Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Appointment System, Ming-Tse Chen

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project was to create an online appointment system that allows students to make appointments with faculty through the internet.

Flight Ticket Ordering System, Ching-Ting Huang

Theses Digitization Project

The Flight Ticket Ordering System (FTOS) is an online system that allows members to get flight information and purchase tickets through the Internet. The project is designed to be a multi-platform, thus the interface is a normal web browser and it is written in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), and JSP (Java Server Page). In this system, we use the MySQL database server to maintain persistent data.

Show Me What You Mean! Exploiting Domain Semantics In Ontology Visualization, Ravi Pavagada, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York

Kno.e.sis Publications

Ontologies build the backbone for many life-sciences applications. These ontologies, however, are represented in XML based languages that are meant for machine-consumption and hence are difficult for humans to comprehend. For a meaningful visualization of these ontologies, it is important that the display of entities and relationships captures the cognitive representation of the domain as perceived by the domain experts. In this paper we present OntoVista, an ontology visualization tool that is adaptable to the needs of different domains, especially in the life sciences. While keeping the graph structures as the predominant model, we provide a semantically enhanced graph display …

Taxaminer: Improving Taxonomy Label Quality Using Latent Semantic Indexing, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Christopher Thomas, Vipul Kashyap, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The development of taxonomies/ontologies is a human intensive process requiring prohibitively large resource commitments in terms of time and cost. In our previous work we have identified an experimentation framework for semi-automatic taxonomy/hierarchy generation from unstructured text. In the preliminary results presented, the taxonomy/hierarchy quality was lower than we had anticipated. In this paper, we present two variations of our experimentation framework, viz. Latent semantic Indexing (LSI) for document indexing and the use of term vectors to prune labels assigned to nodes in the final taxonomy/hierarchy. Using our previous results of taxonomy/hierarchy quality as the baseline we present results that …

Data Processing In Space, Time, And Semantics Dimensions, Farshad Hakimpour, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This work presents an experimental system for data processing in space, time and semantics dimensions using current Semantic Web technologies. The paper describes how we obtain geographic and event data from Internet sources and also how we integrate them into an RDF store. We briefly introduce a set of functionalities in space, time and semantics dimensions. These functionalities are implemented based on our existing technology for main-memory based RDF data processing developed in the LSDIS Lab. A number of these functionalities are exposed as REST Web services. We present two sample client side applications that are developed using a combination …

Using Query-Specific Variance Estimates To Combine Bayesian Classifiers, Chi-Hoon Lee, Russell Greiner, Shaojun Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

Many of today's best classification results are obtained by combining the responses of a set of base classifiers to produce an answer for the query. This paper explores a novel "query specific" combination rule: After learning a set of simple belief network classifiers, we produce an answer to each query by combining their individual responses, using weights based inversely on their respective variances around their responses. These variances are based on the uncertainty of the network parameters, which in turn depend on the training datasample. In essence, this variance quantifies the base classifier's confidence of its response to this query. …

Semi-Supervised Conditional Random Fields For Improved Sequence Segmentation And Labeling, Feng Jiao, Shaojun Wang, Chi-Hoon Lee, Russell Greiner, Dale Schuurmans

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a new semi-supervised training procedure for conditional random fields (CRFs) that can be used to train sequence segmentors and labelers from a combination of labeled and unlabeled training data. Our approach is based on extending the minimum entropy regularization framework to the structured prediction case, yielding a training objective that combines unlabeled conditional entropy with labeled conditional likelihood. Although the training objective is no longer concave, it can still be used to improve an initial model (e.g. obtained from supervised training) by iterative ascent. We apply our new training algorithm to the problem of identifying gene and protein …

An Investigation Of Codon Usage Bias Including Visualization And Quantification In Organisms Exhibiting Multiple Biases, Douglas W. Raiford, Travis E. Doom, Dan E. Krane, Michael L. Raymer

Kno.e.sis Publications

Prokaryotic genomic sequence data provides a rich resource for bioinformatic analytic algorithms. Information can be extracted in many ways from the sequence data. One often overlooked process involves investigating an organism’s codon usage. Degeneracy in the genetic code leads to multiple codons coding for the same amino acids. Organism’s often preferentially utilize specific codons when coding for an amino acid. This biased codon usage can be a useful trait when predicting a gene’s expressivity or whether the gene originated from horizontal transfer. There can be multiple biases at play in a genome causing errors in the predictive process. For this …

Clustering Similarity Comparison Using Density Profiles, Eric Bae, James Bailey, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

The unsupervised nature of cluster analysis means that objects can be clustered in many ways, allowing different clustering algorithms to generate vastly different results. To address this, clustering comparison methods have traditionally been used to quantify the degree of similarity between alternative clusterings. However, existing techniques utilize only the point memberships to calculate the similarity, which can lead to unintuitive results. They also cannot be applied to analyze clusterings which only partially share points, which can be the case in stream clustering. In this paper we introduce a new measure named ADCO, which takes into account density profiles for each …

Information Systems And Health Care Xiii: Examining The Critical Requirements, Design Approaches And Evaluation Methods For A Public Health Emergency Response System, Ann L. Fruhling

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Research pertaining to emergency response systems has accelerated over the past few years, particularly since 9/11 events, and more recently due to Hurricane Katrina and concern over a potential of an avian flu pandemic. This study examines the requirements that are the most demanding with respect to software and hardware, and the associated design strategies for a public health emergency response system (ERS) for electronic laboratory diagnostics consultation. In addition, this study illustrates ways to evaluate the design decisions.

An important goal of a public health ERS is to improve the communication and notification of life-threatening diseases and harmful agents. …

Ontological Implications Of The Levels Of Conceptual Interoperability Model, Andreas Tolk, Charles D. Turnitsa, Saikou Y. Diallo

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model (LCIM) was developed to cope with the different layers of interoperation of modeling & simulation applications. It introduced technical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, dynamic, and conceptual layers of interoperation and showed how they are related to the ideas of integratability, interoperability, and composability. This paper will be presented in the invited session "Ontology Driven Interoperability for Agile Applications using Information Systems: Requirements and Applications for Agent Mediated Decision Support" at WMSCI 2006.

Predicting Domain Specific Entities With Limited Background Knowledge, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper proposes a framework for automatic recognition of domain-specific entities from text, given limited background knowledge, e.g. in form of an ontology. The algorithm exploits several lightweight natural language processing techniques, such as tokenization and stemming, as well as statistical techniques, such as singular value decomposition (SVD) to suggest domain relatedness of unknown entities.

Driving Deep Semantics In Middleware And Networks: What, Why And How?, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Knowledge Modeling And Its Application In Life Sciences: A Tale Of Two Ontologies, Satya S. Sahoo, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York, Samir Tartir

Kno.e.sis Publications

High throughput glycoproteomics, similar to genomics and proteomics, involves extremely large volumes of distributed, heterogeneous data as a basis for identification and quantification of a structurally diverse collection of biomolecules. The ability to share, compare, query for and most critically correlate datasets using the native biological relationships are some of the challenges being faced by glycobiology researchers. As a solution for these challenges, we are building a semantic structure, using a suite of ontologies, which supports management of data and information at each step of the experimental lifecycle. This framework will enable researchers to leverage the large scale of glycoproteomics …

Reporting On-Campus Crime Online: User Intention To Use, Gondy A. Leroy, Alicia Iriberri '06, Nathan Garrett

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

National surveys demonstrate that millions of crimes go unreported in the United States. Several reasons may contribute to this lack of reporting and we are investigating these potential reasons and how they may be addressed. We are developing an online system that provides an anonymous and secure mechanism for both victims and witnesses to report crimes to police. The system is being implemented and tested on a university campus. Potential users (i.e., students, staff) were surveyed to determine their intent to use the system. Respondents claimed to report crimes already, which is in contrast with the findings from the national …

Data Mining Techniques To Study Therapy Success With Autistic Children, Gondy A. Leroy, Annika Irmscher, Marjorie H. Charlop

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Autism spectrum disorder has become one of the most prevalent developmental disorders, characterized by a wide variety of symptoms. Many children need extensive therapy for years to improve their behavior and facilitate integration in society. However, few systematic evaluations are done on a large scale that can provide insights into how, where, and how therapy has an impact. We describe how data mining techniques can be used to provide insights into behavioral therapy as well as its effect on participants. To this end, we are developing a digital library of coded video segments that contains data on appropriate and inappropriate …

Dynamic Generation Of A Table Of Contents With Consumer-Friendly Labels, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy Leroy, Elizabeth Wood

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Consumers increasingly look to the Internet for health information, but available resources are too difficult for the majority to understand. Interactive tables of contents (TOC) can help consumers access health information by providing an easy to understand structure. Using natural language processing and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), we have automatically generated TOCs for consumer health information. The TOC are categorized according to consumer-friendly labels for the UMLS semantic types and semantic groups. Categorizing phrases by semantic types is significantly more correct and relevant. Greater correctness and relevance was achieved with documents that are difficult to read than with …

Health Information Text Characteristics, Gondy Leroy, Evren Eryilmaz '11, Benjamin T. Laroya

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Millions of people search online for medical text, but these texts are often too complicated to understand. Readability evaluations are mostly based on surface metrics such as character or words counts and sentence syntax, but content is ignored. We compared four types of documents, easy and difficult WebMD documents, patient blogs, and patient educational material, for surface and content-based metrics. The documents differed significantly in reading grade levels and vocabulary used. WebMD pages with high readability also used terminology that was more consumer-friendly. Moreover, difficult documents are harder to understand due to their grammar and word choice and because they …

Using A Digital Library Of Images For Communication: Comparison Of A Card-Based System To Pda Software, Trudi Miller '08, Gondy Leroy, John Huang '05, Serena Chuang '05

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Autism spectrum disorder has become one of the most prevalent developmental disorders and one of the main impairments is difficulty with communication. One method of augmentative and alternative communication is the use of the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) to create messages using a series of images printed on cards and organized in binders. We are developing a digital alternative based on an image library that is displayed on a personal digital assistant (PDA). We conducted an initial user acceptance study that compared the effectiveness and usability of both systems. The study showed that the PDA system was able to …

Realtime Query Expansion And Procedural Interfaces For Information Hierarchies, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We demonstrate the use of two user interfaces for interacting with web hierarchies. One uses the dependencies underlying a hierarchy to perform real-time query expansion and, in this way, acts as an in situ feedback mechanism. The other enables the user to cascade the output from one interaction to the input of another, and so on, and, in this way, supports procedural information-seeking tasks without disrupting the flow of interaction.

Information Assurance Through Binary Vulnerability Auditing, William B. Kimball, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The goal of this research is to develop improved methods of discovering vulnerabilities in software. A large volume of software, from the most frequently used programs on a desktop computer, such as web browsers, e-mail programs, and word processing applications, to mission-critical services for the space shuttle, is unintentionally vulnerable to attacks and thus insecure. By seeking to improve the identification of vulnerabilities in software, the security community can save the time and money necessary to restore compromised computer systems. In addition, this research is imperative to activities of national security such as counterterrorism. The current approach involves a systematic …

The Challenges Of Itil Implementations, Jason Gray

Theses : Honours

Originating from the UK, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an IT Service Management framework whose adoption is rapidly spreading throughout Canada, Netherlands, South Africa, India, USA, and Australia. Promoted as a collection of "Best Practices" in IT service management, ITIL is gaining a reputation as a "silver bullet" to IT Service Management woes and is now .gaining popularity amongst IT vendors and leaders of best practices worldwide. Increased IT productivity, IT accountability, increased compliance and reduced IT costs, are just some of the promised list of benefits. More and more organisations are plam1ing to embark on ITIL implementations as …

Synchronization And Multiple Group Server Support For Kepler, K. Maly, M. Zubair, H. Siripuram, S. Zunjarwad, Yannis Manolopoulos (Ed.), Joaquim Filipe (Ed.), Panos Constantopoulos (Ed.), José Cordeiro (Ed.)

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In the last decade literally thousands of digital libraries have emerged but one of the biggest obstacles for dissemination of information to a user community is that many digital libraries use different, proprietary technologies that inhibit interoperability. Kepler framework addresses interoperability and gives publication control to individual publishers. In Kepler, OAI-PMH is used to support "personal data providers" or "archivelets".". In our vision, individual publishers can be integrated with an institutional repository like Dspace by means of a Kepler Group Digital Library (GDL). The GDL aggregates metadata and full text from archivelets and can act as an OAI-compliant data provider …

Efficient Mining Of Group Patterns From User Movement Data, Yida Wang, Ee Peng Lim, San-Yih Hwang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a new approach to derive groupings of mobile users based on their movement data. We assume that the user movement data are collected by logging location data emitted from mobile devices tracking users. We formally define group pattern as a group of users that are within a distance threshold from one another for at least a minimum duration. To mine group patterns, we first propose two algorithms, namely AGP and VG-growth. In our first set of experiments, it is shown when both the number of users and logging duration are large, AGP and VG-growth are …

The Roles Of Digital Libraries In Teaching And Learning Geography, Chew-Hung Chang, John Hedberg, Tiong-Sa Teh, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adopting a problem-centred approach helps students to learn Geography more effectively as they are able to identify and generalize about where different resources or activities are spatially located and they learn to associate certain patterns and processes with geographical changes. In an era where web-based student-centred inquiry is gaining popularity as a mode of learning Geography, the role of digital libraries as delivery trucks (in Clark’s terminology, 1983) needs to be better understood. An obvious affordance of the digital library is that it organizes information around themes for problems to be solved. This paper describes a developmental project to build …

Grid-Partition Index: A Hybrid Approach To Nearest-Neighbor Queries In Wireless Location-Based Services, Baihua Zheng, Jianliang Xu, Wang-Chien Lee, Dik Lun Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional nearest-neighbor (NN) search is based on two basic indexing approaches: object-based indexing and solution-based indexing. The former is constructed based on the locations of data objects: using some distance heuristics on object locations. The latter is built on a precomputed solution space. Thus, NN queries can be reduced to and processed as simple point queries in this solution space. Both approaches exhibit some disadvantages, especially when employed for wireless data broadcast in mobile computing environments. In this paper, we introduce a new index method, called the grid-partition index, to support NN search in both ondemand access and periodic broadcast …

In-Network Join Processing For Sensor Networks, Hai Yu, Ee Peng Lim, Jun Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advances in hardware and wireless technologies have led to sensor networks consisting of large number of sensors capable of gathering and processing data collectively. Query processing on these sensor networks has to consider various inherent constraints. While simple queries such as select and aggregate queries in wireless sensor networks have been addressed in the literature, the processing of join queries in sensor networks remains to be investigated. In this paper, we present a synopsis join strategy for evaluating join queries in sensor networks with communication efficiency. In this strategy, instead of directly joining two relations distributed in a sensor …

A Dyadic Composition To Foster Virtual Team Effectiveness: An Experimental Study, Gamze Karayaz

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The importance of effectiveness for virtual teamwork continues to gain momentum as technology and globalization of work accelerate. The implementation of virtual teams provides one approach to enhance competitiveness, overcoming the disadvantages of space and time differences through collaborative technologies. The influence of structure to virtual team performance has not been clearly established in the literature. The purpose of this research study was to investigate the effectiveness of a dyad structured approach for virtual teams using a quasi-experimental research design.

This research investigated four questions related to the influence of structure on virtual team effectiveness related to task performance, communication …