Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Research In Semantic Web And Information Retrieval: Trust, Sensors, And Search, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Shared Understanding Of End-Users' Requirements In E-Science Projects, Peter Darch, Annamaria Carusi, Marina Jirotka

Peter Darch

The acquisition by developers of e-science applications of a thorough understanding of the requirements of end-users has been recognized as playing a critical role in the usability of such applications. However, there is another dimension to such an understanding that also plays an important role, namely the extent to which these developers converge on a shared understanding of these requirements. This paper considers why such a shared understanding is important, and highlights possible obstacles to this that may arise in the context of e-science projects. A research project, consisting of qualitative case studies of two projects, is being undertaken, with …

Retaining Participants In Volunteer Computing Projects, Peter Darch

Peter Darch

Volunteer computing projects (VCPs) have been set up by groups of scientists to recruit members of the public who are asked to donate spare capacity on their personal computers to the processing of scientific data or computationally intensive models. VCPs serve two purposes: to acquire significant computing capacity and to educate the public about science. A particular challenge for these scientists is the retention of volunteers as there is a very high drop-out rate. This paper develops recommendations for scientists and software engineers setting up or running VCPs regarding which strategies to pursue in order to improve volunteer retention rates. …

Successful And Abandoned Sourceforge.Net Projects In The Initiation Stage, Charles Schweik

National Center for Digital Government

[first paragraph] Chapter 6 provided an open source project success and abandonment dependent variable. Chapter 7 described data available in the Sourceforge.net repository and linked these data to various independent variable concepts and hypotheses presented in the theoretical part of this book. Chapter 7 also described the Classification Tree and Random Forest statistical approaches we use in this and the following chapter. This chapter presents the results of the Classification Tree analysis for successful and abandoned projects in the Initiation Stage, which in Chapter 3 (Figure 3.2), we defined as the period before and up to the time when a …

The Dependent Variable: Defining Open Source "Success" And "Abandonment" Using Sourceforge.Net Data, Charles Schweik

National Center for Digital Government

[first paragraph] From the very beginning of this research project, we understood that we needed to define what success meant in open source so that we could use that definition to create a dependent variable for our empirical studies. Does success mean a project has developed high quality software, or does it mean that the software is widely used? How might extremely valuable software that is used by only a few people, such as software for charting parts of the human genome, fit into this definition? In this chapter, we establish a robust success and abandonment measure that satisfies these …

Towards Reasoning Pragmatics, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The realization of Semantic Web reasoning is central to substantiating the Semantic Web vision. However, current mainstream research on this topic faces serious challenges, which force us to question established lines of research and to rethink the underlying approaches.

A Contrast Pattern Based Clustering Quality Index For Categorical Data, Qingbao Liu, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

Since clustering is unsupervised and highly explorative, clustering validation (i.e. assessing the quality of clustering solutions) has been an important and long standing research problem. Existing validity measures have significant shortcomings. This paper proposes a novel contrast pattern based clustering quality index (CPCQ) for categorical data, by utilizing the quality and diversity of the contrast patterns (CPs) which contrast the clusters in clusterings. High quality CPs can characterize clusters and discriminate them against each other. Experiments show that the CPCQ index (1) can recognize that expert-determined classes are the best clusters for many datasets from the UCI repository; (2) does …

Sparql Query Re-Writing For Spatial Datasets Using Partonomy Based Transformation Rules, Prateek Jain, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth, Peter Z. Yeh, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

Often the information present in a spatial knowledge base is represented at a different level of granularity and abstraction than the query constraints. For querying ontology’s containing spatial information, the precise relationships between spatial entities has to be specified in the basic graph pattern of SPARQL query which can result in long and complex queries. We present a novel approach to help users intuitively write SPARQL queries to query spatial data, rather than relying on knowledge of the ontology structure. Our framework re-writes queries, using transformation rules to exploit part-whole relations between geographical entities to address the mismatches between query …

The Convergence Of Broadcasting And Telephony: Legal And Regulatory Implications, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

This article, written for the inaugural issue of a new journal, analyzes the extent to which the convergence of broadcasting and telephony induced by the digitization of communications technologies is forcing policymakers to rethink their basic approach to regulating these industries. Now that voice and video are becoming available through every transmission technology, policymakers can no longer define the scope of regulatory obligations in terms of the mode of transmission. In addition, jurisdictions that employ separate agencies to regulate broadcasting and telephony must reform their institutional structures to bring both within the ambit of a single regulatory agency. The emergence …

Sustainability In Packaging: A Study Of Trends, Ideas, And Perceptions Of Sustainability As It Relates To Packaging, Leslie Herrmann

Graphic Communication

The consumer packaging world has two key players, the consumer and the packaging manufacturer. And with the outside perspective of an expert on sustainability there creates the chemistry currently operating the sustainable packaging movement. But what does sustainability mean? The quick, dirty, and official definition is something which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (www.sustainability-ed.org).

This study focused on what the consumer perceived as being sustainable as well as tested some consumer knowledge of what sustainability is. This was then contrasted with what some award winning packaging manufacturers …

A Local Qualitative Approach To Referral And Functional Trust, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Dharan Althuru, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust and confidence are becoming key issues in diverse applications such as ecommerce, social networks, semantic sensor web, semantic web information retrieval systems, etc. Both humans and machines use some form of trust to make informed and reliable decisions before acting. In this work, we briefly review existing work on trust networks, pointing out some of its drawbacks. We then propose a local framework to explore two different kinds of trust among agents called referral trust and functional trust, that are modelled using local partial orders, to enable qualitative trust personalization. The proposed approach formalizes reasoning with trust, distinguishing between …

An Anytime Algorithm For Computing Inconsistency Measurement, Yue Ma, Guilin Qi, Guohui Xiao, Pascal Hitzler, Zuoquan Lin

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Measuring inconsistency degrees of inconsistent knowledge bases is an important problem as it provides context information for facilitating inconsistency handling. Many methods have been proposed to solve this problem and a main class of them is based on some kind of paraconsistent semantics. In this paper, we consider the computational aspects of inconsistency degrees of propositional knowledge bases under 4-valued semantics. We first analyze its computational complexity. As it turns out that computing the exact inconsistency degree is intractable, we then propose an anytime algorithm that provides tractable approximation of the inconsistency degree from above and below. We show that …

Case Study: Recruitment Of Egg Donors By South Korean Stem Cell Researchers, Mj Peterson, Osman Kiratli, Ilke Ercan

International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Engineering

This case study examines the controversy surrounding Dr. Hwang Woo-suk's recruitment of egg donors for his team's stem cell research from 2002 through 2005. It explores the international dimensions of ethical standards, the political decentralization of global regulation, and the internationalization of science.

Four Billion Little Brothers?: Privacy, Mobile Phones, And Ubiquitous Data Collection, Katie Shilton

Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse

No abstract provided.

Ontology-Driven Provenance Management In Escience: An Application In Parasite Research, Satya S. Sahoo, D. Brent Weatherly, Raghava Mutharaju, Pramod Anantharam, Amit P. Sheth, Rick L. Tarleton

Kno.e.sis Publications

Provenance, from the French word “provenir”, describes the lineage or history of a data entity. Provenance is critical information in scientific applications to verify experiment process, validate data quality and associate trust values with scientific results. Current industrial scale eScience projects require an end-to-end provenance management infrastructure. This infrastructure needs to be underpinned by formal semantics to enable analysis of large scale provenance information by software applications. Further, effective analysis of provenance information requires well-defined query mechanisms to support complex queries over large datasets. This paper introduces an ontology-driven provenance management infrastructure for biology experiment data, as part …

State Of The U.S. Ocean And Coastal Economies 2009, Judith T. Kildow, Charles S. Colgan, Jason D. Scorse

Publications

This nation’s coasts and oceans contribute much to the United States economy. For the past ten years, the National Ocean Economics Program (NOEP) has compiled time-series data that track economic activities,demographics, natural resource production, non-market values, and federal expenditures in the U.S. coastal zone both on land and in the water. On the website www.oceaneconomics.org, the public—government officials,academics, industry, and advocacy groups—have had interactive access to this information and used it widely for many different purposes. This report features highlights from this collection to heighten appreciation for the value of the ocean and this nation’s coasts among an even …

A Survey Of The Semantic Specification Of Sensors, Michael Compton, Cory Andrew Henson, Laurent Lefort, Holger Neuhaus, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantic sensor networks use declarative descriptions of sensors promote reuse and integration, and to help solve the difficulties of installing, querying and maintaining complex, heterogeneous sensor networks. This paper reviews the state of the art for the semantic specification of sensors, one of the fundamental technologies in the semantic sensor network vision. Twelve sensor ontologies are reviewed and analysed for the range and expressive power of their concepts. The reasoning and search technology developed in conjunction with these ontologies is also reviewed, as is technology for annotating OGC standards with links to ontologies. Sensor concepts that cannot be expressed accurately …

Provenir Ontology: Towards A Framework For Escience Provenance Management, Satya S. Sahoo, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Provenance metadata describes the 'lineage' or history of an entity and necessary information to verify the quality of data, validate experiment protocols, and associate trust value with scientific results. eScience projects generate data and the associated provenance metadata in a distributed environment (such as myGrid) and on a very large scale that often precludes manual analysis. Given this scenario, provenance information should be, (a) interoperable across projects, research groups, and application domains, and (b) support analysis over large datasets using reasoning to discover implicit information. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-driven framework for eScience provenance management underpinned by an …

Library Services For Mobile Devices, Toby Greenwalt, Jacob Hill, Colin Koteles

Library Scholarship

This presentation outlines and discusses the issues, challenges, and technologies involved in offering library services on mobile devices.

Web 2.0 In The Process Of E-Participation: The Case Of Organizing For America And The Obama Administration, Aysu Kes-Erkul, R. Erdem Erkul

National Center for Digital Government

The presidential campaign of Barack Obama during the 2008 elections sparked new discussion about the public engagement issue in the political processes. The campaign used Web 2.0 tools intensively to reach the general public and seek support and collect feedback from voters. In this paper, we analyze the major website of this project, “Organizing for America” (OFA) from the perspective of e-participation, which is a concept that include all the processes of public involvement via information and communication technologies.

Public Research Lab And Other Scientific Collaborations Of The Manchester City Region: A Bibliometric Analysis, Philip Shapira, Luciano Kay

Philip Shapira

This working paper examines the characteristics of the research collaborations of the Manchester City-Region, UK, based on a bibliometric analysis of co-authorship patterns of scientific publications published during the period 2006-2008. The paper focuses on Manchester City-Region collaborations with UK public research laboratories, but to place these in context the paper also contains overview analyses of all of the city-region’s research collaborations in the UK and internationally.

Topscholar®: Creating Opportunities, Connie Foster, Jennifer Wilson

TopSCHOLAR® Presentations and Reports

No abstract provided.

Suggestions For Owl 3, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

With OWL 2 about to be completed, it is the right time to start discussions on possible future modifications of OWL. We present here a number of suggestions in order to discuss them with the OWL user community. They encompass expressive extensions on polynomial OWL 2 profiles, a suggestion for an OWL Rules language, and expressive extensions for OWL DL.

Paraconsistent Reasoning For Owl 2, Yue Ma, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

A four-valued description logic has been proposed to reason with description logic based inconsistent knowledge bases. This approach has a distinct advantage that it can be implemented by invoking classical reasoners to keep the same complexity as under the classical semantics. However, this approach has so far only been studied for the basid description logic ALC. In this paper, we further study how to extend the four-valued semantics to the more expressive description logic SROIQ which underlies the forthcoming revision of the Web Ontology Language, OWL 2, and also investigate how it fares when adapated to tractable description logics including …

A Preferential Tableaux Calculus For Circumscriptive Alco, Stephan Grimm, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Nonmonotonic extensions of description logics (DLs) allow for default and local closed-world reasoning and are an acknowledged desired feature for applications, e.g. in the Semantic Web. A recent approach to such an extension is based on McCarthy's circumscription, which rests on the principle of minimising the extension of selected predicates to close off dedicated parts of a domain model. While decidability and complexity results have been established in the literature, no practical algorithmisation for circumscriptive DLs has been proposed so far. In this paper, we present a tableaux calculus that can be used as a decision procedure for concept satisfiability …

Ibm Altocumulus: A Cross-Cloud Middleware And Platform, E. Michael Maximilien, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Roy Engehausen, Laura Anderson

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cloud computing has become the new face of computing and promises to offer virtually unlimited, cheap, readily available, "utility type" computing resources. Many vendors have entered this market with different offerings ranging from infrastructure-as-a-service such as Amazon, to fully functional platform services such as Google App Engine. However, as a result of this heterogeneity, deploying applications to a cloud and managing them needs to be done using vendor specific methods. This "lock in" is seen as a major hurdle in adopting cloud technologies to the enterprise. IBM Altocumulus, the cloud middleware platform from IBM Almaden Services Research, aims to solve …

A Best Practice Model For Cloud Middleware Systems, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, E. Michael Maximilien

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cloud computing is the latest trend in computing where the intention is to facilitate cheap, utility type computing resources in a service-oriented manner. However, the cloud landscape is still maturing and there are heterogeneities between the clouds, ranging from the application development paradigms to their service interfaces,and scaling approaches. These differences hinder the adoption of cloud by major enterprises. We believe that a cloud middleware can solve most of these issues to allow cross-cloud inter-operation. Our proposed system is Altocumulus, a cloud middleware that homogenizes the clouds. In order to provide the best use of the cloud resources and make …

Context And Domain Knowledge Enhanced Entity Spotting In Informal Text, Daniel Gruhl, Meena Nagarajan, Jan Pieper, Christine Robson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper explores the application of restricted relationship graphs (RDF) and statistical NLP techniques to improve named entity annotation in challenging Informal English domains. We validate our approach using on-line forums discussing popular music. Named entity annotation is particularly difficult in this domain because it is characterized by a large number of ambiguous entities, such as the Madonna album “Music” or Lilly Allen’s pop hit “Smile”.

We evaluate improvements in annotation accuracy that can be obtained by restricting the set of possible entities using real-world constraints. We find that constrained domain entity extraction raises the annotation accuracy significantly, making an …

The Politics Of Patents And Drugs In Brazil And Mexico: The Industrial Bases Of Health Policies, Kenneth C. Shadlen

Ken Shadlen

After introducing pharmaceutical patents in the 1990s, Brazil subsequently adjusted the patent system to ameliorate its effects on drug prices while Mexico introduced measures that reinforce and intensify these effects. The different trajectories are due to the nature of the actors pushing for reform and subsequent patterns of coalitional formation and political mobilization. In Brazil, government demand for expensive, patented drugs made health-oriented patent reform a priority, and the existence of an autonomous local pharmaceutical sector allowed the Ministry of Health to build a supportive coalition. In Mexico, government demand made reforms less urgent, and transformations of the pharmaceutical sector …

Blind Matching Versus Matchmaking: Comparison Group Selection For Highly Creative Researchers, Jan Youtie, Philip Shapira, Juan Rogers

Philip Shapira

This research examines approaches for constructing a comparison group relative to highly creative researchers in nanotechnology and human genetics in the US and Europe. Such a comparison group would be useful in identifying factors that contribute to scientific creativity in these emerging fields. Two comparison group development approaches are investigated. The first approach is based on propensity score analysis and the second is based on knowledge from the literature on scientific creativity and early career patterns. In the first approach, the log of citations over the years of activity in the domains under analysis produces a significant result, but the …