bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Defeasible Logic Reasoner for the Semantic Web
Authors: Bassiliades Nick , Antoniou Grigoris , Vlahavas Ioannis
Published: February 2011

Defeasible reasoning is a rule-based approach for efficient reasoning with incomplete and inconsistent information. Such reasoning is, among others, useful for ontology integration, where conflicting information arises naturally; and for the modeling of business rules and policies, where rules with exceptions are often used. This paper describes these scenarios and reports on the implementation of a system for defeasible reasoning on the Web. The system, DR-DEVICE, is capable of reasoning about RDF metadata over multiple Web sources using defeasible logic rules. It is implemented on top of CLIPS production rule system and builds upon R-DEVICE, an earlier deductive rule system over RDF metadata that also supports derived attribute and aggregate attribute rules. Rules can be expressed either in a native CLIPS-like language, or in an extension of the OO-RuleML syntax. The operational semantics of defeasible logic are implemented through compilation into the generic rule language of R-DEVICE. The paper also presents a full semantic Web broker example for apartment renting.
Ontology-Based Automatic Annotation of Learning Content
Authors: Jovanovic Jelena , Gasevic Dragan , Devedzic Vladan
Published: February 2011

This paper presents an ontology-based approach to automatic annotation of learning objects’ (LOs) content units that we tested in TANGRAM, an integrated learning environment for the domain of Intelligent Information Systems. The approach does not primarily focus on automatic annotation of entire LOs, as other relevant solutions do. Instead, it provides a solution for automatic metadata generation for LOs’ components (i.e., smaller, potentially reusable, content units). Here we mainly report on the content-mining algorithms and heuristics applied for determining values of certain metadata elements used to annotate content units. Specifically, the focus is on the following elements: title, description, unique identifier, subject (based on a domain ontology), and pedagogical role (based on an ontology of pedagogical roles). Additionally, as TANGRAM is grounded on an LO content structure ontology that drives the process of an LO decomposition into its constituent content units, each thus generated content unit is implicitly semantically annotated with its role/position in the LO’s structure. Employing such semantic annotations, TANGRAM allows assembling content units into new LOs personalized to the users’ goals, preferences, and learning styles. In order to provide the evaluation of the proposed solution, we describe our experiences with automatic annotation of slide presentations, one of the most common LO types.
Information Retrieval by Semantic Similarity
Authors: Hliaoutakis Angelos , Varelas Giannis , Voutsakis Epimenidis , Petrakis Euripides G.M. , Milios Evangelos
Published: February 2011

Semantic Similarity relates to computing the similarity between conceptually similar but not necessarily lexically similar terms. Typically, semantic similarity is computed by mapping terms to an ontology and by examining their relationships in that ontology. We investigate approaches to computing the semantic similarity between natural language terms (using WordNet as the underlying reference ontology) and between medical terms (using the MeSH ontology of medical and biomedical terms). The most popular semantic similarity methods are implemented and evaluated using WordNet and MeSH. Building upon semantic similarity, we propose the Semantic Similarity based Retrieval Model (SSRM), a novel information retrieval method capable for discovering similarities between documents containing conceptually similar terms. The most effective semantic similarity method is implemented into SSRM. SSRM has been applied in retrieval on OHSUMED (a standard TREC collection available on the Web). The experimental results demonstrated promising performance improvements over classic information retrieval methods utilizing plain lexical matching (e.g., Vector Space Model) and also over state-of-the-art semantic similarity retrieval methods utilizing ontologies.
SemDiff
Authors: Qin Li , Atluri Vijayalakshmi
Published: February 2011

Ontologies evolve over time at both structural and semantic levels. Detecting semantic changes to ontologies is essential to the functioning of data instances and dependent ontologies over the semantic Web. In this article, we propose a SemDiff approach to examining structural changes and deriving both explicit and implicit semantic changes between ontology versions. Our approach exploits the semantic dependency between properties and concepts: we introduce the notion of isosems, and conduct implication analysis to examine whether, when, and how semantic changes to an isosem imply semantic changes to other isosems. A prototype of our approach is implemented.
Semantic Enrichment in Ontologies for Matching
Authors: Tun Nwe Ni , Tojo Satoshi
Published: February 2011

Matching between heterogeneous ontologies becomes crucial for interoperability in distributed and intelligent environments. Although many efforts in ontology mapping have already been conducted, most of them rely heavily on the meaning of entity names, rather than the semantics defined in ontologies. In order to deal with semantic heterogeneity, we propose a semantically enriched model of ontologies (called MetaOntoModel) where every domain concept is treated as a sort—an entity type that carries identity criteria for its instances—and classified these concepts based on three philosophical notions: identity, rigidity, and dependency. According to the classification, concept-level properties (called meta-knowledge) are embedded for each concept. Our novel idea is that if two concepts are semantically equivalent, then they have the same meta-knowledge. On the contrary, if two concepts possess different kinds of meta knowledge, then they cannot be matched. We also prove that meta-knowledge can determine not only the scope of semantic correspondences, but also which properties are the most relevant in finding correspondence between two similar concepts.
Mediating RDF/S Queries to Relational and XML Sources
Authors: Koffina I. , Serfiotis G. , Christophides V. , Tannen V.
Published: February 2011

Semantic Web (SW) technology aims to facilitate the integration of legacy data sources spread worldwide. Despite the plethora of SW languages (e.g., RDF/S, OWL) recently proposed for supporting large-scale information interoperation, the vast majority of legacy sources still rely on relational databases (RDB) published on the Web or corporate intranets as virtual XML. In this article, we advocate a first-order logic framework for mediating high-level queries to relational and/or XML sources using community ontologies expressed in a SW language such as RDF/S. We describe the architecture and reasoning services of our SW integration middleware, termed SWIM, and we present the main design choices and techniques for supporting powerful mappings between different data models, as well as reformulation and optimization of queries expressed against mediator ontologies and views.
Automatically Integrating Heterogeneous Ontologies from Structured Web Pages
Authors: Ye Shiren , Chua Tat-Seng
Published: February 2011

This article presents an automated approach to integrate multiple analogous ontologies extracted from structured web pages into a common ontology. These ontologies from heterogeneous systems exhibit rich diversity in appearances, structures, terminologies and granularities. We design a unified similarity paradigm that can collect the implicit and explicit evidences that exhibit coherences among ontology and instance, semantic and structure, as well as linguistic and syntactic features. The similarity between ontology elements is derived from three aspects such as intension, extension and context, denoted by , where INT and EXT include corresponding weighted contents from their offspring, and CXT is relevant to evidences shown in their ancestors. The similarity in each aspect is calculated by means of their semantic overlapping and syntactic comparability. We develop a top-down matching algorithm based on matching space selection and similarity reuse; the algorithm facilitates less error-prone map-pings and lower computational cost.
Mobile Ontologies
Authors: Veijalainen Jari
Published: February 2011

The number of mobile subscribers in the world is soon reaching the three billion mark. According to the newest estimates, majority of the subscribers are already in the developing countries, whereas the number of subscribers in the industrialized countries is about to stagnate around one billion. Because especially in the developing countries the only access to Internet are mobile devices, developing high quality services based on them grows in importance. Ontologies are an important ingredient towards more complicated mobile services and wider usage of mobile terminals. In this article, we first discuss ontology and epistemology concepts in general. After that, we review ontologies in the computer science field and introduce mobile ontologies as a special category of them. It seems reasonable to distinguish between two orthogonal categories, mobile domain ontologies and flowing ontologies. The domain of the former one is in some sense related with mobility, whereas the latter ones are able to flow from computer to computer in the network. We then discuss the creation issues, business aspects, and intellectual property rights (IPR), including patentability of mobile ontologies. We also discuss some basic requirements for computer systems architectures that would be needed to support the usage of mobile ontologies.
In Defense of Ambiguity
Authors: Hayes Patrick J. , Halpin Harry
Published: February 2011

URIs, a universal identification scheme, are different from human names insofar as they can provide the ability to reliably access the thing identified. URIs also can function to reference a non-accessible thing in a similar manner to how names function in natural language. There are two distinctly different relationships between names and things: access and reference. To confuse the two relations leads to underlying problems with Web architecture. Reference is by nature ambiguous in any language. So any attempts by Web architecture to make reference completely unambiguous will fail on the Web. Despite popular belief otherwise, making further ontological distinctions often leads to more ambiguity, not less. Contrary to appeals to Kripke for some sort of eternal and unique identification, reference on the Web uses descriptions and therefore there is no unambiguous resolution of reference. On the Web, what is needed is not just a simple redirection, but a uniform and logically consistent manner of associating descriptions with URIs that can be done in a number of practical ways that should be made consistent.
Ontological Indeterminacy and the Semantic Web
Authors: Ginsberg Allen
Published: February 2011

Ontological indeterminacy (OI) involves incompatible conceptual systems being applicable to a domain with equal empirical adequacy; a phenomenon familiar in philosophy, but also present in the sciences and everyday life. This article presents arguments and a detailed use-case showing how OI causes problems for what seems to be a widespread, if implicit, understanding of how semantic Web (SW) terms refer or have meaning, namely: the referent/meaning of a SW term is established through precise definitions given in a formal ontology. We show that this account is incompatible with the key requirement that SW terms/statements be similar in meaning to corresponding natural language terms/statements. We present a new account, based on a “meaning as use” philosophy of language, that avoids these problems by formalizing the distinction between the intention to use a term in a customary manner and the decision to adopt a formal theory that explains or explicates that usage.
Ontology Enhanced Concept Hierarchies for Text Identification
Authors: Reformat Marek , Yager Ronald R. , Li Zhan
Published: February 2011

The Internet holds huge amount of documents available for users. Effective utilization of this enormous repository means a need for systems supporting users in a process of finding related documents. An ontology defined in the framework of the Semantic Web (Berners, 2001) allows for specification of concepts, their instances, and relationships existing between concepts. A hierarchy of concepts (Yager, 2000) is a graph-like structure providing a means for representing human-like dependencies. The article proposes an approach for utilization of a hierarchy of concepts to perform categorization of web pages in the Semantic Web. A user provides a hierarchy that can only partially “cover” their domain of interest. The hierarchy is treated as a “seed” representing user’s initial knowledge about the domain. Ontologies are treated as supplementary knowledge bases. They are used to instantiate the hierarchy with concrete information, as well as to enhance it with new concepts initially unknown to a user.
Efficient Processing of RDF Queries with Nested Optional Graph Patterns in an RDBMS
Authors: Chebotko Artem , Lu Shiyong , Atay Mustafa , Fotouhi Farshad
Published: February 2011

Relational technology has shown to be very useful for scalable Semantic Web data management. Numerous researchers have proposed to use RDBMSs to store and query voluminous RDF data using SQL and RDF query languages. In this article, we study how RDF queries with the socalled well-designed graph patterns and nested optional patterns can be efficiently evaluated in an RDBMS. We propose to extend relational databases with a novel relational operator, nested optional join (NOJ), that is more efficient than left outer join in processing nested optional patterns of well-designed graph patterns. We design three efficient algorithms to implement the new operator in relational databases: (1) nested-loops NOJ algorithm (NL-NOJ); (2) sortmerge NOJ algorithm (SM-NOJ); and (3) simple hash NOJ algorithm (SH-NOJ). Based on a real-life RDF dataset, we demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms by comparing them with the corresponding left outer join implementations and explore the effect of join selectivity on the performance of our algorithms.
A Network Model Approach to Retrieval in the Semantic Web
Authors: Scheir Peter , Lindstaedt Stefanie N. , Ghidini Chiara
Published: February 2011

While it is agreed that semantic enrichment of resources would lead to better search results, at present the low coverage of resources on the Web with semantic information presents a major hurdle in realizing the vision of search on the Semantic Web. To address this problem, we investigate how to improve retrieval performance in settings where resources are sparsely annotated with semantic information. Techniques from soft computing are employed to find relevant material that was not originally annotated with the concepts used in a query. We present an associative retrieval model for the Semantic Web and evaluate if and to what extent the use of associative retrieval techniques increases retrieval performance. The evaluation of new retrieval paradigms, such as retrieval based on technology for the Semantic Web, presents an additional challenge since no off-the-shelf test corpora exist. Hence, we give a detailed description of the approach taken to evaluate the information retrieval service we have built.
The Berlin SPARQL Benchmark
Authors: Bizer Christian , Schultz Andreas
Published: February 2011

The SPARQL Query Language for RDF and the SPARQL Protocol for RDF are implemented by a growing number of storage systems and are used within enterprise and open Web settings. As SPARQL is taken up by the community, there is a growing need for benchmarks to compare the performance of storage systems that expose SPARQL endpoints via the SPARQL protocol. Such systems include native RDF stores as well as systems that rewrite SPARQL queries to SQL queries against non-RDF relational databases. This article introduces the Berlin SPARQL Benchmark (BSBM) for comparing the performance of native RDF stores with the performance of SPARQL-to-SQL rewriters across architectures. The benchmark is built around an e-commerce use case in which a set of products is offered by different vendors and consumers have posted reviews about products. The benchmark query mix emulates the search and navigation pattern of a consumer looking for a product. The article discusses the design of the BSBM benchmark and presents the results of a benchmark experiment comparing the performance of four popular RDF stores (Sesame, Virtuoso, Jena TDB, and Jena SDB) with the performance of two SPARQL-to-SQL rewriters (D2R Server and Virtuoso RDF Views) as well as the performance of two relational database management systems (MySQL and Virtuoso RDBMS).
Learning of OWL Class Descriptions on Very Large Knowledge Bases
Authors: Hellmann Sebastian , Lehmann Jens , Auer Sören
Published: February 2011

The vision of the Semantic Web is to make use of semantic representations on the largest possible scale - the Web. Large knowledge bases such as DBpedia, OpenCyc, GovTrack, and others are emerging and are freely available as Linked Data and SPARQL endpoints. Exploring and analysing such knowledge bases is a significant hurdle for Semantic Web research and practice. As one possible direction for tackling this problem, the authors present an approach for obtaining complex class descriptions from objects in knowledge bases by using Machine Learning techniques. They describe in detail how we leverage existing techniques to achieve scalability on large knowledge bases available as SPARQL endpoints or Linked Data. Their algorithms are made available in the open source DL-Learner project and we present several real-life scenarios in which they can be used by Semantic Web applications.
Files are Siles
Authors: Schandl Bernhard , Haslhofer Bernhard
Published: February 2011

With the increasing storage capacity of personal computing devices, the problems of information overload and information fragmentation are apparent on users’ desktops. For the Web, semantic technologies solve this problem by adding a machine-interpretable information layer on top of existing resources. It has been shown that the application of these technologies to desktop environments is helpful for end users. However, certain characteristics of the Semantic Web architecture that are commonly accepted in the Web context are not desirable for desktops. To overcome these limitations, the authors propose the sile model, which combines characteristics of the Semantic Web and file systems. This model is a conceptual foundation for the Semantic Desktop and serves as underlying infrastructure on which applications and further services can be built. The authors present one service, a virtual file system based on siles, which allows users to semantically annotate files and directories and keeps full compatibility to traditional hierarchical file systems. The authors also discuss how Semantic Web vocabularies can be applied for meaningful annotation of files and present a prototypical implementation of the model and analyze the performance of typical access operations, both on the file system and metadata level.
A Pattern-Based Method for Re-Engineering Non-Ontological Resources into Ontologies
Authors: Villazón-Terrazas Boris Carmen , Suárez-Figueroa Mari , Gómez-Pérez Asunción
Published: February 2011

To speed up the ontology development process, ontology developers are reusing all available ontological and non-ontological resources, such as classification schemes, thesauri, lexicons, and so forth, that have already reached some consensus. Non-ontological resources are highly heterogeneous in their data model and storage system (or implementation). The reuse of these non-ontological resources involves their re-engineering into ontologies. This paper presents a method for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies. The method is based on so-called re-engineering patterns, which define a procedure that transforms the non-ontological resource components into ontology representational primitives using WordNet for making explicit the relations among the non-ontological resource terms. The paper also provides the description of NOR2O, a software library that implements the transformations suggested by the patterns. Finally, it depicts an evaluation of the method, patterns, and software library proposed.
Towards Controlled Natural Language for Semantic Annotation
Authors: Davis Brian , Dantuluri Pradeep , Handschuh Siegfried , Cunningham Hamish
Published: February 2011

Richly interlinked metadata constitute the foundation of the Semantic Web. Manual semantic annotation is a labor intensive task requiring training in formal ontological descriptions for the otherwise non-expert user. Although automatic annotation tools attempt to ease this knowledge acquisition barrier, their development often requires access to specialists in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This challenges researchers to develop user-friendly annotation environments. Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs) offer an incentive to the novice user to annotate, while simultaneously authoring his/her respective documents in a user-friendly manner. CNLs have been successfully applied to ontology authoring, but little research has focused on their application to semantic annotation. This paper describes two novel approaches to semantic annotation, which permit non-expert users to simultaneously author and annotate meeting minutes using CNL. Finally, this work provides empirical evidence that for certain scenarios applying CNLs for semantic annotation can be more user friendly than a standard manual semantic annotation tool.
Mobile Commerce Use among UK Mobile Users Based on a Proposed Mobile Network Utilization Framework
Authors: Moqbel Asem , Yani-Di-Soriano Mirella , Yousafzai Shumaila
Published: February 2011

This paper examines UK mobile users’ perceptions of m-commerce utilization. For this purpose, the study has devised a Mobile Network Utilization Model that was empirically tested in experimental settings. The empirical findings revealed strong support for the capability of the proposed utilization model in measuring the concept of Mobile Task-Technology Fit (MTTF) and explaining the utilization of m-commerce services among UK mobile users. In particular, the research found that MTTF and m-commerce utilization are dependent on the interactions between the key components of a wider mobile network, that is mobile devices, mobile tasks, mobile operators, as well as mobile vendors. Fifteen factors were identified as a result of such interaction and the importance of these factors in explaining MTTF and the actual utilization of m-commerce services was empirically asserted.
Traditional Job-Related Factors and Career Salience in IT-Based Workplace
Authors: Ahmad Aminu , Ahmad Hartini
Published: February 2011

Despite growing academic and practical concerns about IT-transformed workplaces, little research empirically investigates these concerns. This paper adopts a unique approach to address these concerns by evaluating the appropriateness of traditional drivers of career salience in high IT working environments. Building on established measures of role stress, participation in decision making, job involvement and career salience, questionnaires were distributed to staff working in high IT organizations in Nigeria. Multiple regressions were run from a valid response of 223, resulting in the three traditional drivers accounting for 25% of the variance in career salience. Similarly, standardized ß coefficients indicate on job involvement (0.46) makes unique significant contribution to career salience. This finding is in line with sociotechnical theory—that changes in technical sub-system affect the social sub-system and vice versa. The finding also provides indirect exploratory support for the decreasing importance of non-IT factors in the evolving digital workplace. Other implications, limitations and direction for future research are highlighted.
Human Talent Forecasting using Data Mining Classification Techniques
Authors: Jantan Hamidah Razak , Hamdan Abdul Ali , Othman Zulaiha
Published: February 2011

Talent management is a very crucial task and demands close attention from human resource (HR) professionals. Recently, among the challenges for HR professionals is how to manage organization’s talents, particularly to ensure the right job for the right person at the right time. Some employee’s talent patterns can be identified through existing knowledge in HR databases, which data mining can be applied to handle this issue. The hidden and useful knowledge that exists in databases can be discovered through classification task and has been widely used in many fields. However, this approach has not successfully attracted people in HR especially in talent management. In this regard, the authors attempt to present an overview of talent management problems that can be solved by using this approach. This paper uses that approach for one of the talent management tasks, i.e., predicting potential talent using previous existing knowledge. Future employee’s performances can be predicted based on past experience knowledge discovered from existing databases by using classification techniques. Finally, this study proposes a framework for talent forecasting using the potential Data Mining classification techniques.
Ubiquitous Computing
Authors: Quilici-Gonzalez J. A. , Kobayashi G. , Broens M. C. , Gonzalez M. E. Q.
Published: February 2011

In this article, the authors investigate, from an interdisciplinary perspective, possible ethical implications of the presence of ubiquitous computing systems in human perception/action. The term ubiquitous computing is used to characterize information-processing capacity from computers that are available everywhere and all the time, integrated into everyday objects and activities. The contrast in approach to aspects of ubiquitous computing between traditional considerations of ethical issues and the Ecological Philosophy view concerning its possible consequences in the context of perception/action are the underlying themes of this paper. The focus is on an analysis of how the generalized dissemination of microprocessors in embedded systems, commanded by a ubiquitous computing system, can affect the behaviour of people considered as embodied embedded agents.
Cyberbullying
Authors: Neves José , Pinheiro Luzia de Oliveira
Published: February 2011

Cyberbullying has become a major social concern because it raises questions about technoethics. It has been the subject of research, information and prevention activities for different groups to protect against the misuse of technology, and because of that, this paper is based on an exploratory study about the sociological phenomenon of cyberbullying among Portuguese university students. The paper stresses the connection between the concepts of bullying and cyberbullying while promoting a flexible epistemological model that highlights the emerging nature of these phenomena based on the theoretical contribution of Gregory Bateson. In the end, the authors present the main conclusions of the empirical study.
The Regulation of Gaze and Capture
Authors: Ibrahim Yasmin
Published: February 2011

The increasing use of the body for embedding technology as well as the convergence of multiple features in mobile telephony have made image capture an important phenomenon that presents new ways to capture events and their constructs, which cast new forms of gaze into everyday life. The ways in which one captures and gazes has increasing ethical, legal and social implications for societies. The civilian gaze through mobile recording devices can be empowering in terms of holding authorities accountable, but it can equally debilitate societies by transgressing privacy and enabling new forms of voyeurism and deviance. In recognition of this, many governments and authorities are restricting the ways in which we capture and upload images. This paper looks at how this image economy is creating new ways of looking and how the new rules are, for different reasons, seeking to curb this architecture of capture.
Human Implants
Authors: Cabrera Laura
Published: February 2011

Human implants are among the technology applications that deserve to be carefully assessed as they have the potential to help us treating many devastating human conditions, but also to assist us reaching a stage beyond current human capacities and abilities. Such a development would introduce many challenges for society, governments, and the individual. Human implants can blur the line that lies between what is acknowledged as therapy and enhancement. The lack of a clear distinction between therapy and enhancement will confront governments with new regulatory challenges in public health and funding technology research. This brings to the fore issues of justice, such as how to close instead of widen the ’technology-divide’ and how to define priorities for funding, distributing, and using human implants. Given the potential impact that new and improved human implants can have for the individual and for society, a better understanding on the direction and reasons for developing such applications is needed to handle them in a wiser way. One way of assisting such a development is by rethinking our priorities when using technology for human enhancement applications.
Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing
Authors: Allen Peter , Shepherd Katherine , Roberts Lynne
Published: February 2011

Despite persistent government and industry efforts to stop the sharing and downloading of media such as files over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, this activity shows no sign of abating. This research investigated whether psychological reactance could account for variance in the intent to engage in, and the extent of such behaviour beyond that accounted for by the standard Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) variables. No support for psychological reactance as a predictor of P2P file downloading intent or behaviour was found in this paper. However, the results did indicate that attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control each accounted for significant variance in P2P file downloading behaviour, and that these relationships were fully mediated by behavioural intent. These findings are consistent with, and provide strong support for, the use of the TPB within this domain.
The Functional Morality of Robots
Authors: Johansson Linda
Published: February 2011

It is often argued that a robot cannot be held morally responsible for its actions. The author suggests that one should use the same criteria for robots as for humans, regarding the ascription of moral responsibility. When deciding whether humans are moral agents one should look at their behaviour and listen to the reasons they give for their judgments in order to determine that they understood the situation properly. The author suggests that this should be done for robots as well. In this regard, if a robot passes a moral version of the Turing Test—a Moral Turing Test (MTT) we should hold the robot morally responsible for its actions. This is supported by the impossibility of deciding who actually has (semantic or only syntactic) understanding of a moral situation, and by two examples: the transferring of a human mind into a computer, and aliens who actually are robots.
An Exploratory Study of the Cyberbullying and Cyberstalking Experiences and Factors Related to Victimization of Students at a Public Liberal Arts College
Authors: Kraft Ellen , Wang Jinchang
Published: February 2011

This article shows the results of a study of the cyberbullying and cyberstalking experiences of students at a public liberal arts college. A survey was administered online to sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduate students at the college. The prevalence rates were 10% for cyberbullying and 9% for cyberstalking, shown in the sample of 471 respondents. Traditional college students under 25 years of age were experiencing and participating in cyberbullying at higher rates than older college students. Prior experience as a victim of cyberbullying in high school was a significant risk factor for cyberbullying and cyberstalking in college, which implies that students’ roles in cyberbullying are maintained from high school to college. The majority of college students are handling cyberbullying incidents themselves rather than utilizing campus resources, but two-thirds of respondents would be more likely to consider reporting an incident if there was a central e-mail address available for reporting incidents.
A Taxonomy of Stakeholders
Authors: Alexander Ian F.
Published: February 2011

Systems engineers have often paid too little attention to the nature of the so-called “users” of products under development. These are better called stakeholders, as many roles are involved, and few of those are in direct contact with the developed products. A simple and robust conceptual framework for classifying development stakeholders — a taxonomy — is proposed. The taxonomy is product centric, with concentric “circles” denoting broad categories of stakeholders. Within these, generic “slots” describe typical classes of stakeholders; these are subdivided into “roles,” which are expected to vary at least in name with the domain. Examples are given, and a popular template is reanalysed using the framework. The taxonomy has immediate value in identifying and validating stakeholder roles in requirements elicitation, helping to ensure that key viewpoints are not missed, and hence reducing the risk of instability and failure during development.
Believe It or Not
Authors: George Susan E.
Published: February 2011

This paper considers the development of virtual communities focusing upon virtual religion and its impact on humanity. It is important that religion is expressed communally and socially, and the Internet has provided a new community context for religiosity, linking people from geographically, socially, and culturally disparate backgrounds, facilitating interactivity as never before in an intriguing anthropological development. We find examples of “online religion” that are already occurring and see technology as playing a crucial positive role in humanity in the 21st century. While there are limitations with virtual interaction compared to face-to-face engagement, there are benefits, primarily that such technology starts to answer the deeper philosophical questions associated with technology, especially the question of how technology cannot rob people of the essence of what it is to be human. By facilitating virtual religion, technology assists the uniquely human pursuit of religiosity, and merely provides a new “meeting place” for exchange.
The Desire for Privacy
Authors: Spiekermann Sarah
Published: February 2011

Using privacy and security technology becomes increasingly important in many application areas for companies as well as for consumers. However, the market for privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) is still small, especially in the private consumer segment. Due to the nature of the technology per se, little is known and can be learned about the views and motivation of those who carefully protect their transactions on the Net. Are they a niche group in the long run? Or do they hold views and have traits that promise a wider-spread adoption of PETs? This paper gives an insight into the traits and views of 5,037 customers of an anonymity service. Due to high service reputation and unchanged questions posted over 2½ years on the service’s Web site, insights could be gained on PET users’ demographic and psychographic traits. Moreover, 482 free-text comments provide a unique insight into the thoughts, feelings, and motivation for service usage.
Automated Video Segmentation for Lecture Videos
Authors: Lin Ming , Chau Michael , Cao Jinwei , Nunamaker Jr. Jay F.
Published: February 2011

Video, a rich information source, is commonly used for capturing and sharing knowledge in learning systems. However, the unstructured and linear features of video introduce difficulties for end users in accessing the knowledge captured in videos. To extract the knowledge structures hidden in a lengthy, multi-topic lecture video and thus make it easily accessible, we need to first segment the video into shorter clips by topic. Because of the high cost of manual segmentation, automated segmentation is highly desired. However, current automated video segmentation methods mainly rely on scene and shot change detection, which are not suitable for lecture videos with few scene/shot changes and unclear topic boundaries. In this article we investigate a new video segmentation approach with high performance on this special type of video: lecture videos. This approach uses natural language processing techniques such as noun phrases extraction, and utilizes lexical knowledge sources such as WordNet. Multiple linguistic-based segmentation features are used, including content-based features such as noun phrases and discourse-based features such as cue phrases. Our evaluation results indicate that the noun phrases feature is salient.
Differential Impacts of Social Presence on the Behavior Modeling Approach
Authors: Chen Charlie C. , Olfman Lorne , Harris Albert
Published: February 2011

The continued and increasing use of online asynchronous learning (OAL) environments for training raises the question whether and to what extent behavior modeling, the most effective training method in live instruction, will prove to be effective in OAL environments. This article analyzes the effect of applying behavior modeling training in an OAL environment. Behavior modeling training can be delivered in three modes: face-to-face, videotaped, and scripted. Each behavior modeling mode expresses social presence to a different degree, which could impact both learning performance and the willingness of students to take online asynchronous training. This study reports on the effect of behavior modeling mode on these variables in an OAL environment. Nine hypotheses were proposed. Four hypotheses were supported and five were not. This research found that the face-to-face environment is not significantly more effective than an OAL environment.
Sociotechnical Spaces
Authors: Clausen Christian , Yoshinaka Yutaka
Published: February 2011

This article addresses how insights from the social shaping tradition and political process theory may contribute to an understanding of the sociotechnical design and implementation of change. This idea is pursued through the notion of “sociotechnical spaces” and its delineation, with respect to the analysis of two distinct cases: Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in light of “film-less” radiological practice. Sociotechnical space is elaborated as being an occasioning as well as a result of sociotechnical choices and processes. It points to the role of socio-material and discursive practices in rendering spaces open to problematisation and action. It is suggested that the notion of sociotechnical spaces helps generate a sensitising guide for researchers and practitioners, and is proposed as a constructive means to localising potential political concerns. The article tentatively points to some analytical implications, and to challenges and possibilities for the “bridging” between spaces otherwise rendered distinct.
Organisations and Information Systems
Authors: Brooks Laurence , Davis Christopher J. , Lycett Mark
Published: February 2011

Starting from personal construct theory (PCT), this article explores the use of two complementary approaches to investigate the interdependence of organisations and information systems. These two techniques — repertory grid analysis (RGA) and cognitive mapping (CM) — were used to investigate the dynamics of this interaction. Changing business models and information technologies were investigated in two distinct work settings; in each case, the technique contributed substantial insight into the role of information systems in that context. The analysis shows that the techniques have matured to a stage where they provide a basis for improved understanding of the organisational complexities related to information technologies. The techniques focus on the social construction of meaning by articulating and interpreting the discourse that surrounds the development, implementation, and use of information technology in organisations. It is these ongoing discourses that creates the dynamic complexities in organisations as they play themselves out and develop over time. Current research has articulated and improved awareness of the issues and concerns that surround computer-based information systems. Despite the differing contexts and work processes, the findings from each case suggest that this has made managers more conceptually agile, leading to improved integration of organisational processes and technology. The article concludes by drawing out the idea of the development of a conceptual model to act as a framework for the analysis of cognitive schema and shared understanding. In developing and participating in this shared understanding, both organisational and technological communities could increase their awareness of each other’s issues and concerns, thereby enabling them to improve the conceptual agility of the organisation.
Chinese POS Disambiguation and Unknown Word Guessing with Lexicalized HMMs
Authors: Fu Guohong , Luke Kang-Kwong
Published: February 2011

This article presents a lexicalized HMM-based approach to Chinese part-of-speech (POS) disambiguation and unknown word guessing (UWG). In order to explore word-internal morphological features for Chinese POS tagging, four types of pattern tags are defined to indicate the way lexicon words are used in a segmented sentence. Such patterns are combined further with POS tags. Thus, Chinese POS disambiguation and UWG can be unified as a single task of assigning each known word to input a proper hybrid tag. Furthermore, a uniformly lexicalized HMM-based tagger also is developed to perform this task, which can incorporate both internal word-formation patterns and surrounding contextual information for Chinese POS tagging under the framework of HMMs. Experiments on the Peking University Corpus indicate that the tagging precision can be improved with efficiency by the proposed approach.
Optimality-Theoretic Lexical Mapping Theory
Authors: Her One-Soon
Published: February 2011

Locative inversion verbs seem to share the same argument structure and grammatical function assignment (i.e., ) cross-linguistically. This article discusses the nature of argument-function linking in LFG and demonstrates how the Lexical Mapping Theory (LMT) rendered in Optimality-Theoretic (OT) terms, where argument-function linking is governed by universal violable constraints that consistently favor the unmarked function, accounts for locative inversion straightforwardly. Within this OT-LMT, locative inversion is due to a universal morphosyntactic constraint, and language variation in locative inversion is due to the difference in its relative ranking. This account also offers a potential explanation for the markedness of the locative inversion construction.
Inventing Use for a Novel Mobile Service
Authors: Repo Petteri , Hyvonen Kaarina , Pantzar Mika , Timonen Päivi
Published: February 2011

Multimedia rich mobile broadband services are expected to be used widely in the near future. To become commercially successful, meaningful uses for them need to be invented. We approached the takeup of such novel mobile services from the perspective of user innovations. Mobile phones with video capability were handed out to test users in order to discover what kinds of meaningful contexts they might find for watching streaming mobile video. There were two different contexts in which users considered it natural to view mobile video. First, they were able to alleviate boring situations by entertaining themselves. Second, mobile video made it possible to share experiences with other people. Although streaming video service provides little room for user innovations, users came up with two distinctly different contexts of use. This implies that early user feedback in the innovation and commercialization processes likely will promote the development of successful next-generation mobile services.
Analyzing the Factors Influencing the Successful Design and Uptake of Interactive Systems to Support Social Networks in Urban Neighborhoods
Authors: Foth Marcus
Published: February 2011

In urban residential environments in Australia and other developed countries, Internet access is on the verge of becoming a ubiquitous utility like gas or electricity. From an urban sociology and community informatics perspective, this article discusses new emerging social formations of urban residents that are based on networked individualism and the potential of Internet-based systems to support them. It proposes that one of the main reasons for the disappearance or nonexistence of urban residential communities is a lack of appropriate opportunities and instruments to encourage and support local interaction in urban neighborhoods. The article challenges the view that a mere reappropriation of applications used to support dispersed virtual communities is adequate to meet the place and proximity-based design requirements that community networks in urban neighborhoods pose. It argues that the key factors influencing the successful design and uptake of interactive systems to support social networks in urban neighborhoods include the swarming social behavior of urban dwellers; the dynamics of their existing communicative ecology; and the serendipitous, voluntary, and place-based quality of interaction between residents on the basis of choice, like-mindedness, mutual interest and support needs. Drawing on an analysis of these factors, the conceptual design framework of a prototype system — the urban tribe incubator — is presented.
Electronic Commerce Strategy in the UK Electricity Industry
Authors: Shaw Duncan R. , Holland Christopher P. , Kawalek Peter , Snowdon Bob , Warboys Brian
Published: February 2011

This paper investigates the collective use of a simple modeling technology by highly complex, heterogeneous and numerous groups of stakeholders who heavily depend upon it to mediate their interactions. We use economic theory, design theory, complex systems theory and business process modeling concepts to analyze deregulation and business to business interaction in the UK electricity industry, and the strategic business and IT response of Electric Co, a large electricity supply company. The relevance of this study comes from its investigation of a novel example of the shaping of a whole sector’s e-business through regulatory law and thus we are concerned with enterprise and inter-enterprise systems not purely with ERP systems. We focus on model-based business interaction and its effect upon the business and consumer behaviors of a whole country’s electricity sector. This sector is a socio-technical system; so business processes and consumer behaviors are not only shaped by the regulator’s legally enforced business to business process interaction model, but the opinions of businesses and the public also influence how the regulator updates its model. Thus business behaviors, consumer behaviors and the model interact to shape each other. By moving from intra to inter-organizational business processes we seek to demonstrate and explain the value of models in e-business where the complexity of interacting business systems involves many thousands of parameters. We show how developments in technical standards and business process management are related to inter-organizational interaction and coordination.