Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Fuzzy Matching Of Web Queries To Structured Data, Tao Cheng, Hady W. Lauw, Stelios Paparizos

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recognizing the alternative ways people use to reference an entity, is important for many Web applications that query structured data. In such applications, there is often a mismatch between how content creators describe entities and how different users try to retrieve them. In this paper, we consider the problem of determining whether a candidate query approximately matches with an entity. We propose an off-line, data-driven, bottom-up approach that mines query logs for instances where Web content creators and Web users apply a variety of strings to refer to the same Web pages. This way, given a set of strings that …

Efficient Verification Of Shortest Path Search Via Authenticated Hints, Man Lung Yiu, Yimin Lin, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shortest path search in transportation networks is unarguably one of the most important online search services nowadays (e.g., Google Maps, MapQuest, etc), with applications spanning logistics, spatial optimization, or everyday driving decisions. Often times, the owner of the road network data (e.g., a transport authority) provides its database to third-party query services, which are responsible for answering shortest path queries posed by their clients. The issue arising here is that a query service might be returning sub-optimal paths either purposely (in order to serve its own purposes like computational savings or commercial reasons) or because it has been compromised by …

Top-K Aggregation Queries Over Large Networks, Xifeng Yan, Bin He, Feida Zhu, Jiawei Han

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searching and mining large graphs today is critical to a variety of application domains, ranging from personalized recommendation in social networks, to searches for functional associations in biological pathways. In these domains, there is a need to perform aggregation operations on large-scale networks. Unfortunately the existing implementation of aggregation operations on relational databases does not guarantee superior performance in network space, especially when it involves edge traversals and joins of gigantic tables. In this paper, we investigate the neighborhood aggregation queries: Find nodes that have top-k highest aggregate values over their h-hop neighbors. While these basic queries are common in …

K-Anonymity In The Presence Of External Databases, Dimitris Sacharidis, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The concept of k-anonymity has received considerable attention due to the need of several organizations to release microdata without revealing the identity of individuals. Although all previous k-anonymity techniques assume the existence of a public database (PD) that can be used to breach privacy, none utilizes PD during the anonymization process. Specifically, existing generalization algorithms create anonymous tables using only the microdata table (MT) to be published, independently of the external knowledge available. This omission leads to high information loss. Motivated by this observation we first introduce the concept of k-join-anonymity (KJA), which permits more effective generalization to reduce the …

Symphony: A Platform For Search-Driven Applications, John C. Shafer, Rakesh Agrawal, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present the design of Symphony, a platform that enables non-developers to build and deploy a new class of search-driven applications that combine their data and domain expertise with content from search engines and other web services. The Symphony prototype has been built on top of Microsoft's Bing infrastructure. While Symphony naturally makes use of the customization capabilities exposed by Bing, its distinguishing feature is the capability it provides to the application creator to combine their proprietary data and domain expertise with content obtained from Bing. They can also integrate specialized data obtained from web services to enhance the richness …

Preference Queries In Large Multi-Cost Transportation Networks, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Yimin Lin, Man Lung Yiu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Research on spatial network databases has so far considered that there is a single cost value associated with each road segment of the network. In most real-world situations, however, there may exist multiple cost types involved in transportation decision making. For example, the different costs of a road segment could be its Euclidean length, the driving time, the walking time, possible toll fee, etc. The relative significance of these cost types may vary from user to user. In this paper we consider such multi-cost transportation networks (MCN), where each edge (road segment) is associated with multiple cost values. We formulate …

Survey Of Environmental Data Portals: Features, Characteristics, And Reliability Issues, Shahram Latifi, David Walker

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

24 PowerPoint slides Session 2: Infrastructure Convener: Sergiu Dascalu, UNR Abstract: -What is a Data Portal? -Presents information from diverse sources in a unified way -Enables instant, reliable and secure exchange of information over the Web -The "portal" concept is to offer a single web page that aggregates content from several systems or servers.

Estimating The Quality Of Postings In The Real-Time Web, Hady W. Lauw, Alexandros Ntoulas, Krishnaram Kenthapadi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Millions of users are posting their status updates, interesting findings, news, ideas and observations in real-time on microblogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk. This real-time Web can be a great resource of valuable timely information. Since the real-time Web is completely open and decentralized and anyone may post information at whim, distinguishing interesting and popular postings from the mundane ones is a challenging task. In this paper we study the problem of estimating the quality (or “interestingness”) of postings in the real-time Web. We identify several important factors that are indicative of the quality of postings, and present …

Efficient Valid Scope For Location-Dependent Spatial Queries In Mobile Environments, Ken C. K. Lee, Wang-Chien Lee, Hong Va Leong, Brandon Unger, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In mobile environments, mobile clients can access information with respect to their locations by submitting Location-Dependent Spatial Queries (LDSQs) to Location-Based Service (LBS) servers. Owing to scarce wireless channel bandwidth and limited client battery life, frequent LDSQ submission from clients must be avoided. Observing that LDSQs issued from a client located at nearby positions would likely return the same query results, we explore the idea of valid scope, which represents a spatial area in which a set of LDSQs will retrieve exactly the same set of query results. With a valid scope derived and an LDSQ result cached, a client …

Player Performance Prediction In Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (Mmorpgs), Kyong Jin Shim, Richa Sharan, Jaideep Srivastava

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have seen an ever increasing number of people interacting in the online space. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are personal computer or console-based digital games where thousands of players can simultaneously sign on to the same online, persistent virtual world to interact and collaborate with each other through their in-game characters. In recent years, researchers have found virtual environments to be a sound venue for studying learning, collaboration, social participation, literacy in online space, and learning trajectory at the individual level as well as at the group level. While many games today provide web and GUI-based reports …

Privacy-Preserving Similarity-Based Text Retrieval, Hwee Hwa Pang, Jialie Shen, Ramayya Krishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users of online services are increasingly wary that their activities could disclose confidential information on their business or personal activities. It would be desirable for an online document service to perform text retrieval for users, while protecting the privacy of their activities. In this article, we introduce a privacy-preserving, similarity-based text retrieval scheme that (a) prevents the server from accurately reconstructing the term composition of queries and documents, and (b) anonymizes the search results from unauthorized observers. At the same time, our scheme preserves the relevance-ranking of the search server, and enables accounting of the number of documents that each …

Twitterrank: Finding Topic-Sensitive Influential Twitterers, Jianshu Weng, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang, Qi He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the problem of identifying influential users of micro-blogging services. Twitter, one of the most notable micro-blogging services, employs a social-networking model called "following", in which each user can choose who she wants to "follow" to receive tweets from without requiring the latter to give permission first. In a dataset prepared for this study, it is observed that (1) 72.4% of the users in Twitter follow more than 80% of their followers, and (2) 80.5% of the users have 80% of users they are following follow them back. Our study reveals that the presence of "reciprocity" can …

Virtual World Commerce Adoption (Vwca) : A Case Study Of Second Life Investigating The Impacts Of Perceived Affordances, Trust, And Need Satisfaction, Kamolbhan Olapiriyakul

Dissertations

Virtual worlds are computer-simulated worlds in which multi-players can simultaneously interact in a rich graphical environment. The development of virtual worlds, along with the massive growth of users, creates opportunities for business organizations. This dissertation involves many studies regarding virtual world adoption in business by virtual consumers.

Most of the research in Information Systems (IS) was conducted investigating factors influencing technology adoption, such as ease of use and usefulness, subjective norms and behavioral controls, self-efficacy, performance and effort expectancy, flow, etc. However, most of these research studies focused neither on design aspects related to affordances nor users' goal-oriented behaviors, such …

Understanding Cognitive Differences In Processing Competing Visualizations Of Complex Systems, Madhavi Mukul Chakrabarty

Dissertations

Node-link diagrams are used represent systems having different elements and relationships among the elements. Representing the systems using visualizations like node-link diagrams provides cognitive aid to individuals in understanding the system and effectively managing these systems. Using appropriate visual tools aids in task completion by reducing the cognitive load of individuals in understanding the problems and solving them. However, the visualizations that are currently developed lack any cognitive processing based evaluation. Most of the evaluations (if any) are based on the result of tasks performed using these visualizations. Therefore, the evaluations do not provide any perspective from the point of …

Job Seeking And Job Application In Social Networking Sites : Predicting Job Seekers' Behavioral Intentions, Maria Marcella Plummer

Dissertations

Social networking sites (SNSs) are revolutionizing the way in which employers and job seekers connect and interact with each other. Despite the reported benefits of SNSs with respect to finding a job, there are issues such as privacy concerns that might be deterring job seekers from using these sites in their attempts to secure a job. It is therefore important to understand the factors that are salient in predicting job seekers' use of SNSs in applying for jobs.

In this research, a theoretical model was developed to explicate job seekers' intentions to use SNSs to apply for jobs. Two aspects …

Skos And The Semantic Web: Knowledge Organization, Metadata, And Interoperability, Eric A. Robinson

Other Topics

The Simplified Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a Semantic Web framework, based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for thesauri, classification schemes and simple ontologies. It allows for machine-actionable description of the structure of these knowledge organization systems (KOS) and provides an excellent tool for addressing interoperability and vocabulary control problems inherent to the rapidly expanding information environment of the Web. This paper discusses the foundations of the SKOS framework and reviews the literature on a variety of SKOS implementations. The limitations of SKOS that have been revealed through its broad application are addressed with brief attention to the proposed …

Understanding Events Through Analysis Of Social Media, Amit P. Sheth, Hemant Purohit, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Pavan Kapanipathi, Lu Chen

Kno.e.sis Publications

Users are sharing vast amounts of social data through social networking platforms accessible by Web and increasingly via mobile devices. This opens an exciting opportunity to extract social perceptions as well as obtain insights relevant to events around us. We discuss the significant need and opportunity for analyzing event-centric user generated content on social networks, present some of the technical challenges and our approach to address them. This includes aggregating social data related to events of interest, along with Web resources (news, Wikipedia pages, multimedia) related to an event of interest, and supporting analysis along spatial, temporal, thematic, and sentiment …

Mobicloud - Making Clouds Reachable: A Toolkit For Easy And Efficient Development Of Customized Cloud Mobile Hybrid Applications, Ashwin Manjunatha, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The advancements in computing have resulted in a boom of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices, as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources, commonly referred to as Cloud computing. However, taking full advantage of this mobile and cloud computing landscape, especially for the data intensive domains, has been hampered by the many heterogeneities that exist in the mobile space, as well as the Cloud space. Our research attempts to exploit the capabilities of the mobile and cloud landscape by introducing MobiCloud, an online toolkit to efficiently develop Cloud-mobile hybrid (CMH) applications. We define a CMH …

A Sketch-Based Language For Representing Uncertainty In The Locations Of Origin Of Herbarium Specimens, Barry Kronenfeld, Andrew Weeks

Faculty Research and Creative Activity

Uncertainty fields have been suggested as an appropriate model for retrospective georeferencing of herbarium specimens. Previous work has focused only on automated data capture methods, but techniques for manual data specification may be able to harness human spatial cognition skills to quickly interpret complex spatial propositions. This paper develops a formal modeling language by which location uncertainty fields can be derived from manually sketched features. The language consists of low-level specification of critical probability isolines from which a surface can be uniquely derived, and high-level specification of features and predicates from which low-level isolines can be derived. In a case …

Online Collaborative Whiteboard, Niranjana Kumari Subramanian

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project is to build a simple Online Collaborative Whiteboard (OCW) application to enable multiple users to brainstorm and share ideas interactively by using fun tools to start thinking together. Includes source code.