Computer Sciences Commons^™

Computing Medoids In Large Spatial Datasets, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias, Spiros Papadimitriou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this chapter, we consider a class of queries that arise in spatial decision making and resource allocation applications. Assume that a company wants to open a number of warehouses in a city. Let P be the set of residential blocks in the city. P represents customer locations to be potentially served by the company. At the same time, P also comprises the candidate warehouse locations because the warehouses themselves must be opened in some residential blocks.

Offering Rss Feeds: Does It Help To Gain Competitive Advantage?, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, many Websites have adopted the really simple syndication (RSS) technology to deliver online content to visitors. In this paper, I build an analytical model to examine how the offering of RSS feeds impact the number of visitors, total traffic load, and profit of Websites in a competitive setting. I show that although RSS can always attract more visitors, it may reduce the Website's profit. Interestingly, in a competitive market there are cases that the RSS feeds hurt the offering Website but benefit the competing Website instead. The conditions under which these will happen are derived. I also study the …

The 4 X 4 Semantic Model: Exploiting Data, Functional, Non-Functional And Execution Semantics Across Business Process, Workflow, Partner Services And Middleware Services Tiers, Amit P. Sheth, Karthik Gomadam

Kno.e.sis Publications

Business processes in the global environment increasingly encompass multiple partners and complex, rapidly changing requirements. In this context it is critical that strategic business objectives align with and map accurately to systems that support flexible and dynamic business processes. To support the demanding requirements of global business processes, we propose a comprehensive, unifying 4 X 4 Semantic Model that uses Semantic Templates to link four tiers of implementation with four types of semantics. The four tiers are the Business Process Tier, the Workflow Enactment Tier, the Partner Services Tier, and the Middleware Services Tier. The four types of semantics are …

Semantic Sensor Web, Amit P. Sheth, Cory Henson, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

An Online Learning Approach To Community Building Among Asian Journalists, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo, Violet B. Valdez

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

This chapter describes a master's program in journalism designed for professional Asian journalists which has drawn students from 13 Asian countries and is run by faculty members from five countries. The program uses blended learning methods combining synchronous, asynchronous, and classroom-based approaches. An exploratory study was conducted to describe the strategies used by the students and teachers to build a community of learners (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) and hence achieve the program's learning goals. The study took into consideration cultural differences, in particular, those referring to educational experiences. Results show that the respondents tended to use the strategies of …

Capturing Workflow Event Data For Monitoring, Performance Analysis, And Management Of Scientific Workflows, Matthew Valerio, Satya S. Sahoo, Roger Barga, Jared Jackson

Kno.e.sis Publications

To effectively support real-time monitoring and performance analysis of scientific workflow execution, varying levels of event data must be captured and made available to interested parties. This paper discusses the creation of an ontology-aware workflow monitoring system for use in the Trident system which utilizes a distributed publish/subscribe event model. The implementation of the publish/subscribe system is discussed and performance results are presented.

Growing Fields Of Interest: Using An Expand And Reduce Strategy For Domain Model Extraction, Christopher Thomas, Pankaj Mehra, Roger Brooks, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Domain hierarchies are widely used as models underlying information retrieval tasks. Formal ontologies and taxonomies enrich such hierarchies further with properties and relationships associated with concepts and categories but require manual effort; therefore they are costly to maintain, and often stale. Folksonomies and vocabularies lack rich category structure and are almost entirely devoid of properties and relationships. Classification and extraction require the coverage of vocabularies and the alterability of folksonomies and can largely benefit from category relationships and other properties. With Doozer, a program for building conceptual models of information domains, we want to bridge the gap between the vocabularies …

Evaluating Online Health Information: Beyond Readability Formulas, Gondy Leroy, Stephen Helmreich, James Cowie, Trudi Miller '08, Wei Zheng '08

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Although understanding health information is important, the texts provided are often difficult to understand. There are formulas to measure readability levels, but there is little understanding of how linguistic structures contribute to these difficulties. We are developing a toolkit of linguistic metrics that are validated with representative users and can be measured automatically. In this study, we provide an overview of our corpus and how readability differs by topic and source. We compare two documents for three groups of linguistic metrics. We report on a user study evaluating one of the differentiating metrics: the percentage of function words in a …

Inside Unlv, Shane Bevell, Tony Allen, Karen Sharp, Mamie Peers, Cate Weeks

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

Relationship Web: Trailblazing, Analytics And Computing For Human Experience, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This panel presentation was give at the 27th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2008), Barcelona, Spain, October 20-23, 2008.

What A User Wants: Redesigning A Library's Web Site Based On A Card-Sort Analysis, Laura Pope Robbins, Lisa Esposito, Christ Kretz, Michael Aloi

Publications

Web site usability concerns anyone with a web site to maintain. Libraries, however, are often the biggest offenders in terms of usability. In our efforts to provide users with everything they need to do research, we often overwhelm them with sites that are confusing in structure, difficult to navigate, and weighed down with jargon. Dowling College Library recently completed a redesign of its web site based upon the concept of usability. For smaller libraries in particular, this can be a challenge. The web site is often maintained by one or two people and finding the time and resources to conduct …

An Ontology-Driven Semantic Mash-Up Of Gene And Biological Pathway Information: Application To The Domain Of Nicotine Dependence, Satya S. Sahoo, Olivier Bodenreider, Joni L. Rutter, Karen J. Skinner, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Objectives: This paper illustrates how Semantic Web technologies (especially RDF, OWL, and SPARQL) can support information integration and make it easy to create semantic mashups (semantically integrated resources). In the context of understanding the genetic basis of nicotine dependence, we integrate gene and pathway information and show how three complex biological queries can be answered by the integrated knowledge base.

Methods: We use an ontology-driven approach to integrate two gene resources (Entrez Gene and HomoloGene) and three pathway resources (KEGG, Reactome and BioCyc), for five organisms, including humans. We created the Entrez Knowledge Model (EKoM), an information model in OWL …

Modeling Geographic Population Dispersion Utilizing Geospatial Information System Environment Agents In An Agent Based Model, Karl D. Liebert

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

New capabilities in agent based model (ABM) environments are opening the door to the creation of ABM that may incorporate high-quality, real world environment data in the form of Geospatial Information System (GIS) files . In the past, GJS environments were only possible through extensive software development efforts focused on specific model applications.

This thesis explores the value and issues of using GIS data to provide an ABM environment. It examines the ability of ABM development environments (DE) to support GIS environment data. The selected ABM DE is then used to model population behavior in an environment defined by authoritative …

Adapting Ranking Functions To User Preference, Keke Chen, Ya Zhang, Zhaohui Zheng, Hongyuan Zha, Gordon Sun

Kno.e.sis Publications

Learning to rank has become a popular method for web search ranking. Traditionally, expert-judged examples are the major training resource for machine learned web ranking, which is expensive to get for training a satisfactory ranking function. The demands for generating specific web search ranking functions tailored for different domains, such as ranking functions for different regions, have aggravated this problem. Recently, a few methods have been proposed to extract training examples from user clickthrough log. Due to the low cost of getting user preference data, it is attractive to combine these examples in training ranking functions. However, because of the …

Description Logic Reasoning With Decision Diagrams: Compiling Shiq To Disjunctive Datalog, Sebastian Rudolph

Kno.e.sis Publications

We propose a novel method for reasoning in the description logic SHIQ. After a satisfiability preserving transformation from SHIQ to the description logic ALCIb, the obtained ALCIb Tbox T is converted into an ordered binary decision diagram (OBDD) which represents a canonical model for T. This OBDD is turned into a disjunctive datalog program that can be used for Abox reasoning. The algorithm is worst-case optimal w.r.t. data complexity, and admits easy extensions with DL-safe rules and ground conjunctive queries.

Impacts Of Information And Communication Technologies On Country Development: Accounting For Area Interrelationships, Robert J. Kauffman, Ajay Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Single-item composite indices gauge ICT readiness at the country level but do not represent the direct impact of ICTs on a country's development. This paper describes a new approach to measuring the macrolevel impacts of ICTs across a range of development areas. The indirect effects of one area on others is taken into consideration by a simultaneous equation model that permits the inclusion of multiple development areas. The model is applied to data pertaining to four development areas in 64 countries: trade flows, agricultural productivity, R&D, and quality of life. ICT readiness is found to have a positive association with …

Leveraging Social Context For Searching Social Media, Marc Smith, Vladimir Barash, Lise Getoor, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ability to utilize and benefit from today's explosion of social media sites depends on providing tools that allow users to productively participate. In order to participate, users must be able to find resources (both people and information) that they find valuable. Here, we argue that in order to do this effectively, we should make use of a user's "social context". A user's social context includes both their personal social context (their friends and the communities to which they belong) and their community social context (their role and identity in different communities).

An Agent-Based Combat Simulation Framework In Support Of Effect-Based And Net-Centric Evaluation, Robert Joseph Bowen

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The use of information technologies (IT) and information networks has proliferated in industry as a method to achieve competitive advantage. The U.S. Military and its allies, in recent years, have employed IT to improve the way they conduct operations, speed decision making, and increase the span of control of commanders. This has resulted in a fundamental shift in the way military commanders employ combat units today. These (Information Age) forces no longer have to be able to see each other or even communicate directly in order to synchronize maneuvers. Dispersion is now favored over mass, relying on the IT network …

Segmenting Brain Tumors Using Pseudo-Conditional Random Fields, Chi-Hoon Lee, Shaojun Wang, Albert Murtha, Matthew R.G. Brown, Russell Greiner

Kno.e.sis Publications

Locating Brain tumor segmentation within MR (magnetic resonance) images is integral to the treatment of brain cancer. This segmentation task requires classifying each voxel as either tumor or non-tumor, based on a description of that voxel. Unfortunately, standard classifiers, such as Logistic Regression (LR) and Support Vector Machines (SVM), typically have limited accuracy as they treat voxels as independent and identically distributed (iid). Approaches based on random fields, which are able to incorporate spatial constraints, have recently been applied to brain tumor segmentation with notable performance improvement over iid classifiers. However, previous random field systems involved computationally intractable …

A Faceted Classification Based Approach To Search And Rank Web Apis, Karthik Gomadam, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web application hybrids, popularly known as mashups, are created by integrating services on the Web using their APIs. Support for finding an API is currently provided by generic search engines or domain specific solutions such as Google and ProgrammableWeb. Shortcomings of both these solutions in terms of and reliance on user tags make the task of identifying an API challenging. Since these APIs are described in HTML documents, it is essential to look beyond the boundaries of current approaches to Web service discovery that rely on formal descriptions. In this work, we present a faceted approach to searching and ranking …

Semantics Enhanced Services: Meteor-S, Sawsdl And Sa-Rest, Amit P. Sheth, Karthik Gomadam, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu

Kno.e.sis Publications

Services Research Lab at the Knoesis center and the LSDIS lab at University of Georgia have played a significant role in advancing the state of research in the areas of workflow management, semantic Web services and service oriented computing. Starting with the METEOR workflow management system in the 90's, researchers have addressed key issues in the area of semantic Web services and more recently, in the domain of RESTful services and Web 2.0. In this article, we present a brief discussion on the various contributions of METEOR-S including SAWSDL, publication and discovery of semantic Web services, data mediation, dynamic configuration …

Do Online Reviews Affect Product Sales? The Role Of Reviewer Characteristics And Temporal Effects, Nan Hu, Ling Liu, Jennifer Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online product reviews provided by consumers who previously purchased products have become a major information source for consumers and marketers regarding product quality. This study extends previous research by conducting a more compelling test of the effect of online reviews on sales. In particular, we consider both quantitative and qualitative aspects of online reviews, such as reviewer quality, reviewer exposure, product coverage, and temporal effects. Using transaction cost economics and uncertainty reduction theories, this study adopts a portfolio approach to assess the effectiveness of the online review market. We show that consumers understand the value difference between favorable news and …

Challenges Of Creating A Knowledge-Based Society: Education & Research For India & Gujarat, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Keeping Abreast Of Quantum News: Quantum Computing On The Web And In The Literature, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This appendix describes tools that can help you track developments in quantum computing.

Historical Bibliography Of Quantum Computing, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This bibliographic essay reviews seminal papers in quantum computing. Although quantum computing is a young science, its researchers have already published thousands of noteworthy articles, far too many to list here. Therefore, this appendix is not a comprehensive chronicle of the emergence and evolution of the field but rather a guided tour of some of the papers that spurred, formalized, and furthered its study.

Tcruzikb: Enabling Complex Queries For Genomic Data Exploration, Pablo N. Mendes, Bobby Mcknight, Amit P. Sheth, Jessica C. Kissinger

Kno.e.sis Publications

We developed a novel analytical environment to aid in the examination of the extensive amount of interconnected data available for genome projects. Our focus is to enable flexibility and abstraction from implementation details, while retaining the expressivity required for post-genomic research. To achieve this goal, we associated genomics data to ontologies and implemented a query formulation and execution environment with added visualization capabilities. We use ontology schemas to guide the user through the process of building complex queries in a flexible Web interface. Queries are serialized in SPARQL and sent to servers via Ajax. A component for visualization of the …

Text Analytics For Semantic Computing - The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This tutorial was give at the Second IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing Santa Clara, CA, USA - August 4-7, 2008.

Connectionist Model Generation: A First-Order Approach, Sebastian Bader, Pascal Hitzler, Steffen Holldobler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Knowledge-based artificial neural networks have been applied quite successfully to propositional knowledge representation and reasoning tasks. However, as soon as these tasks are extended to structured objects and structure-sensitive processes as expressed e.g., by means of first-order predicate logic, it is not obvious at all what neural-symbolic systems would look like such that they are truly connectionist, are able to learn, and allow for a declarative reading and logical reasoning at the same time. The core method aims at such an integration. It is a method for connectionist model generation using recurrent networks with feed-forward core. We show in this …

Mediatability: Estimating The Degree Of Human Involvement In Xml Schema Mediation, Karthik Gomadam, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Lakshmish Ramaswamy, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

Mediation and integration of data are significant challenges because the number of services on the Web, and heterogeneities in their data representation, continue to increase rapidly. To address these challenges we introduce a new measure, mediatability, which is a quantifiable and computable metric for the degree of human involvement in XML schema mediation. We present an efficient algorithm to compute mediatability and an experimental study to analyze how semantic annotations affect the ease of mediating between two schemas. We validate our approach by comparing mediatability scores generated by our system with user-perceived difficulty. We also evaluate the scalability of our …

An Xml-Based Approach To Handling Tables In Documents, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Trivikram Immaneni

Kno.e.sis Publications

We explore application of XML technology for handling tables in legacy semi-structured documents. Specifically, we analyze annotating heterogeneous documents containing tables to obtain a formalized XML Master document that improves traceability (hence easing verification and update) and enables manipulation using XSLT stylesheets. This approach is useful when table instances far outnumber distinct table types because the effort required to annotate a table instance is relatively less compared to formalizing table processing that respects table’s semantics. This work is also relevant for authoring new documents with tables that should be accessible to both humans and machines.