Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Semantic Computing In Real-World: Vertical And Horizontal Application Within Enterprise And On The Web, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Kino: A Generic Document Management System For Biologists Using Sa-Rest And Faceted Search, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Priti Parikh, Maryam Panahiazar, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Document management has become an important consideration for the scientific community over the last decade. Human knowledge is central to many scientific domains, thus it is not possible to completely automate the document management process. Managing scientific documents require a semi-automatic approach to overcome issues of large volume, yet support the human participation in the process. In this paper we present Kino, a set of tools that streamline the document management process in life science domains. Kino is integrated with National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), providing scientists access to quality domain models. Annotated documents are indexed using a faceted …

Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills, David F. Feldon, James Peugh, Briana E. Timmerman, Michelle A. Maher, Melissa Hurst, Denise Strickland, Joanna A. Gilmore, Cindy Stiegelmeyer

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students are often encouraged to maximize their engagement with supervised research and minimize teaching obligations. However, the process of teaching students engaged in inquiry provides practice in the application of important research skills. Using a performance rubric, we compared the quality of methodological skills demonstrated in written research proposals for two groups of early career graduate students (those with both teaching and research responsibilities and those with only research responsibilities) at the beginning and end of an academic year. After statistically controlling for preexisting differences between groups, students who both taught and conducted …

Best Instructional Practices For Distance Education: A Meta-Analysis, Robin Michael Roberts

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Recent meta-analyses on the efficacy of distance education have concluded that no significant difference exists between face-to-face and distance education. At the same time, these meta-analyses noted that considerable heterogeneity existed between the individual studies used in the meta-analyses. Investigation of moderators responsible for that heterogeneity suggested that four things other than media delivery were primarily responsible for the majority of variation between study outcomes: methodological quality, instructor involvement, type of interaction, instructional methods and time-on-task. A comparative meta-analysis was performed to further investigate these moderators. Methodological quality, maturational differences in students and any undetermined media effects were controlled for …

Evaluating And Implementing Web Scale Discovery Services: Part Two, Jason Vaughan, Tamera Hanken

Library Faculty Presentations

Part Four: Quick Tour of the Current Marketplace:

• "The Big 5"
• Similarities and differences

Part Five: It's Not All Sliced Bread:

• Shortcomings of web scale discovery

Part Six: Implementation (pre launch steps):

• Selecting and preparing implementation staff
• Preparing and communicating process/decisions with all staff
• Working with the vendor (roles, expectations, timeline)
• Workflow changes and implications (technical services)

Part Seven: Specific implementation tasks, issues, and considerations:

• Record loading and mapping (catalog content)
• Harvesting and mapping digital/local content
• Working with central index data (internal & external content)
• Web integration and customization
• Assessment and continuous improvement

Citizen Sensing: Opportunities And Challenges In Mining Social Signals And Perceptions, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Millions of persons have become 'citizens' of an Internet- or Web-enabled social community. Web 2.0 fostered the open environment and applications for tagging, blogging, wikis, and social networking sites that have made information consumption, production, and sharing so incredibly easy. An interconnected network of people who actively observe, report, collect, analyze, and disseminate information via text, audio, or video messages, increasingly through pervasively connected mobile devices, has led to what we term citizen sensing. In this talk, we review recent progress in supporting collective intelligence through intelligent processing of citizen sensing. Key issues we cover in this talk are: - …

Measuring The Perceived Attributes Of Innovation: A Study Of Capacitive Switch Technology In Industrially Designed User Interface Controls, Aaron B. Stachewicz

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to test the applicability of Rogers’ theory of innovation diffusion as it relates to measuring the perceived attributes of innovations of capacitive switch technology in user interface controls. This study used a Likert scale to collect data on the following perceived attributes of innovation including relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, demonstrability, visibility, ease of use, image, voluntariness, perceived risk, and perceived resources as outlined by Rogers (1995), Moore and Benbasat (1991), and Dupagne and Driscoll (2005). Results indicated whether a consumer is willing to accept capacitive switch innovation in industrially designed user interface controls.

Evaluating And Implementing Web Scale Discovery Services: Part One, Jason Vaughan, Tamera Hanken

Library Faculty Presentations

Preface: Before Web Scale Discovery

• A very brief overview

Part 1: What is Web Scale Discovery

• Content
• Technology

Part 2: Why is Web Scale Discovery important?

• What’s the need?
• How is it different from earlier attempts at broad discovery?

Part 3: A Framework for Evaluating Web Scale Discovery Services

• What we did at UNLV
• Other options

Local Closed World Semantics: Keep It Simple, Stupid!, Adila Krishnadhi, Kunal Sengupta, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

A combination of open and closed-world reasoning (usually called local closed world reasoning) is a desirable capability of knowledge representation formalisms for Semantic Web applications. However, none of the proposals made to date for extending description logics with local closed world capabilities has had any significant impact on applications. We believe that one of the key reasons for this is that current proposals fail to provide approaches which are intuitively accessible for application developers at the same time are applicable, as extensions, to expressive description logics as SROIQ, which underlies the Web Ontology Language OWL.

In this paper, we propose …

Web Wisdom: An Essay On How Web 2.0 And Semantic Web Can Foster A Global Knowledge Society, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Admittedly this is a presumptuous title that should never be used when reporting on individual research advances. Wisdom is just not a scientific concept. In this case, though, we are reporting on recent developments on the web that lead us to believe that the web is on the way to providing a platform for not only information acquisition and business transactions but also for large scale knowledge development and decision support. It is likely that by now every web user has participated in some sort of social function or knowledge accumulating function on the web, many times without even being …

Smob: The Best Of Both Worlds, Alexandre Passant, Julia Anaya, Owen Sacco, Pavan Kapanipathi

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents the architecture of SMOB and the way it combines Semantic Web standards (RDF(S) / SPARQL) and new protocols such as PubSubHubbub to enable a Federated and Privacy-Aware Social Web.

Automatic Domain Model Creation Using Pattern-Based Fact Extraction, Christopher Thomas, Pankaj Mehra, Wenbo Wang, Amit P. Sheth, Gerhard Weikum, Victor Chan

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper describes a minimally guided approach to automatic domain model creation. The first step is to carve an area of interest out of the Wikipedia hierarchy based on a simple query or other starting point. The second step is to connect the concepts in this domain hierarchy with named relationships. A starting point is provided by Linked Open Data, such as DBPedia. Based on these community-generated facts we train a pattern-based fact-extraction algorithm to augment a domain hierarchy with previously unknown relationship occurrences. Pattern vectors are learned that represent occurrences of relationships between concepts. The process described can be …

Privacy-By-Design In Federated Social Web Applications, Alexandre Passant, Owen Sacco, Julia Anaya, Pavan Kapanipathi

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Local Closed-World Reasoning With Description Logics Under The Well-Founded Semantics, Matthias Knorr, Jose Julio Alferes, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

An important question for the upcoming Semantic Web is how to best combine open world ontology languages, such as the OWL-based ones, with closed world rule-based languages. One of the most mature proposals for this combination is known as hybrid MKNF knowledge bases (Motik and Rosati, 2010 [52]), and it is based on an adaptation of the Stable Model Semantics to knowledge bases consisting of ontology axioms and rules. In this paper we propose a well-founded semantics for nondisjunctive hybrid MKNF knowledge bases that promises to provide better efficiency of reasoning, and that is compatible with both the OWL-based …

Management And Support Of Shared Integrated Library Systems, Jason Vaughan, Kristen Costello

Library Faculty Research

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) University Libraries has hosted and managed a shared integrated library system (ILS) since 1989. The system and the number of partner libraries sharing the system has grown significantly over the past two decades. Spurred by the level of involvement and support contributed by the host institution, the authors administered a comprehensive survey to current Innovative Interfaces libraries. Research findings are combined with a description of UNLV’s local practices to provide substantial insights into shared funding, support, and management activities associated with shared systems.

Comparing Components Of Flexography Printing For The Application Of Oxygen Barrier Inks On Films, Kasey Renee Reed

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this study is to appraise typical components used in flexographic printing to provide more knowledge on the use of printing with functional inks on filmic substrates when printing packaged products inline. An oxygen barrier coating was applied using different plate-screening technologies and anilox rolls. Comparing two plate-screening technologies and three different anilox rolls using oxygen permeability tests helped to conclude the optimum plate and anilox roll solution that best apply the ink for proper functionality of the coating, with minimal ink application as to reduce waste.

Further knowledge of printing oxygen barrier coatings inline will yield results …

Groundwater Research In Middle Earth, Thomas Lapoint

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

My senior project focused on studying saltwater intrusion in a coastal town of New Zealand. I feel lucky that I was able to travel to such a distant place, conduct research that was insightful and interesting, and immerse myself in an international culture all in the name of my education. As a Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies student, I aim to analyze not only the cultural differences and similarities that the foreign environment offers to me but also the detailed, technical, engineering aspect of my research. I believe that my education should be approached with a well rounded perspective that …

Creating An Environmental Placed Based Education At Norris Elementary, Ben Kittrell

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

This study is focused on creating a place based education program. Place based education programs provide many benefits at the personal level with the students (PBEEC). The study was completed at Norris Elementary School where the students have access to the “Norris Forest” which is a planted forest with a walk way through the trees. Some of the trees are labeled for the students to identify and others are not. A graph of the unlabelled trees has been included for the students or the teachers to use.

This project incorporates activities that will engage the students in order to teach …

21rst Century Educational Farmstead, Trevis Carmichael

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

When Europeans began settling in the United States, farmsteads were built across the Great Plains. Out of necessity, these had to function in a self-sufficient manner; meaning the people had to produce their own food, use local materials, and be energy efficient for their transportation. Parents had to teach their children how to do all of the practical work it took to maintain their lives. This was the foundation that America was built upon. Having completed the first decade of the 21st century, the time seems right for a mental re-settlement that follows some of those same principles. Teaching our …

What's Happening In Semantic Web ... And What Fca Could Have To Do With It, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The Semantic Web is gaining momentum. Driven by over 10 years of focused project funding in the US and the EU, Semantic Web Technologies are now entering application areas in industry, academia, government, and the open Web.

The Semantic Web is based on the idea of describing the meaning - or semantics - of data on the Web using metadata - data that describes other data - in the form of ontologies, which are represented using logic-based knowledge representation languages. Central to the transfer of Semantic Web into practice is the Linked Open Data effort, which has already resulted in …