of the usability and accessibility (U&A) of web sites by performing a static analysis of their HTML code against U&A guidelines. The approach relies on separating guidelines evaluation logic from the evaluation engine. Due to this separation, the whole evaluation process can be divided into two main phases: specifying formal guidelines and web page evaluation. In the first phase, the formal structure of a guideline is expressed in terms of Guideline Definition Language (GDL). In the second phase, the web page is parsed to identify its contents and structure and link them to relevant guidelines to be evaluated on the page parsed. This approach enables the simultaneous evaluation of multiple guidelines selected on demand from different sources. It also optimises evaluation by automatically identifying common sub-structures among structured guidelines. It also supports the expression, by evaluators with different usability practises, of alternative evaluation strategies.

Nowadays, differences between men and women in computer science have become a concern in the scientific society. But few studies focus on possible gender differences in web design. We have thus tackled the problem and conducted a statistical analysis in the field. We have selected male and female sites and analyzed them according to a list of graphic variables including the number of colours in the site, the type of these, the type of background, the presence of graphics and their types etc. We have also questionned male and female students about their preferences in web design.

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