Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Semantic (Web) Technology In Action: Ontology Driven Information Systems For Search, Integration, And Analysis, Amit P. Sheth, Cartic Ramakrishnan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantics is seen as the key ingredient in the next phase of the Web infrastructure as well as the next generation of information systems applications. In this context, we review some of the reservations expressed about the viability of the Semantic Web. We respond to these by identifying a Semantic Technology that supports the key capabilities also needed to realize the Semantic Web vision, namely representing, acquiring and utilizing knowledge. Given that scalability is a key challenge, we briefly review our observations from developing three classes of real world applications and corresponding technology components: search/browsing, integration, and analytics. We distinguish …

Semantic Web Processes: Semantics Enabled Annotation, Discovery, Composition, And Orchestration Of Web Scale Processes, Jorge Cardoso, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This tutorial deals with the evolution of inter- Enterprise and Web scale process to support e-commerce and e-services. It taps into the promises of two of the hottest R&D and technology areas: Web services and the Semantic Web. It presents how applying semantics to each of the steps in the Semantic Web Process lifecycle can help address critical issues in reuse, integration and scalability.

A Fit-Gap Analysis Of E-Business Curricula Vs. Industry Need, S. Davis, Keng Siau, K. Dhenuvakonda

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The alignment of e-business academic programs with the e-business market is examined using a fit-gap analysis. Two high-end business schools, ranked independently by US News and Business Week, were chosen as sample. A total of 391 different e-commerce courses were identified, which were classified into 24 categories. Out of these, there are two broad and distinct tracks in e-business curricula, with one track paving the way for an e-business career with a prevailing focus on the business aspect and the other track leading to a career focusing on technology and Web-based systems development. Industry demand for e-business professionals and the …

Paper For An Educational Digital Library, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Yin-Leng Theng, Ming Yin, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

GeogDL is a digital library of geography examination resources designed to assist students in revising for a national geography examination in Singapore. As part of an iterative design process, we carried out participatory design and brainstorming with student and teacher design partners. The first study involved prospective student design partners. In response to the first study, we describe in this paper an implementation of PAPER – Personalised Adaptive Pathways for Exam Resources – a new bundle of personalized, interactive services containing a mock exam and a personal coach. The mock exam provides a simulation of the actual geography examination while …

Creating A Virtual Store Image, P. Katerattanakul, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A study was conducted to describe some of the factors that needed to be considered for a virtual store. It was revealed that the growth of e-commerce and online businesses has made it essential to understand the critical attributes of image for a virtual store. Store image was described as the way in which the store was defined by customers and several studies. The study compiled 77 designs and features into a list used to construct a survey. Four hundred and twenty-seven potential customers were requested to rate the significance of each item on the list. The information gathered identified …

Development Of A Framework For Trust In Mobile Commerce, J. Erickson, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile commerce represents a significant development in e-commerce. Despite the potential of mobile commerce, trust is a major obstacle in its adoption and development. The focus of this research is to develop a framework to identify the factors influencing trust in mobile commerce and to explain the development of such trust using a means-ends objective network. We utilized the Value- Focused Thinking approach to interview subjects in order to identify their fundamental and means objectives concerning trust in mobile commerce and to construct a means-ends objective network. A trust framework is developed from the means-ends objective network. As one of …

Xstamps: A Multiversion Timestamps Concurrency Control Protocol For Xml Data, Khin-Myo Win, Wee-Keong Ng, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the tremendous growth of XML data over the Web, efficient management of such data becomes a new challenge for database community. Several data management solutions, proposed in recent years, extend the capability of traditional database systems to meet the needs of XML data while alternative approaches introduce new generation databases, named as native XML database management systems. Although traditional databases have mature transaction management and concurrency control techniques, there is still a need to tailor techniques for native XML databases in order to deal with distinct characteristics of XML. In this paper, we propose XStamps, a multiversion timestamps concurrency …

Development Of A Systems Engineering Model For Chemical Separation Process, Lijian Sun

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis is concerned with the efforts to develop a general-purpose systems engineering model software TRPSEMPro1 that can be used to improve productivity in the design process. Different features of TRPSEMPro will be presented in this thesis. First, Systems Engineering technology is presented, followed by the exposition of different numerical optimization technologies and DOE (Design of Experiments) study technologies. Second, the detailed software process, Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOA&D) for the TRPSEMPro is presented. All the design data models are expressed by using Unified Modeling Language (UML).

AMUSESimulator is another software package which has been designed and implemented in order …

Validating And Refining Clusters Via Visual Rendering, Keke Chen, Ling Liu

Kno.e.sis Publications

The automatic clustering algorithms are known to work well in dealing with clusters of regular shapes, e.g. compact spherical/elongated shapes, but may incur higher error rates when dealing with arbitrarily shaped clusters. Although some efforts have been devoted to addressing the problem of skewed datasets, the problem of handling clusters with irregular shapes is still in its infancy, especially in terms of dimensionality of the datasets and the precision of the clustering results considered. Not surprisingly, the statistical indices works ineffective in validating clusters of irregular shapes, too. We address the problem of clustering and validating arbitrarily shaped clusters with …

Semantic E-Workflow Composition, Jorge Cardoso, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Systems and infrastructures are currently being developed to support Web services. The main idea is to encapsulate an organization's functionality within an appropriate interface and advertise it as Web services. While in some cases Web services may be utilized in an isolated form, it is normal to expect Web services to be integrated as part of workflow processes. The composition of workflow processes that model e-service applications differs from the design of traditional workflows, in terms of the number of tasks (Web services) available to the composition process, in their heterogeneity, and in their autonomy. Therefore, two problems need to …

Towards (Semi-) Automatic Generation Of Bio-Medical Ontologies, Vipul Kashyap, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Thomas Rindflesch

Kno.e.sis Publications

The design and construction of domain specific ontologies and taxonomies requires allocation of huge resources in terms of cost and time. These efforts are human intensive and we need to explore ways of minimizing human involvement and other resources. In the biomedical domain, we seek to leverage resources such as the UMLS1 Metathesaurus and NLP-based applications such as MetaMap2 in conjunction with statistical clustering techniques, to (partially) automate the process. This is expected to be useful to the team involved in developing MeSH and other biomedical taxonomies to identify gaps in the existing taxonomies, and to be able to quickly …

Web Unit Mining: Finding And Classifying Subgraphs Of Web Pages, Aixin Sun, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In web classification, most researchers assume that the objects to classify are individual web pages from one or more web sites. In practice, the assumption is too restrictive since a web page itself may not always correspond to a concept instance of some semantic concept (or category) given to the classification task. In this paper, we want to relax this assumption and allow a concept instance to be represented by a subgraph of web pages or a set of web pages. We identify several new issues to be addressed when the assumption is removed, and formulate the web unit mining …

Apparatus For Discovering Computing Services Architecture And Developing Patterns Of Computing Services And Method Therefor [Sg 107499], Emarson Victoria, Hui Tseng, Hwee Hwa Pang, Tau Chen Cham, Siew Choo Tay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An apparatus for discovering computing services architecture and developing patterns of computing services and method therefor are disclosed. The apparatus, according to an embodiment of the invention, provides a graphical user interface for displaying a deployment plan of deployed computing services. Components in the deployment plan are interconnected by links indicating dependency relationships between the components. Each component and link is assigned a confidence value, which is based on a calculated weight of the properties of each component. The apparatus further provides editing tools for manipulating the components in the deployment plan as well as for creating and managing patterns.

What Can Semantics Do For Bioinformatics?, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

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Data Mining And Mining Disasters: Terrorism Information Awareness, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article identifies problems with data mining approaches to antiterrorism and counterterrorism.

A Computer-Based Articulation Training Aid For Short Words (Cata), Mukund Devarajan

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Several improvements in the vowel articulation training aid (VATA) are described, as well as the efforts to extend the visual feedback system to operate with short words in the form of consonant, vowel and consonant (CVC). The extended version of the visual feedback system is referred to as CATA (Computer-based Articulation Training Aid); the vowel version of the aid (VATA) only operates with ten American English monopthong vowels. Improvements in VATA include the use of a neural network (NN) recognizer method to prune a large database of vowel recordings to eliminate noisy and/or mispronounced tokens. The spectral jitter problem, previously …

Semantic Web In Action: Ontology-Driven Information Search, Integration And Analysis, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Context-Aware Semantic Association Ranking, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Christian Halaschek-Wiener, I. Budak Arpinar, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Discovering complex and meaningful relationships, which we call Semantic Associations, is an important challenge. Just as ranking of documents is a critical component of today's search engines, ranking of relationships will be essential in tomorrow's semantic search engines that would support discovery and mining of the Semantic Web. Building upon our recent work on specifying types of Semantic Associations in RDF graphs, which are possible to create through semantic metadata extraction and annotation, we discuss a framework where ranking techniques can be used to identify more interesting and more relevant Semantic Associations. Our techniques utilize alternative ways of specifying the …

The Challenges Of Case Design Integration In The Telecommunication Application Domain, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The magnitude of the problems facing the telecommunication software industry is presently at a point at which software engineers should become deeply involved. This paper presents a research project on advanced telecommunication technology carried out in Europe, called BOOST (Broadband Object-Oriented Service Technology). The project involved cooperative work among telecommunication companies, research centres and universities from several countries. The challenges to integrate CASE tools to support software development within the telecommunication application domain are discussed. A software process model that encourages component reusability, named the X model, is described as part of a software life cycle model for the telecommunication …

Continuity Of Semantic Operators In Logic Programming And Their Approximation By Artificial Neural Networks, Pascal Hitzler, Anthony K. Seda

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

One approach to integrating first-order logic programming and neural network systems employs the approximation of semantic operators by feedforward networks. For this purpose, it is necessary to view these semantic operators as continuous functions on the reals. This can be accomplished by endowing the space of all interpretations of a logic program with topologies obtained from suitable embeddings. We will present such topologies which arise naturally out of the theory of logic programming, discuss continuity issues of several well-known semantic operators, and derive some results concerning the approximation of these operators by feedforward neural networks.

Aggregated Causal Maps: An Approach To Elicit And Aggregate The Knowledge Of Multiple Experts, S. Nadkarni, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a systematic procedure to elicit and aggregate the knowledge of multiple individual experts and represent it in the form of an Aggregated Causal Map (ACM). This procedure differs from existing methods in two ways. First, unlike other methods, this method does not rely on group interaction in eliciting knowledge of multiple experts, and, therefore, is not fraught with biases associated with group dynamics. Second, this method uses both the idiographic and nomothetic approaches while existing methods focus on nomothetic approaches to knowledge elicitation. We draw on the strengths of both approaches by using the idiographic approach to …

E-Ducation, J. Erickson, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most educators are convinced Internet technology will sharply alter the educational landscape of the future, but considerable uncertainly still exists as to exactly how the classroom will evolve over the next decade. Many of the relevant technologies in development are a direct result of the Internet2 Project [1], a collaboration of more than 200 universities working closely with private industry and the National Science Foundation to build and promote an advanced network using state-of-the-art technology and applications. But how the classroom evolves depends not only on advanced Internet2 technologies, which are discussed later in the article, but also on issues …

Ssm: Fast Construction Of The Optimized Segment Support Map, Kok-Leong Ong, Wee-Keong Ng, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Computing the frequency of a pattern is one of the key operations in data mining algorithms. Recently, the Optimized Segment Support Map (OSSM) was introduced as a simple but powerful way of speeding up any form of frequency counting satisfying the monotonicity condition. However, the construction cost to obtain the ideal OSSM is high, and makes it less attractive in practice. In this paper, we propose the FSSM, a novel algorithm that constructs the OSSM quickly using a FP-Tree. Given a user-defined segment size, the FSSM is able to construct the OSSM at a fraction of the time required by …

Interorganizational Systems And Competitive Advantages – Lessons From History, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Global business constantly faces radical transformations stemming from advances in information technology (IT). The concept of gaining competitive advantages by linking information systems across organizations (e.g., supply chain integration) has taken on an overtone of dogma in many business circles. Such electronic linkages are known as Interorganizational Systems (IOS). Lately, the growing importance and easy accessibility of the Internet have propelled IOS to a new height. Undoubtedly, IOS can have a great impact on organizational performance and industry structure. However, IT such as the Internet is readily available to all companies, and most IOS concepts can be easily replicated. Followers …

On Mining Group Patterns Of Mobile Users, Yida Wang, Ee Peng Lim, San-Yih Hwang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a group pattern mining approach to derive the grouping information of mobile device users based on the spatio-temporal distances among them. Group patterns of users are determined by a distance threshold and a minimum duration. To discover group patterns, we propose the AGP and VG-growth algorithms that are derived from the Apriori and FP-growth algorithms respectively. We further evaluate the efficiencies of these two algorithms using synthetically generated user movement data.

Design And Evaluation Of A List Gathering Tool In A Web-Based Collaborative Environment, Yuanqiong Wang

Dissertations

This research focuses on how to build a "list" structure to combine individual items of information into some sort of structure that converts the individual items of information into a structure of knowledge relative to the problem. Software was designed to provide relationships among and comparisons of the contributions in a "list" structure, so that individual members of a group process will be able to understand the contributions of information made by the group as a whole.

A List Gathering Tool was designed and implemented, which is one component in a Web-based Social Decision Support System (SDSS) Toolkit. Then, a …

Design And Evaluation Of A Voting Tool In A Collaborative Environment, Zheng Li

Dissertations

This dissertation researchdesigned, implemented, and evaluated a Web-based Dynamic Voting Toolfor small group decision-making in a collaborative environment.

In this dissertation, theliterature on voting tools in current GDSS research is presented. Variousvoting theories and methods are analyzed, and the advantages and weaknessesare compared, so as to gain a better understanding of how to apply thesedifferent voting methods to diverse decision-making situations. A briefoverview of scaling theories is also given, with an emphasis on Thurstone'sLaw.

The basic features of someweb-based voting tool implementations are reviewed along with a discussionof the pros and cons of Intemet voting. A discussion of Human DynamicVoting …

Context-Aware Semantic Association Ranking, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Chris Halaschek, I. Budak Arpinar, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Discovering complex and meaningful relationships, which we call Semantic Associations, is an important challenge. Just as ranking of documents is a critical component of today's search engines, ranking of relationships will be essential in tomorrow's semantic search engines that would support discovery and mining of the Semantic Web. Building upon our recent work on specifying types of Semantic Associations in RDF graphs, which are possible to create through semantic metadata extraction and annotation, we discuss a framework where ranking techniques can be used to identify more interesting and more relevant Semantic Associations. Our techniques utilize alternative ways of specifying the …

Enemy At The Gate: Threats To Information Security, Michael E. Whitman

Faculty Articles

A firm can build more effective security strategies by identifying and ranking the severity of potential threats to its IS efforts.

Boltzmann Machine Learning With The Latent Maximum Entropy Principle, Shaojun Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Fuchun Peng, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a new statistical learning paradigm for Boltzmann machines based on a new inference principle we have proposed: the latent maximum entropy principle (LME). LME is different both from Jaynes maximum entropy principle and from standard maximum likelihood estimation. We demonstrate the LME principle BY deriving new algorithms for Boltzmann machine parameter estimation, and show how robust and fast new variant of the EM algorithm can be developed. Our experiments show that estimation based on LME generally yields better results than maximum likelihood estimation, particularly when inferring hidden units from small amounts of data.