Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Integrating Owl And Rules: A Syntax Proposal For Nominal Schemas, David Carral Martinez, Adila Krisnadhi, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper proposes an addition to OWL 2 syntax to incorporate nominal schemas, which is a new description-logic style extension of OWL 2 which was recently proposed, and which makes is possible to express "variable nominal classes" within axioms in an OWL 2 ontology. Nominal schemas make it possible to express DL-safe rules of arbitrary arity within the extended OWL paradigm, hence covering the well-known DL-safe SWRL language. To express this feature, we extend OWL 2 syntax to include necessary and minimal modifications to both Functional and Manchester syntax grammars and mappings from these two syntaxes to Turtle/RDF. We also …

Dynamic Scoping For Browser Based Access Control System, Vinaykumar Nadipelly

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

We have inorganically increased the use of web applications to the point of using them for almost everything and making them an essential part of our everyday lives. As a result, the enhancement of privacy and security policies for the web applications is becoming increasingly essential. The importance and stateless nature of the web infrastructure made the web a preferred target of attacks. The current web access control system is a reason behind the victory of attacks. The current web consists of two major components, the browser and the server, where the effective access control system needs to be implemented. …

Semantic Aspects Of Earthcube, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Gary Berg-Cross, Leo Obrst, Amit P. Sheth, Timothy Finin, Isabel F. Cruz

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this document, we give a high-level overview of selected Semantic (Web) technologies, methods, and other important considerations, that are relevant for the success of EarthCube. The goal of this initial document is to provide entry points and references for discussions between the Semantic Technologies experts and the domain experts within EarthCube. The selected topics are intended to ground the EarthCube roadmap in the state of the art in semantics research and ontology engineering.

We anticipate that this document will evolve as EarthCube progresses. Indeed, all EarthCube parties are asked to provide topics of importance that should be treated in …

Trust Networks, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Pramod Anantharam, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust relationships occur naturally in many diverse contexts such as collaborative systems, e-commerce, interpersonal interactions, social networks, semantic sensor web, etc. As collaborating agents providing content and services become increasingly removed from the agents that consume them, the issue of robust trust inference and update become critical. There is a need to find online substitutes for traditional (direct or face-to-face) cues to derive measures of trust, and create efficient and secure system for managing trust, to support decision-making. Unfortunately, there is neither a universal notion of trust that is applicable to all domains nor a clear explication of its semantics …

Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments [Keynote Speech], Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless data broadcasting is a promising technique for information dissemination that exploits the computational capabilities of mobile devices, in order to enhance the scalability of the system. Under this environment, the data are continuously broadcast by the server, interleaved with some indexing information for query processing. Clients may tune in the broadcast channel and process their queries locally without contacting the server. In this paper we focus on spatial queries in particular. First, we review existing methods on this topic. Next, taking shortest path computation as an example, we showcase technical challenges arising in this processing model and describe techniques …

A Software Framework For Augmentative And Alternative Communication, Adam Loup

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

By combining context awareness and analytical based relevance computing software, the proposed Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) framework aims provide a foundation to create communication systems to dramatically increase the words available to AAC users. The framework will allow the lexicon available to the user to be dynamically updated by varying sources and to promote words based on contextual relevance. This level of customization enables the development of highly customizable AAC devices that evolve with use to become more personal while also broadening the expressiveness of the user. In order to maximize the efficient creation of conversation for AAC users, …

Discontinuities And Best Practices In Virtual Research Collaboration, Vipin Arora, Deepak Khazanchi, Bjørn Erik Munkvold, Dawn Owens, Karen Stendal, Alvin Tarrell, Adeola Wale-Kolade, Sofi Westin, Ilze Zigurs

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Research collaboration has become increasingly global, as collaboration technologies continue to advance and as research problems become more interdisciplinary and global. Virtual research teams have processes and challenges that are unique from a typical virtual team, and we need a better understanding of how such teams can utilize virtual research environments to their advantage. We examine this question from a review of the relevant literature and an analysis of experiences and reflections from a doctoral seminar that studied and experienced the process of virtual research collaboration.

Towards Self-Emancipation In Ict For Development Research: Narratives About Respect, Traditional Leadership And Building Networks Of Friendships In Rural South Africa, Kirstin Krauss

The African Journal of Information Systems

In this paper, the author contends that if the outsider-researcher involved in Information and Communication Technology for Development really wants to make a difference and honestly address the emancipatory interests of the developing community, social transformation will have to occur on both sides of the “development divide.” This statement implies both an understanding of the researcher’s own ethnocentrism, prejudice, assumptions and inabilities as well as local concerns, needs, expectations and realities. Using critical social theory as a position of inquiry and learning from the enculturation phases of critical ethnographic fieldwork in a deep rural part of South Africa, the paper …

Extending Description Logic Rules, David Carral Martinez, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Description Logics – the logics underpinning the Web Ontology Language OWL – and rules are currently the most prominent paradigms used for modeling knowledge for the Semantic Web. While both of these approaches are based on classical logic, the paradigms also differ significantly, so that naive combinations result in undesirable properties such as undecidability. Recent work has shown that many rules can in fact be expressed in OWL. In this paper we extend this work to include some types of rules previously excluded. We formally define a set of first order logic rules, C-Rules, which can be expressed within OWL …

Insider Threat Mitigation Models Based On Thresholds And Dependencies, Harini Ragavan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Insider threat causes great damage to data in any organization and is considered a serious issue. In spite of the presence of threat prevention mechanisms, sophisticated insiders still continue to attack a database with new techniques. One such technique which remains an advantage for insiders to attack databases is the dependency relationship among data items. This thesis investigates the ways by which an authorized insider detects dependencies in order to perform malicious write operations. The goal is to monitor malicious write operations performed by an insider by taking advantage of dependencies. A term called `threshold' is associated with every data …

Dynamic Data Extraction And Data Visualization With Application To The Kentucky Mesonet, Anoop Rao Paidipally

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

There is a need to integrate large-scale database, high-performance computing engines and geographical information system technologies into a user-friendly web interface as a platform for data visualization and customized statistical analysis. We present some concepts and design ideas regarding dynamic data storage and extraction by making use of open-source computing and mapping technologies. We implemented our methods to the Kentucky Mesonet automated weather mapping workflow. The main components of the work flow includes a web based interface, a robust database and computing infrastructure designed for both general users and power users such as modelers and researchers.

Organizational Search In Email Systems, Sruthi Bhushan Pitla

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The storage space for emails has been increasing at a rapid pace day by day. Email systems still serve as very important data repositories for many users to store different kinds of information which they use in their daily activities. Due to the rapidly increasing volume of email data, there is a need to maintain the data in a most efficient way. It is also very important to provide intuitive and flexible search utilities to provide better access to the information in the email repositories, especially in an enterprise or organizational setting. In order to implement the functionality, we are …

Ensemble Of Feature Selection Techniques For High Dimensional Data, Sri Harsha Vege

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Data mining involves the use of data analysis tools to discover previously unknown, valid patterns and relationships from large amounts of data stored in databases, data warehouses, or other information repositories. Feature selection is an important preprocessing step of data mining that helps increase the predictive performance of a model. The main aim of feature selection is to choose a subset of features with high predictive information and eliminate irrelevant features with little or no predictive information. Using a single feature selection technique may generate local optima.

In this thesis we propose an ensemble approach for feature selection, where multiple …

Pamr: Passive-Aggressive Mean Reversion Strategy For Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This project proposes a novel online portfolio selection strategy named ``Passive Aggressive Mean Reversion" (PAMR). Unlike traditional trend following approaches, the proposed approach relies upon the mean reversion relation of financial markets. Equipped with online passive aggressive learning technique from machine learning, the proposed portfolio selection strategy can effectively exploit the mean reversion property of markets. By analyzing PAMR's update scheme, we find that it nicely trades off between portfolio return and volatility risk and reflects the mean reversion trading principle. We also present several variants of PAMR algorithm, including a mixture algorithm which mixes PAMR and other strategies. We …

Organizing User Search Histories, Heasoo Hwang, Hady W. Lauw, Lise Getoor, Alexandros Ntoulas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users are increasingly pursuing complex task-oriented goals on the web, such as making travel arrangements, managing finances, or planning purchases. To this end, they usually break down the tasks into a few codependent steps and issue multiple queries around these steps repeatedly over long periods of time. To better support users in their long-term information quests on the web, search engines keep track of their queries and clicks while searching online. In this paper, we study the problem of organizing a user's historical queries into groups in a dynamic and automated fashion. Automatically identifying query groups is helpful for a …

Method And Apparatus For Rapid Identification Of Column Heterogeneity, Bing Tian Dai, Nikolaos Koudas, Beng Chin Ooi, Divesh Srivastava, Suresh Venkatasubranmanian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A method and apparatus for rapid identification of column heterogeneity in databases are disclosed. For example, the method receives data associated with a column in a database. The method computes a cluster entropy for the data as a measure of data heterogeneity and then determines whether said data is heterogeneous in accordance with the cluster entropy.

Spatial Queries In Wireless Broadcast Environments [Keynote Speech], Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless data broadcasting is a promising technique for information dissemination that exploits the computational capabilities of mobile devices, in order to enhance the scalability of the system. Under this environment, the data are continuously broadcast by the server, interleaved with some indexing information for query processing. Clients may tune in the broadcast channel and process their queries locally without contacting the server. In this paper we focus on spatial queries in particular. First, we review existing methods on this topic. Next, taking shortest path computation as an example, we showcase technical challenges arising in this processing model and describe techniques …

Hearts And Minds: Examining The Evolution Of The Egyptian Excerebration And Evisceration Traditions Through The Impact Mummy Database, Andrew D. Wade

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Egyptian mummification and funerary rituals were a transformative process, making the deceased a pure being; free of disease, injury, and disfigurements, as well as ethical and moral impurities. Consequently, the features of mummification available to specific categories of individuals hold social and ideological significance. This study refutes long-held classical stereotypes, particularly dogmatic class associations; demonstrates the apocryphal nature of universal heart retention; and expands on the purposes of excerebration and evisceration implied by synthetic and radiological analyses.

Features of the embalming traditions, specifically the variable excerebration and evisceration traditions, represented the Egyptian view of death. Fine-grain analyses, through primary imaging …

User Expectations Of Library Genealogy Databases V. What They Actually Get, Rosemary L. Meszaros, Katherine Pennavaria

DLPS Faculty Publications

An analysis and comparison of two genealogical databases: Ancestry.com and Heritagequest.com.

Effects Of Variations In 3d Spatial Search Techniques On Mobile Query Speed Vs Accuracy, Junjun Yin, James Carswell

Conference papers

This paper presents three Spatial Search Algorithms for determiningthe three dimensional visibility shape (threat dome) at a user’s current locationin a built environment. Users then utilize this 3D shape as their query“window” to retrieve information on only those objects visible within a spatialdatabase. Visibility shape searching addresses the information overloadproblem by providing “Hidden Query Removal” functionality for mobile LBS.This functionality will be especially useful in the Web 4.0 era when trillions ofmicro-sensors become available for query through standard IP access.