Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Bridging The Paradigm Gap With Rules For Owl, Jurgen Angele, Boris Motik, Rudi Studer, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Accelerated by the vision of the semantic web, semantic technologies have recently made significant advances. The underlying methods and paradigms are already being transferred to adjacent areas of research in artificial intelligence, knowledge management, and elsewhere. Textbooks explaining the foundations have appeared. Large national and international projects on the topic are under way.

Web Service Semantics - Wsdl-S, Rama Akkiraju, Joel Farrell, John A. Miller, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

The current WSDL standard operates at the syntactic level and lacks the semantic expressivity needed to represent the requirements and capabilities of Web Services. Semantics can improve software reuse and discovery, significantly facilitate composition of Web services and enable integrating legacy applications as part of business process integration. The Web Service Semantic s technical note defines a mechanism to associate semantic annotations with Web services that are described using Web Service Description Language (WSDL). It is conceptually based on, but a significant refinement in details of, the original WSDL-S proposal [WSDL-S] from the LSDIS laboratory at the University of Georgia. …

Live Virtual Reference And The Database Dilemma, Jennifer Mcclure

The Southeastern Librarian

Live virtual reference programs in the university setting have blossomed in recent years as librarians have aspired to become as “virtual” as the resources they offer. While some libraries have chosen to limit their service to affiliated members, many have preferred to open their programs to the wider community. The motivation to do so is perhaps particularly strong among public university librarians, who often feel a dual responsibility to their own affiliates and to the citizens of their state. However, the decision to offer a chat reference service to the public raises a number of legal, ethical, and practical questions …

Cnning And Showdown: Iraq: News, New Media, And Popular Culture, G. Kim Blank

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Kim Blank's CNNing and Showdown Iraq, too, provides an innovative model for the interaction and mutual transfusion of case study and the work of theorizing. Although the backdrop to Blank's essay is CNN's cultural significance and the programming it ran under the SHOWDOWN: Iraq banner, it repeatedly returns to the busy intersection of media, technology, popular culture, and mass culture. Characterized by its author as restless, the piece strategically employs a non-linear discursive strategy deliberately mimicking the practices of channel surfing and the constant interruption of the commercial break. It re-contextualizes, in other words, the critical perspective by re-inventing it …

Reading In The Future: Literacy And The Time Of The Internet, David R. Cole

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

David R. Cole's Reading in the Future: Literacy and the Time of the Internet locates the literacies of the internet -- itself read as the end game of western technology or the Machina Mundi, the Great Chain of the World that has a centre that is everywhere and a circumference that is nowhere -- in a contradictory space. But Cole also self-consciously locates his own writing at a moment in time when the initial technological hype of the internet is subsiding in the face of the boredom of informational overload and the internet is emerging as both an unlimited …

Media Discourse: Social Semiotics And The Study Of Multimodal Discourse. An Interview With Theo Van Leeuwen, Theo Van Leeuwen, Judith Reitstaetter, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

This interview article is intended to provide both an overview of the contribution Theo van Leeuwen has made to the field of semiotics and approach his work from an unconventional angle. The first aspect of our aim is covered in the form of an introduction comprised of a short biographical note, a list of recent publications and short reviews of van Leeuwen’s major works. The second aspect of what we hope to accomplish is tackled in the form of the interview itself. In this, we have tried to balance general questions – e.g. about the epistemological …

An Editorial Introduction To Reconstructing Media, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Media [pl. of medium, from the Latin noun medium, meaning ‘the middle’ or ‘the public eye’]. Although no longer one of the top buzzwords in the humanities or cultural criticism, if you prefer, ‘the media’ are still around, in the sense of both an ever more elusive and ramified empirical reality and as a conceptual field marked by the theoretical debates of several decades. Whether dealing with synchronic analysis or historical change, a specific medium or the media in general, a singular text, a group of texts or genre, studies relying on – or should we say, …

Fractured Identities: Siblings And Doubles In Video Games, Laurie N. Taylor

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In her essay on “Fractured Identities: Siblings and Doubles in Video Games” Laurie Taylor explores how certain norms of video game design – originally derived from technological constraints of code space and processing speed – continue as the narrative parameters of many if not most contemporary video games. Synthesizing approaches from literary studies and narratology, Taylor offers an innovative angle on the fractured identities of doubles and siblings as the narrative correspondence to now largely obsolete technological constraints. Game-play, related to but nevertheless distinct from the literary type of narrative, as Taylor insists, is a key factor in determining what …

An Information Extraction Approach To Reorganizing And Summarizing Specifications, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Aaron Berkovich, Dan Z. Sokol

Kno.e.sis Publications

Materials and Process Specifications are complex semi-structured documents containing numeric data, text, and images. This article describes a coarse-grain extraction technique to automatically reorganize and summarize spec content. Specifically, a strategy for semantic-markup, to capture content within a semantic ontology, relevant to semi-automatic extraction, has been developed and experimented with. The working prototypes were built in the context of Cohesia's existing software infrastructure, and use techniques from Information Extraction, XML technology, etc.

Divide-And-Approximate: A Novel Constraint Push Strategy For Iceberg Cube Mining, Ke Wang, Yuelong Jiang, Jeffrey Xu Yu, Guozhu Dong, Jiawei Han

Kno.e.sis Publications

The iceberg cube mining computes all cells v, corresponding to GROUP BY partitions, that satisfy a given constraint on aggregated behaviors of the tuples in a GROUP BY partition. The number of cells often is so large that the result cannot be realistically searched without pushing the constraint into the search. Previous works have pushed antimonotone and monotone constraints. However, many useful constraints are neither antimonotone nor monotone. We consider a general class of aggregate constraints of the form f(v)θ_σ, where f is an arithmetic function of SQL-like aggregates and θ is one of <, ≤, ≥, > . We propose a …

Media & Information Literacy Theory And Research: Thoughts From The Co-Editors, Jeremy Harris Lipschultz, Michael L. Hilt

Communication Faculty Publications

An overview of the conceptualization of media studies and information literacy education reveals the importance of analyzing text and visual communication. Beyond simply offering an explanation of mass communication and all of its parts, media and information literacy as an emerging field of study must begin to address the complex interaction between literacy and new media forms. The new co-editors of SIMILE encourage interdisciplinary scholarship, which illuminates new avenues in media and information literacy education.

Hitting The Headlines In Europe: A Country-By-Country Guide To Effective Media Relations, Priscilla Finley

Library Faculty Research

Burton and Drake's guide offers a practical approach for British or American flacks who are planning public relations campaigns in Europe. The first half presents an overview of the European media landscape with specific advice about approaching print media, news agencies, and media centers. The second half profiles 43 European countries, surveying the general media environment and noting key players in various media genres.

The Role Of Media In Crisis Management, Radwa Hamada Ashoush

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Gamers’ Sensations Of Spatial, Social, And Co-Presence While Playing Online Video Games, Cheryl Campanella Bracken, R. L. Lange, James Denny

Communication Faculty Publications

There is an increasing number of video gamers who are playing games online. Previous research has demonstrated that off line gamers experience sensations of presence “the illusion of non-mediation” (Lombard & Ditton, 1997). The current study, explores through focus groups, the type of presence online gamers report experiencing. The results demonstrate that online gamers report having sensations that can be classified into all three main presence types: spatial (physical), social, and co-presence.

A Random Rotation Perturbation Approach To Privacy Preserving Data Classification, Keke Chen, Ling Liu

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents a random rotation perturbation approach for privacy preserving data classification. Concretely, we identify the importance of classification-specific information with respect to the loss of information factor, and present a random rotation perturbation framework for privacy preserving data classification. Our approach has two unique characteristics. First, we identify that many classification models utilize the geometric properties of datasets, which can be preserved by geometric rotation. We prove that the three types of classifiers will deliver the same performance over the rotation perturbed dataset as over the original dataset. Second, we propose a multi-column privacy model to address the …

Meteor-S Wsdi: A Scalable P2p Infrastructure Of Registries For Semantic Publication And Discovery Of Web Services, Kunal Verma, Kaarthik Sivashanmugam, Amit P. Sheth, Abhijit Patil, Swapna Oundhakar, John Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services are the new paradigm for distributed computing. They have much to offer towards interoperability of applications and integration of large scale distributed systems. To make Web services accessible to users, service providers use Web service registries to publish them. Current infrastructure of registries requires replication of all Web service publications in all Universal Business Registries. Large growth in number of Web services as well as the growth in the number of registries would make this replication impractical. In addition, the current Web service discovery mechanism is inefficient, as it does not support discovery based on the capabilities of …

Wsdl-S: Adding Semantics To Wsdl, John Miller, Kunal Verma, Preeda Rajasekaran, Amit P. Sheth, Rohit Aggarwal, Kaarthik Sivashanmugam

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services have primarily been designed for providing inter-operability between business applications. Current technologies assume a large amount of human interaction, for integrating two applications. This is primarily due to the fact that business process integration requires understanding of data and functions of the involved entities. Semantic Web technologies, powered by description logic based languages like OWL[1], aim to add greater meaning to Web content, by annotating the data with ontologies. Ontologies provide a mechanism of providing shared conceptualizations of domains. This allows agents to get an understanding of users’ Web content and greatly reduces human interaction for meaningful Web …

Preemption Of State Spam Laws By The Federal Can-Spam Act, Roger Allen Ford

Law Faculty Scholarship

Unsolicited bulk commercial email is an increasing problem, and though many states have passed laws aimed at curbing its use and abuse, for several years the federal government took no action. In 2003 that changed when Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act. Though the law contains many different restrictions on spam messages, including some restriction of nearly every type that states had adopted, the Act was widely criticized as weak. Many of the CAN-SPAM Act's provisions are weaker than corresponding provisions of state law, and the Act preempts most state spam laws that would go farther, including two state laws that …

Level Mapping Characterizations Of Selector-Generated Models For Logic Programs, Sibylle Schwarz, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Assigning semantics to logic programs via selector generated models (Schwarz 2002/2003) extends several semantics, like the stable, the inflationary, and the stable generated semantics, to programs with arbitrary formulae in rule heads and bodies. We study this approach by means of a unifying framework for characterizing different logic programming semantics using level mappings (Hitzler and Wendt 200x, Hitzler 2003), thereby supporting the claim that this framework is very flexible and applicable to very diversely defined semantics.

The Semantic Web In One Day, York Sure, Pascal Hitzler, Andreas Eberhart, Rudi Studer

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

To gain momentum, technologies for building private semantic Webs or parts of the World Wide semantic Web must become a commodity and easy to integrate. To determine just how far semantic Web technologies have come, we wanted to create a snapshot of what you could do by applying and assembling existing semantic Web technologies - in one day.

Cultura Cyber: Commodifying Latina/O Nationalism And Rhetoric On The Internet, Richard Pineda

Selected Works Temporary Series

No abstract provided.

Taxaminer: An Experimentation Framework For Automated Taxonomy Bootstrapping, Vipul Kashyap, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Construction of domain ontologies on the semantic web is a human and resource intensive process, efforts to reduce which are crucial for the Semantic Web to scale. We present a framework for automated taxonomy construction, that involves: (a) generation of a cluster hierarchy from a document corpus using statistical clustering and NLP techniques; (b) extraction of a topic hierarchy from this cluster hierarchy; and (c) assignment of labels to nodes in the topic hierarchy. Metrics for estimating topic hierarchy quality and parameters of an experimentation framework are identified. MEDLINE was the document corpus and MeSH thesaurus was the gold standard.

Ranking Complex Relationships On The Semantic Web, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Christian Halaschek-Wiener, I. Budak Arpinar, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Industry and academia are both focusing their attention on information retrieval over semantic metadata extracted from the Web, and it is increasingly possible to analyze such metadata to discover interesting relationships. However, just as document ranking is a critical component in today's search engines, the ranking of complex relationships would be an important component in tomorrow's semantic Web engines. This article presents a flexible ranking approach to identify interesting and relevant relationships in the semantic Web. The authors demonstrate the scheme's effectiveness through an empirical evaluation over a real-world data set.

Variational Bayesian Image Modelling, Li Chen, Feng Jiao, Dale Schuurmans, Shaojun Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a variational Bayesian framework for performing inference, density estimation and model selection in a special class of graphical models—Hidden Markov Random Fields (HMRFs). HMRFs are particularly well suited to image modelling and in this paper, we apply them to the problem of image segmentation. Unfortunately, HMRFs are notoriously hard to train and use because the exact inference problems they create are intractable. Our main contribution is to introduce an efficient variational approach for performing approximate inference of the Bayesian formulation of HMRFs, which we can then apply to the density estimation and model selection problems that arise when …

Framework For Semantic Web Process Composition, Kaarthik Sivashanmugam, John A. Miller, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services have the potential to revolutionize e-commerce by enabling businesses to interact with each other on the fly. To date, however, Web processes using Web services have been created mostly at the syntactic level. Current composition standards focus on building processes based on the interface description of the participating services. This rigid approach, with its strong coupling between the process and the interface of the participating services, does not allow businesses to dynamically change partners and services. As shown in this article, Web process composition techniques can be enhanced by using semantic process templates to capture the semantic requirements …

Tontogen: A Synthetic Data Set Generator For Semantic Web Applications, Matthew Perry

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

From Semantic Search & Integration To Analytics, Amit P. Sheth

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 enterprise content management. Ontology is the centerpiece of the most prevalent semantic technologies and provides the basis of representing, acquiring, and utilizing knowledge. With the availability of several commercial products and many research tools, specifications and increasing adoption of Semantic Web standards such as RDF for metadata and OWL for ontology representation, ontology-driven techniques and systems have already enabled a new generation of industry strength semantic applications. In particular, Semagix's Freedom has powered applications in leading verticals such …

Promotional Strategies In The Internet Age, Morgan Almasi

Theses : Honours

The Internet and e-Business has experienced exponential growth over the past few years, generating significant challenges to organizations using the Internet for business, or as a communications medium. Along with the proliferation of the Internet, a number of new online-based promotional tools have been added to the overall promotional mix. This research aims at investigating successful online promotional strategies through a comparison of a synthesis of contemporary literature and information collected from a case study based on the online recruitment industry. The findings from the case study confirmed and built upon several key points identified in the literature. However, the …

Users And Internet Skills: A Report From Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria, Stella E. Igun

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

This study, based on a survey of eighty-one (81) users of a cyber café owned and run by the Delta State University, Abraka in 2005 examines the self-reported level of Internet skills; sources of such skills; the additional skills desired, and preferred ways of acquiring them; and how the Internet has influenced and affected their research. The results show 71% of respondents rated their Internet skills between average and very high; 78.8% acquired their Internet skills either online or through teaching by colleagues or friends. World Wide Web (WWW) skills were the most sought after additional skill (73%). Continuing …

Narrowcasting To Faculty And Students: Creating An Efficient “Research By Subject” Page, Rob Withers, Rob Casson, Aaron Shrimplin

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

Libraries provide thousands of e-resources, but most users need only a handful. Miami University has created an interface which enables subject specialists to select from electronic resources provided by the Libraries, add links to related resources, and post announcements in each subject area. In addition, subject specialists can create multi-database searches for each subject area. Subject specialists can make immediate changes, web developers are relieved of reviewing and making changes submitted by others, and students and faculty see the resources they need. The University portal will eventually link to subject areas corresponding each students’ classes and faculty member’s teaching …