Information Systems

Purpose – The collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic in 1991 led to a world-wide diaspora. The
purpose of this paper is to discuss and analyse Somali web sites in an attempt to demonstrate how
they reflect the troubled history and politics of the homeland and continue to interest, involve, bring
together and divide Somalis world-wide.
Design/methodology/approach – Web sites were divided into categories, and a study of the
community/political category was conducted. Visits were made to the Horn of Africa and elsewhere,
and face-to-face interviews conducted. E-mail contact was maintained with a number of Somali
webmasters.
Findings – Community/political web sites was the most numerous category, with the majority being
named after a geographical area associated with a group of clan lineages or sub-lineages. They contain
news, opinion pieces and other features in Somali and on some web sites in Somali and English. While
web sites usually declare that the opinions in articles are those of the authors alone, they are unlikely
to publicise views with which they are not in agreement.
Originality/value – The paper illustrates how web sites enable members of one diaspora
community to keep in touch with a political situation at home that is exceptional, and to involve
themselves in its controversies, should they wish to do so. It also shows how the web site has brought a
new dimension to traditional methods of feuding.
Keywords Worldwide Web, History, Politics, Deportation, Somalia
Paper type Research paper

The Internet technology has given the Somali poet a new perspective. As he/she wants to be heard in places far away from his home thus craving a spatial extension, the web is just the right tools to enable him/her to reach a global audience.
Literature is one feature that the majority of Somali websites have in common. Another feature is Islamic section. These two features demonstrate the importance which Somalis give to their most enduring heritage: literature and Islam.
Next to these two features comes the audio facility. The audio uses an analogue of oral media. Because of its oral output, it has the potential to allow Somali orality to reach new heights.
This paper will use a Somali poetic combat known as Doodwanaag to analyse the new dawn of Somali poetry being transmitted via the Internet.

With vigorous development of the Internet, e-learning system has become more and more popular and many adaptive learning systems have been developed. In recent years, researchers have proposed various approaches for developing adaptive learning systems based on concept maps. Nevertheless, most of them deal only with binary grades of each test item, furthermore, the existing methods that based on f uzzy set theory do not take in consideration the conceptual weight of concept in each question that might be cause to construct incorrectly relationships or exaggerate the degree of relationship. To cope with this problem, this study proposes an innovative approach to automatically construct concept maps. Firstly, we use look ahead fuzzy association rule mining algorithm to mind some information about the relationships between questions, then we construct the questions-relationships mapping. After that, we calculate the relevance degree between concepts in each question to obtain the final concept maps.