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Chuleekorn, Thanongsitt. "Management of information system implementation from a power perspective : case studies of organisations in Thailand." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.575715.
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An information system is widely recognised as a technological-political system and it can be better understood from a political perspective. This research studies how an information system is socially and politically constructed through the implementation process. It posits that the process of information system implementation can be shaped and impacted by power relations and thus that failing to understand such phenomena will contribute to system failure. The aim of this research is to broaden the understanding of an information system from a power perspective. Particular emphasis is placed on power relations in organisations and how such relations impact the process of system implementation. In order to achieve this aim, the research applies an integrated theoretical framework based on power and discourse perspectives to two qualitative case studies carried out in companies in Thailand. The case studies were undertaken based on an interpretive mode of inquiry, which provides ways of understanding how the process of implementation of information systems was shaped and impacted by human actions and political processes. lnterpretivism helped to explore the complexity of human action and meanings that system participants assigned to those actions leading to the system implementation process. The main findings suggest that information system implementation can be impacted by power relations enacted through discursive actions of textual practices 2 I constituting discourse. Besides, a grand discourse can itself be a source of power that affects the system implementation process. The findings indicate that: i) knowledge integrated in discourse plays a prominent role in power relations, ii) discursive legitimacy could enable and at the same time delimit the exercise of power, and iii) an information system may be used as an apparatus for domination as well as human emancipation. The main findings are taken as significant contributions to both theory and practice in the information systems field. 3
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Lee, Deborah. "Modelling music : a theoretical approach to the classification of notated Western art music." Thesis, City, University of London, 2017. http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/17445/.
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The classification of notated Western art music is a perennial issue. This thesis analyses and models the knowledge organization of notated Western art music in order to elucidate a theoretical understanding of these classification issues and to offer new ways of viewing music classification in the future. This thesis also considers how music classification contributes to developments in general knowledge organization and compares the classification of Western art music across the library and information science (LIS) and music domains. The research is conducted using a number of analytical techniques, including examining music knowledge organization discourse, analysing examples of LIS classification schemes, unpicking discussions of classification in the music domain and analysing composer worklists in the music domain. After ascertaining how music classification fits into theories of faceted classification, three important facets of music are identified: medium, form and genre, and a quasi-facet of function. These three facets are explored in detail over five chapters: the binary vocal/instrumental categorisation; classifying numbers of instruments or voices, accompaniment, arrangements and “extreme” mediums; classifying musical instruments; classifying musical forms and genres; and the quasi-facet of function. Five resulting models of music classification are presented. Model 1 demonstrates the complexities of classifying musical medium, including the interlinked relationships between different parts of musical medium. Model 2 offers a solution to LIS classification’s largely binary view of vocal and instrumental categorisation by suggesting a novel new category: “vocinstrumental”. Model 3 illuminates the entrenched dependencies between facets of music, highlighting one of the structural issues with LIS classifications of music. Model 4 offers an original structure of music classification, proposing a simultaneous faceted and genre-based system. Model 5 compares classification in the music and LIS domains, offering a novel way of considering domain-based classification by codifying various types of relationships between the LIS and domain classifications. This thesis also contributes to the theory and practice of knowledge organization in general through the development of novel frameworks and methodologies to analyse classification schemes: the multiplane approach, reception-infused analysis, webs of Wirkungs (connections) between classification schemes and stress-testing.
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Канівець, Дмитро Володимирович. "Математичне та програмне забезпечення класифікації наукових текстів." Master's thesis, КПІ ім. Ігоря Сікорського, 2019. https://ela.kpi.ua/handle/123456789/31517.
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Актуальність теми: для спрощення пошуку необхідної інформації серед наукових публікацій в Україні використовується бібліотечна класифікація. Проте наразі ця система є недосконалою, адже при класифікації допускаються помилки, а в деяких випадках вона виконується для збірника загалом, що призводить до часткової невідповідності для деяких статей, що в нього входять. Також виконання класифікації сторонньою людиною (наприклад, бібліотекарем чи редактором) вимагає багато часу. Вирішенням цієї проблеми є автоматизація процесу класифікації. За рахунок використання машинного навчання можна створити автоматичний класифікатор, яких дозволить покращити точність класифікації порівняно з ручною та прискорити класифікацію нових надходжень.
Мета дослідження: створення класифікатора наукових статей за категоріями УДК на основі машинного навчання.
Для реалізації поставленої мети були сформульовані наступні завдання:
– систематизація існуючих алгоритмів класифікації текстових даних;
– збір достатньої навчальних даних, розробка класифікатору на основі машинного навчання;
– тестування та аналіз ефективності отриманого алгоритму;
– визначення подальшого напрямку досліджень.
Об’єкт дослідження: бібліотечна класифікація наукових статей.
Предмет дослідження: алгоритми класифікації текстових даних.
Методи дослідження: для розв’язання поставленої задачі використовувались наївний баєсів класифікатор, нейронні мережі, алгоритм зворотного поширення помилки.
Наукова новизна: найбільш суттєвими науковими результатами магістерської дисертації є дослідження можливостей автоматизації класифікації наукових текстів; пошуку помилок у вже класифікованих текстах; створення алгоритмів класифікації для розрізнення категорій у текстів близьких тематик.
Практичне значення отриманих результатів визначається тим, що запропонований алгоритм дозволяє досягти точності бібліотечної класифікації в 86%, що дозволяє використовувати його для пошуку і виправлення помилок у класифікації текстів, а також як допоміжного засобу при класифікації нових надходжень.
Зв’язок роботи з науковими програмами, планами, темами: робота виконувалась на кафедрі автоматизованих систем обробки інформації та управління Національного технічного університету України «Київський політехнічний інститут ім. Ігоря Сікорського» в рамках теми «Математичні моделі та технології в СППР». Державний реєстраційний номер 0117U000914
Апробація: основні положення роботи доповідались і обговорювались на XІІ науково-практичній конференції магістрантів та аспірантів «Прикладна математика та комп’ютинг» (ПМК-2019), а також на третій всеукраїнській науково-практичній конференції молодих вчених та студентів «Інформаційні системи та технології управління» (ІСТУ-2019).Relevance: to simplify the search for relevant information among scientific publications in Ukraine, a library classification is used. However, this system is not perfect at this time, because classification is erroneous, and in some cases it is executed for the journal as a whole, which results in partial discrepancies for some of its articles. Also, it takes a long time to perform the classification by a third party (such as a librarian or editor). The solution to this problem is to automate the classification process. By using machine learning, automatic classifier can be created, which will improve the accuracy of the classification compared to manual and accelerate the classification of new revenues. Purpose: create a classifier of scientific articles by UDC categories based on machine learning. To achieve this goal, the following tasks were formulated: - systematization of existing text data classification algorithms; - gathering sufficient training data, developing a classifier based on machine learning; - testing and analysis of the efficiency of the obtained algorithm; - determining the further direction of research. Object of study: library classification of scientific articles. Subject of study: algorithms for classification of text data. Research methods: naive Bayes classifier, neural networks, backpropagation algorithm were used to solve this problem. Scientific novelty: the most significant scientific results of a master's thesis are the study of the possibilities of automation of the classification of scientific texts; search for mistakes in already classified texts; creation of classification algorithms for distinguishing categories in texts of similar subjects. The practical value of the obtained results is determined by the fact that the proposed algorithm allows to achieve the accuracy of library classification in 86%, which allows to use it for finding and correcting errors in the classification of texts, as well as an aid in the classification of new receipts. Relationship with working with scientific programs, plans, topics: work was performed at the Department of Automated Information Processing and Management Systems of the Igor Sikorsky National Technical University of Ukraine «Kyiv Polytechnic Institute» within the topic «Mathematical Models and Technologies in DSS». State Registration Number 0117U000914 Approbation: the main provisions of the work were reported and discussed at the XIII Scientific and Practical Conference of undergraduate and graduate students «Applied Mathematics and Computing» (AMP-2019), as well as at the third all-Ukrainian scientific and practical conference of young scientists and students «Information Systems and Technologies of Management» (ISTM-2019).
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Sayah, Tarek. "Selective disclosure and inference leakage problem in the Linked Data." Thesis, Lyon, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016LYSE1156/document.
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L'émergence du Web sémantique a mené à une adoption rapide du format RDF (Resource Description Framework) pour décrire les données et les liens entre elles. Ce modèle de graphe est adapté à la représentation des liens sémantiques entre les objets du Web qui sont identifiés par des IRI. Les applications qui publient et échangent des données RDF potentiellement sensibles augmentent dans de nombreux domaines : bio-informatique, e-gouvernement, mouvements open-data. La problématique du contrôle des accès aux contenus RDF et de l'exposition sélective de l'information en fonction des privilèges des requérants devient de plus en plus importante. Notre principal objectif est d'encourager les entreprises et les organisations à publier leurs données RDF dans l'espace global des données liées. En effet, les données publiées peuvent être sensibles, et par conséquent, les fournisseurs de données peuvent être réticents à publier leurs informations, à moins qu'ils ne soient certains que les droits d'accès à leurs données par les différents requérants sont appliqués correctement. D'où l'importance de la sécurisation des contenus RDF est de l'exposition sélective de l'information pour différentes classes d'utilisateurs. Dans cette thèse, nous nous sommes intéressés à la conception d'un contrôle d'accès pertinents pour les données RDF. De nouvelles problématiques sont posées par l'introduction des mécanismes de déduction pour les données RDF (e.g., RDF/S, OWL), notamment le problème de fuite d'inférence. En effet, quand un propriétaire souhaite interdire l'accès à une information, il faut également qu'il soit sûr que les données diffusées ne pourront pas permettre de déduire des informations secrètes par l'intermédiaire des mécanismes d'inférence sur des données RDF. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons un modèle de contrôle d'accès à grains fins pour les données RDF. Nous illustrons l'expressivité du modèle de contrôle d'accès avec plusieurs stratégies de résolution de conflits, y compris la Most Specific Takes Precedence. Nous proposons un algorithme de vérification statique et nous montrons qu'il est possible de vérifier à l'avance si une politique présente un problème de fuite d'inférence. De plus, nous montrons comment utiliser la réponse de l'algorithme à des fins de diagnostics. Pour traiter les privilèges des sujets, nous définissons la syntaxe et la sémantique d'un langage inspiré de XACML, basé sur les attributs des sujets pour permettre la définition de politiques de contrôle d'accès beaucoup plus fines. Enfin, nous proposons une approche d'annotation de données pour appliquer notre modèle de contrôle d'accès, et nous montrons que notre implémentation entraîne un surcoût raisonnable durant l'exécutionThe emergence of the Semantic Web has led to a rapid adoption of the RDF (Resource Description Framework) to describe the data and the links between them. The RDF graph model is tailored for the representation of semantic relations between Web objects that are identified by IRIs (Internationalized Resource Identifier). The applications that publish and exchange potentially sensitive RDF data are increasing in many areas: bioinformatics, e-government, open data movement. The problem of controlling access to RDF content and selective exposure to information based on privileges of the requester becomes increasingly important. Our main objective is to encourage businesses and organizations worldwide to publish their RDF data into the linked data global space. Indeed, the published data may be sensitive, and consequently, data providers may avoid to release their information, unless they are certain that the desired access rights of different accessing entities are enforced properly, to their data. Hence the issue of securing RDF content and ensuring the selective disclosure of information to different classes of users is becoming all the more important. In this thesis, we focused on the design of a relevant access control for RDF data. The problem of providing access controls to RDF data has attracted considerable attention of both the security and the database community in recent years. New issues are raised by the introduction of the deduction mechanisms for RDF data (e.g., RDF/S, OWL), including the inference leakage problem. Indeed, when an owner wishes to prohibit access to information, she/he must also ensure that the information supposed secret, can’t be inferred through inference mechanisms on RDF data. In this PhD thesis we propose a fine-grained access control model for RDF data. We illustrate the expressiveness of the access control model with several conict resolution strategies including most specific takes precedence. To tackle the inference leakage problem, we propose a static verification algorithm and show that it is possible to check in advance whether such a problem will arise. Moreover, we show how to use the answer of the algorithm for diagnosis purposes. To handle the subjects' privileges, we define the syntax and semantics of a XACML inspired language based on the subjects' attributes to allow much finer access control policies. Finally, we propose a data-annotation approach to enforce our access control model, and show that our solution incurs reasonable overhead with respect to the optimal solution which consists in materializing the user's accessible subgraph to enforce our access control model, and show that our solution incurs reasonable overhead with respect to the optimal solution which consists in materializing the user's accessible subgraph
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Codocedo-Henríquez, Víctor. "Contributions à l'indexation et à la recherche d'information avec l'analyse formelle de concepts." Thesis, Université de Lorraine, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015LORR0143/document.
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Un des premiers modèles d'indexation de documents qui utilise des termes comme descripteurs était une structure de treillis, cela une vingtaine d'années avant l'arrivée de l'analyse formelle de concepts (FCA pour "Formal Concept Analysis"), qui s'affirme maintenant comme un formalisme théorique important et solide pour l'analyse de données et la découverte de connaissances. Actuellement, la communauté en recherche d'information (RI) s'intéresse particulièrement à des techniques avancées pour la recherche des documents qui relèvent des probabilités et des statistiques. En parallèle, l'intérêt de la communauté FCA au développement de techniques qui font avancer l'état de l'art en RI tout en offrant des fonctionnalités sémantiques lui est toujours bien vivant. Dans cette thèse, nous présentons un ensemble de contributions sur ce que nous avons appelé les systèmes FCA de recherche d'information ("FCA-based IR systems''). Nous avons divisé nos contributions en deux parties, à savoir l'extraction et l'indexation. Pour la récupération, nous proposons une nouvelle technique qui exploite les relations sémantiques entre les descripteurs dans un corpus de documents. Pour l'indexation, nous proposons un nouveau modèle qui permet de mettre en oeuvre un modèle vectoriel d'indexation des documents s'appuyant sur un treillis de concepts (ou treillis de Galois). En outre, nous proposons un modèle perfectionné pour l'indexation hétérogène dans lequel nous combinons le modèle vectoriel et le modèle de recherche booléen. Finalement, nous présentons une technique de fouille de données inspiré de l'indexation des documents, à savoir un modèle d'énumération exhaustive des biclusters en utilisant la FCA. Le biclustering est une nouvelle technique d'analyse de données dans laquelle les objets sont liés via la similitude dans certains attributs de l'espace de description, et non pas par tous les attributs comme dans le "clustering'' standard. En traduisant ce problème en termes d'analyse formelle de concepts, nous pouvons exploiter l'algorithmique associée à la FCA pour développer une technique d'extraction de biclusters de valeurs similaires. Nous montrons le très bon comportement de notre technique, qui fonctionne mieux que les techniques actuelles de biclustering avec énumération exhaustiveOne of the first models ever to be considered as an index for documents using terms as descriptors, was a lattice structure, a couple of decades before the arrival of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) as a solid theory for data mining and knowledge discovery.While the Information Retrieval (IR) community has shifted to more advanced techniques for document retrieval, like probabilistic and statistic paradigms, the interest of the FCA community on developing techniques that would improve the state-of-the-art in IR while providing relevance feedback and semantic based features, never decayed. In this thesis we present a set of contributions on what we call FCA-based IR systems. We have divided our contributions in two sets, namely retrieval and indexing. For retrieval, we propose a novel technique that exploits semantic relations among descriptors in a document corpus and a new concept lattice navigation strategy (called cousin concepts), enabling us to support classification-based reasoning to provide better results compared with state-of-the-art retrieval techniques. The basic notion in our strategy is supporting query modification using "term replacements'' using the lattice structure and semantic similarity. For indexing, we propose a new model that allows supporting the vector space model of retrieval using concept lattices. One of the main limitations of current FCA-based IR systems is related to the binary nature of the input data required for FCA to generate a concept lattice. We propose the use of pattern structures, an extension of FCA to deal with complex object descriptions, in order to support more advanced retrieval paradigms like the vector space model. In addition, we propose an advanced model for heterogeneous indexing through which we can combine the vector space model and the Boolean retrieval model. The main advantage of this approach is the ability of supporting indexing of convex regions in an arbitrary vectorial space built from a document collection. Finally, we move forward to a mining model associated with document indexing, namely exhaustive bicluster enumeration using FCA. Biclustering is an emerging data analysis technique in which objects are related by similarity under certain attributes of the description space, instead of the whole description space like in standard clustering. By translating this problem to the framework of FCA, we are able to exploit the robust machinery associated with the computation of concept lattices to provide an algorithm for mining biclusters based on similar values. We show how our technique performs better than current exhaustive enumeration biclustering techniques
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Chandler, Ben. "Equipping select local church leaders to increase missions giving by valuing and promoting the Cooperative Program." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), access this title online, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.2986/tren.054-0254.
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Torres, JoseÌ. "Visual information retrieval through interactive multimedia queries." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.431417.
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Cooray, Shavindrie Flavia. "End-user driven development of information systems : revisiting Vickers' notion of 'appreciation'." Thesis, University of Portsmouth, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.556971.
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This research is concerned with an investigation into the reported failures in information systems programmes and of the underlying cause of these failures. The research revealed that end user participation is an important part of the information systems design process for it is rarely the technology that fails but a failure of the information system to meet the expectations of the end user. Research into the literature indicates that a major problem encountered when attempting end user driven participation is that there is a gap in communication between the end users who are experts in the business domain and the developers who are experts in technology. The literature reveals that the challenge of managing this gap in a user driven manner is still the subject of much research. Many attempts to manage the gap that have been reported can be criticised since they are driven by the technical developer and not the end user despite recognising that it is the end user who will be using the information system on a daily basis. The research reported in this thesis provides an account of a unique use of Vickers' notion of Appreciation coupled with the mnemonic PEArL applied in order to first, enable end users to define their information system in a rich and enhanced manner and second, to provide a pathway for end users to 'navigate' the gap (between end users and developers) in a coherent and traceable manner. The developed approach is then applied to a field study in a leading public library in the UK from which lessons are learnt about the approach itself and about end-user driven development of information systems.
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Nguyen, Tu. "Generating natural language explanations for entailments in ontologies." Thesis, Open University, 2013. http://oro.open.ac.uk/39116/.
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Building an error-free and high-quality ontology in OWL (Web Ontology Language)---the latest standard ontology language endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium---is not an easy task for domain experts, who usually have limited knowledge of OWL and logic. One sign of an erroneous ontology is the occurrence of undesired inferences (or entailments), often caused by interactions among (apparently innocuous) axioms within the ontology. This suggests the need for a tool that allows developers to inspect why such an entailment follows from the ontology in order to debug and repair it. This thesis aims to address the above problem by advancing knowledge and techniques in generating explanations for entailments in OWL ontologies. We build on earlier work on identifying minimal subsets of the ontology from which an entailment can be drawn---known technically as justifications. Our main focus is on planning (at a logical level) an explanation that links a justification (premises) to its entailment (conclusion); we also consider how best to express the explanation in English. Among other innovations, we propose a method for assessing the understandability of explanations, so that the easiest can be selected from a set of alternatives. Our findings make a theoretical contribution to Natural Language Generation and Knowledge Representation. They could also play a practical role in improving the explanation facilities in ontology development tools, considering especially the requirements of users who are not expert in OWL.
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Wall, Terry K. "Studies on frequency distributions of recorded use for students using academic library collections." Thesis, Loughborough University, 1987. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/10938.
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Frequency distributions of recorded use for students using academic libraries were analysed using statistical models not previously employed for the purpose. The suitability of the data for such analysis is discussed. Evidence suggested that frequency distributions of recorded library use reflected real differences in amounts of library use by users. A computer simulation of library use by students was used to investigate the effects of competition among users upon distributions of use. Negative binomial probability distributions were found to reproduce some of the observed patterns of user activity, but were rejected on grounds of fit and applicability. Other two and three-parameter probability distributions were considered. A novel modification of the negative binomial distribution (being a Neyman Type A-gamma distribution instead of a Poisson-gamma distribution) gave good fit to frequency distributions of recorded use from various libraries. The fitted parameters appeared to be related to statistics of use for the observed populations, but the diversity observed in reality among users was clearly simplified in a stochastic model with only three parameters. In the second part of the study, methods of using the model were explored. Given stability in two of the three parameters, the model could be scaled with time to predict future frequency distributions. The extrapolation of numbers of non-users from one set of data is described. The effect upon the uptake of titles from a library collection of distributions of activity among students was also considered. By simplifying the model, relationships between the mean use by a group of users and maximum amounts of use by individuals, and between numbers of uses and numbers of titles used are suggested. A key factor in relating user activity to uptake is the extent to which users diversify in their use of titles.
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Lyons, Seamus. "Extraction and summarization of units of information from web text." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.493011.
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Al, Harrasi Nabhan Harith. "Understanding Omani academic library collaboration : a soft systems approach." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.575551.
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Abstract The primary aim of this research was to understand the situation of Omani academic library collaboration (OALC). The results show that the situation of Omani academic library collaboration was problematical due to lack of library collaboration activities in Oman, financial and human constraints that have rendered working in isolation no effective, and challenges related to purchasing, processing and providing services and information to the library community. Therefore, an investigation was required to understand factors that delay establishment of collaboration activities, factors that support working collaboratively, and methods and strategies that can be used to improve the current situation of OA Le. Soft systems methodology (SSM) was used as an interpretive approach to find out about the problematical situation and to model, discuss and improve OALe. Four academic libraries were involved in this study: Sultan Qaboos University Library, Nizwa University Library, Sohar University Library, and Dhofar University Library. 23 participants were involved in describing their situation in one-to-one interviews in order to gain understanding of the complexity of OALe. Then three group interviews were used tor the purpose of modelling and discussing conceptual activities which were suggested to improve the situation. Systems that are systematically desirable and culturally feasible were identified. A workshop was then organised to implement the awareness raising system, improve inter-group communication and conflict resolution, establish a strategic planning committee composed of representatives from every library to carry out the activities, and develop some rules and regulations that could be used to operate and control the system of interlibrary loans. The changes achieved through the process of the research would impact on three dimensions of the academic libraries: structure, attitude and procedures. The contribution of this research is in the appl ication of SSM in academ ic library collaboration.
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Farhan, Huda Rashed. "Recruiting the public : the potential of folksonomies for organizing and retrieving information in an e-government context." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.555896.
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Folksonomies brought a new dimension to the way information is organized and retrieved in the internet environment. Despite criticism, folksonomies attracted attention and interest both in academia and amongst the general public. Disputes have arisen concerning the appropriateness of folksonomies as tools for organizing and retrieving information in official contexts. Despite numerous studies dealing with folksonomies, these disputes have not yet been resolved. There is a need, therefore, to investigate the quality of folksonomies as tools for organizing and retrieving information. In this study, evaluation criteria were developed in an attempt to assess that quality. The developed criteria were then utilized in several evaluation studies, conducted on a number of folksonomies, so that their validity and reliability could be tested. When the evaluation criteria were applied it was perceived that there is a need to generate an e-government folksonomy dedicated to a particular e-government initiative. This need was translated into the generation of an e-government folksonomy dedicated to the Kuwaiti e-government portal. This folksonomy was generated by potential users and went through an evaluation process using the developed evaluation criteria. In addition, the generated egovernment folksonomy was added to the Kuwaiti e-government portal as a tool to use for organizing and retrieving information. A user- centric comparative study was then conducted. For the comparative study, the folksonomy was evaluated by assessing the success of an information system in which the folkonomy was implemented. An information system success evaluation model was used in order to assess the extent to which the deployment of the folksonomy on the e-government portal could enhance the information organization and retrieval process. The evaluation model used was a modification of the Broudi et ai, 1986 alternative model. In this model the relationship between three constructs of information system success was assessed. These constructs were: user satisfaction, user's involvement and system usage. Use of this model provided a practical opportunity to test, from a user's perspective, the hypothesised potential of folksonomies to enhance the organization and retrieval of information in an egovernment context. The findings of the different studies indicated the validity and reliability of the developed evaluation criteria. Also, the findings emphasized the suitability of folksonomies to be used use in an official context for the purpose of organizing and retrieving information. However, folksonomies need to be implemented in information systems in conjunction with conventional tools for organizing and retrieving information: Despite their compatibility with the developed evaluation criteria, folksonomies lack the robustness of standardized, conventional tools of information organization and retrieval. Hence, folksonomies cannot serve in the field of information organization and retrieval on their own. However, in conjunction with conventional tools of organizing and retrieving information, folksonomies can bridge the gap between information system's language and potential user's language. Thus, allowing information to be organized based on both standardized tools and user's perception.
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Zeranou, Kalliopi. "Template rule development for information extraction: The net method." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.489539.
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Information Extraction (IE) is becoming increasingly important for the semantic analysis of free-text documents stored in large document repositories, such as the Web. Once free-text is analysed for the recognition of concepts and concept interrelations in events and facts of interest, the resulting structured information becomes a valuable knowledge resource. This resource can be of further use in other information management technologies, such as document summarisation, ontology development, semantic document indexing, question answering, etc., or can be further exploited by data mining and reasoning technologies.
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Carrea, Laura. "Optimised probabilistic data structures for forwarding in information centric networking." Thesis, University of Essex, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.601507.
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In this thesis, a probabilistic approach to the problem of packet forwarding in information centric networks is analysed and further developed. This type of networks are based on information identifiers rather than on the traditional host addresses. The approach is compact forwarding where the Bloom filter is the key method for aggregating forwarding information that allows moving packets at line speed labelled with fiat identifiers. The Bloom filter reduces state at the nodes, simplifies multicast delivery and introduces new trade-offs in the traditional routing and forwarding design space. However) it is a lassy method which produces some potential bandwidth penalties, loops, packet storms, and security issues due to false positives. This thesis focuses on false posit ive control for the probabilistic in-packet forwarding method and proposes two approaches either to reduce false positives or to exploit them in a useful way. One approach consists of a mechanism to carefully select the number of hash functions to use to generate the Bloom filter, The mechanism on average offers the minimum false positive occurrences depending on the traffic along the links. The other approach is a variation of the Bloom filter, the optihash, that can give better performance with respect to the Bloom filter at a cost of slightly more processing. The optihash is constructed with a family of functions that allows an optimisation which can be performed according to different metrics. Two general metrics are proposed in detail and some other, appJicationspeCific, are explored for in-packet forwarding techniques in different types of networks. The time complexity/false positive trade-off is thoroughly investigated and the evaluation of the optihasb as an alternative to the Bloom filter is performed for in-packet compact forwarding.
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Albakour, M.-Dyaa. "Adaptive domain modelling for information retrieval." Thesis, University of Essex, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.573703.
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Lopez, Vanessa. "PowerAqua : open question answering on the semantic web." Thesis, Open University, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.578555.
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With the rapid growth of semantic information in the Web, the processes of searching and querying These very large amounts of heterogeneous content have become increasingly challenging. This research tackles the problem of supporting users in querying and exploring information across multiple and heterogeneous Semantic Web (SW) sources. A review of literature on ontology-based Question Answering reveals the limitations of existing technology. Our approach is based on providing a natural language Question Answering interface for the SW, PowerAqua. The realization of PowerAqua represents a considerable advance with respect to other systems, which restrict their scope to an ontology-specific or homogeneous fraction of the publicly available SW content. To our knowledge, PowerAqua is the only system that is able to take advantage of the semantic data available on the Web to interpret and answer user queries posed in natural language. In particular, PowerAqua is uniquely able to answer queries by combining and aggregating information, which can be distributed across heterogeneous semantic resources. Here, we provide a complete overview of our work on PowerAqua, including: the research challenges it addresses; its architecture; the techniques we have realised to map queries to semantic data, to integrate partial answers drawn from different semantic resources and to rank alternative answers; and the evaluation studies we have performed, to assess the performance of PowerAqua. We believe our experiences can be extrapolated to a variety of end-user applications that wish to open up to large scale and heterogeneous structured datasets, to be able to exploit effectively what possibly is the greatest wealth of data in the history of Artificial Intelligence.
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Roa, Seungwan. "Internet interpersonal communications : an industrial design approach to interfaces and products." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.406790.
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The Internet provides interpersonal communication that does not merely emulate the 'real' world but offers radically innovative design options; this study investigates related theoretical contexts to expound new conclusions which recognise both non-pre-existing needs and long-term concerns from an industrial design perspective. The study consists of a contextual section and a practice-related section, and generates preliminary design recommendations in the contextual section as a result of exploring and reviewing: 1) socio-psychological; 2) socio-technological; and 3) technological contexts related to internet interpersonal communication. The preliminary design recommendations are based on the most significant internet interpersonal communication potential identified in the contextual section: 1) the absence of the physical body, 2) the need for artificial interfaces, 3) requirements of human-to-human interaction, and 4) support of controllability. The practice-related section, utilising simulated practice activity, assesses each preliminary design recommendation in terms of its degree of practicality and efficiency, and concludes with an identification of the most important principles for internet interpersonal communication interface and product design as below: a) To design the interface as an efficient self-presenter considering human-tohuman interaction preferentially, and b) To harmonise the technological provisions and distinct internet interpersonal communication opportunities as a benefit for individual users. The preliminary design recommendations are further revised with respect to their hierarchical relations in connection with the principles above, and it is suggested that 'omni-dimensional interface/design' would be a sensible direction for internet interpersonal communication interface and product design as well as for most design disciplines related to information communications technologies. In addition, industrial designers focusing on service design could offer effective and efficient guidance to an industry in which technology is becoming less tangible and in which multidisciplinary collaboration is necessary
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Jayalal, S. G. V. S. "Web site link prediction and semantic relatedness of web pages." Thesis, Keele University, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.421664.
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Relying solely on Web browsers to navigate large Web sites has created some navigation problems for users. Many researchers have stressed the importance of improving site user orientation and have suggested the use of information visualisation techniques, in particular "site maps" or "overview diagrams" to address this issue. Link prediction and the semantic relatedness of Web pages have been incorporated into such site maps. This thesis addresses disorientation within Web sites by presenting a visualisation of the site in order to answer one of the three fundamental questions identified by Nielsen and others that users might ask when they become disoriented while navigating a Web site, namely, Where am I now? Where have I been? Where can I go next? A method for making link predictions, which is based on Markov chains, has been developed and implemented in order to answer the third question, "where can I go next?". The method utilises information about the path already followed by the user. In addition to link prediction, pages which are semantically similar to the "current" page are automatically identified using an approach which is based on lexical chains. The proposed approach for link prediction using an exponentially-smoothed transition probability matrix incorporating site usage data over a time period was evaluated by comparing with similar approach developed by Sarukkai. The proposed semantic relatedness approach using weighted lexical chains was empirically compared with an earlier approach developed by Green using synset weight vectors. In conclusion, this thesis argues that Web site link prediction and the identification of semantically-related Web pages can be used to overcome disorientation. The approaches proposed are demonstrated to be superior to earlier methods.
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Emerson, Pamela Margaret. "From club room to Carnegie Library: patterns of book borrowing and lending in Ulster 1788-1908." Thesis, Ulster University, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.673815.
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From Club Room to Carnegie Library traces the extent, influence and development of book lending provision in nineteenth-century Ulster. This innovative survey starts with the neighbourhood book club that met at an inn or in a member's house, then examines how enterprising business owners diversified to lend books for a fee, before going on to explore the range of organisations that added book lending to their activities and finishes with the establishment of the public library service which was financially assisted by Andrew Carnegie. Within these investigative chapters criteria have been devised and applied to focus on the purpose, occurrence and location, book consumption and membership of these facilities. For the first time information from diverse secondary literature has been critically analysed and pertinent data expressed in tabular form to collate and therefore reveal extant knowledge marshalled under the relevant criteria. The tables, included as extensive appendices, are an integral part of the research. The primary sources, some unique to this research, have been explored to expand the number of book lending facilities, widen the geographical coverage and discover more about the people who established and used the facilities. The information thus gained has also been tabulated so this new information is also in accessible format. The final chapter combines the secondary literature and the primary research to develop a detailed account of this educational and recreational practice, to discover patterns and provide statistics about book lending practices that to date have been vague or avoided altogether. From Club Room to Carnegie Library is a unique examination of book lending practices which takes the subject to greater depth and covers a longer time frame than previous work on the topic.
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Choulis, Konstantinos. "Conservation treatments carried out on the Greek manuscripts of the Fondo Anitco in the Vatican Library (15th - 20th centuries)." Thesis, University of London, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.639825.
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The conservation treatments, carried out either on manuscripts or printed books, indelibly mark the appearance of the volumes and constitute a part of their history. A study of the treatments is helpful both for the history of a volume as well as for the history of conservation itself. The Fondo Antico of Greek manuscripts in the Vatican Library was established between the first half of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Conservation treatments were carried out either before the manuscripts entered the Library from outside the Vatican (having taken place in Greece or in Italy, or after their arrival at the Library, taking place somewhere in Rome or in the Vatican workshop until today. The treatments are evident but have been sometimes obscured by other treatments carried out more recently. The aim of this research is to bring light on the period in which a volume was treated identifying the place or the techniques, and rarely the persons who worked on this. To obtain this, two approaches were necessary: first the study of the treatments themselves by recording materials and techniques, and secondly the study of archival sources with the purpose of retrieving information, relative names, dates and historical events. The technical approach provides details about the practices adopted by workers century by century, identifying teams, names of restores who signed their work, or workshops connected with the Vatican milieu. The Library accounts were of great help to that end and, in the future, will probably provide more information to researchers who will try to connect conservation treatments with persons and workshops in other collections of the Library. However, behind the techniques adopted, the materials used and the numbers or percentages of the volumes restored, the relationship between books and society has been essentially reflected.
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Dreza, Omar M. A. "Approach for handling positional uncertainty when combining distributed heterogeneous vector data sources." Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10399/201.
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Spacey, Rachel Elizabeth. "The attitudes of public library staff to the Internet and evaluations of Internet training." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2003. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/10210.
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The aim of this study was to measure the attitudes of public library staff towards the Internet. Opinions of training received by staff for use of the Internet were also recorded and the relationship between attitudes and training was analysed and considered. This was deemed of value at a time when public library staff were about to embark on the largest public library training initiative ever undertaken for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and the installation ofPCs with Internet access in every public library as part of the People's Network. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative research methods were utilised including a questionnaire which incorporated an amended version of the Technology Acceptance Model completed by more than 900 public library staff, interviews with managers, focus groups with a cross-section of staff and an online bulletin board. The study found that the attitudes of most public library staffwere positive towards using the Internet at work. Negativity towards the Internet related to discomfort with the cultural changes taking place in public libraries as a result ofiCT. Attitudes were found to have an integral role in relation to public library staff's willingness to use the Internet; in particular, perceptions of usefulness were very influential. Helping the public use the Internet was generally regarded as a positive experience although finding the time to assist library users was difficult. Training, support and assistance for use of the Internet was well rated although a minority of respondents had not received any training. Ratings of the usefulness of Internet training were related to perceptions of the usefulness, ease of use and intention to use the Internet at work. The popularity of self-directed learning denoted the increased potential for online learning in the future. In contrast with findings from the literature review, informal learning methods such as on-the-job and cascade training were well rated by staff for use of the Internet. The findings of this study suggest that seemingly throwaway comments deriding a new innovation or practice in the public library sphere cannot be easily dismissed and may point to deeper concerns about change and lay bare negative attitudes. In addition, staff demonstrating pessimistic and unconstructive remarks appear to be influential. More worryingly, these attitudes may mean that staff will not use a new technology in the way that managers, policy makers and funding bodies envisage.
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Truran, Mark. "The theory and practice of co-active search." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.430760.
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Garratt, Andrea. "The construction of the builder and searcher components of WWWLIB-TNG." Thesis, University of Wolverhampton, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.425248.
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Klampanos, Iraklis Angelos. "A cluster-based architecture for peer-to-peer information retrieval." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.433270.
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Miras, Dimitrios. "Quality-aware adaptation of internet video using objective quality metrics." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.411044.
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Castilla, Celia Casado. "Flexible text recovery and recognition from degraded historical typewritten documents." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.442003.
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Ferguson, John Douglas. "Quality, collaboration and usability in process design." Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.415374.
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Robinson, Martin H. "Intelligent information retrieval using web communities." Thesis, University of Ulster, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.424555.
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Musgrave, Stephen J. "Telematics for community portal development." Thesis, Open University, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.427485.
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Armitage, Ursula Marie. "Navigation and learning in electronic texts." Thesis, City University London, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.412608.
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Crudge, Sarah Elizabeth. "Mental models of Internet search engines : eliciting user perceptions through repertory grid technique." Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.423529.
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Ramaiah, Chennupati K. "Hypertext and the training of library and information studies students." Thesis, Loughborough University, 1993. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/26896.
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As a result of the introduction of computers into teaching, a number of computer interfaces have been developed and used for teaching students at all levels. Among them, hypertext is one of the best known and most frequently discussed. Hypertext, as a non-sequential presentation of information, is a fairly old concept, but it has only recently become available for teaching purposes in a cheap and flexible form.
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Abraham, Ann. "Information seeking from Web-based resources : sensemaking strategies and implications for interaction design." Thesis, Open University, 2013. http://oro.open.ac.uk/41292/.
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The internet has made an enormous volume of information available, and there has been substantial research into how users look for information. However, there has been much less research about how they make sense of what they find, and how sensemaking is shaped by the tasks they are trying to achieve. This research addresses that gap, with empirical studies of sensemaking during web-based information tasks. Two main studies are presented, which aimed to expose the relationship between information seeking and information comprehension and use. The first study explored the actions of experienced information processors (in this case, doctoral students) as they undertook research-related web-based tasks related to their own work. The second study observed experienced users as they undertook an unfamiliar topic comprehension task. In both studies participants were encouraged to ‘think-aloud’ as they completed web-based tasks. Audio-recording was used in Study-1 with video-recording in Study-2. In addition to the task session, background questionnaires and sample interviews were applied. A detailed, iterative inductive analysis was undertaken for each study. The analysis produced a framework that models the users’ process in terms of five categories of information interactions: seeking, evaluating for selection, evaluating for use, compilation, and planning. A range of visual representations were developed to capture the user sessions, expressing facets such as how resources were used over time and in combination, and the sequences of user behaviours. Attention was given to the use of representation throughout this process. Sensemaking goals and strategies were inferred from users’ behaviours and utterances, and were related to their activity and output. The intertwined nature of information seeking and sensemaking activity was revealed, and planning (not addressed in previous literature) was identified as a significant behaviour that drives strategy and binds the other behaviours to the task-in-hand. These findings have implications for interaction design and for tools to support sensemaking.
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Chapman, Christopher. "Embedded metadata within persistent indentifiers to enhance a corpus of digital documents." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.404161.
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Azzopardi, Leif. "Incorporating context within the language modeling approach for ad hoc information retrieval." Thesis, University of the West of Scotland, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.427712.
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Uganda has been considered one of Africa's few "success stories" over the past decade, an example of how a country can be transformed through a committed state bureaucracy. The thesis questions this view by looking at the experiences of development and change in a subparish in eastern Uganda. From this more local-level perspective, the thesis discusses the weakness of the state in the countryside, and incorporates the importance of religious and customary institutions. In place of a narrow view of politics, focused on reforms and policies coming from above, which rarely reach rural areas in a consistent or predictable way, the thesis describes political developments within a rural community. The thesis rests on two premises. First, that the state in rural Uganda has been too weak to support an effective bureaucratic presence in the countryside. Second, that politics at the local-level is an "open-ended" business, better understood through investigating a range of institutional spaces and activities, rather than a particular set of actions, or a single bureaucracy. Oledai sub-parish, which provides the empirical material for the thesis, was far removed from the idea of state-sponsored success described in the literature. V illagers had to contend with a history of violence, with recent impoverishment, and with the reality that the rural economy was unimportant in maintaining the structures of the government system. The thesis shows that the marginalisation of the countryside came at a time when central and local government structures had become increasingly reliant on funding from abroad. Aside from the analysing the weakness of the state bureaucracy, the thesis goes on to discuss broader changes in the life of the sub-parish, including the impact of a violent insurgency in the late 1980s. The thesis also looks at the role of churches and burial societies, institutions which have been largely ignored by the literature on political developments in Uganda. Religious and customary institutions, as well as the village court, provided spaces where political goals, such as settling disputes, building a career, or acquiring wealth, could be pursued.
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Zorba, Ioanna. "The management and role of library e-presence : a study into British academic library websites." Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2014. http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/311305/.
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This thesis sought to undertake a primary, holistic and contextual investigation of the management and the role of academic library Web presence as it has evolved since its beginnings in the early 1990s. Most of the data collection took place in 2008 and it focused on the practice in British universities. Previous research on this topic was limited and published studies reported only limited investigations which had explored only some elements of the issue. Furthermore Web technologies have become crucial and integral part of library’s Web presence and activity. The study reviewed, analysed and determined the range of library web site role. It examined the library web site management within its context. Relations between the roles and management approaches were examined and factors, which affected both, were investigated. A mixed methods approach was used; four data collection methods were used (descriptive survey, content analysis and desk research, interviews) to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. Data was examined and analysed structurally and “triangulation” was used. The study has provided evidence for the general understanding of the phenomenon and it has identified crucial factors and issues for further investigation; for instance the factor of authority over the library web site management and the issue of understanding of the web publishing by the library web managers. Unlike the wide and increasing potential of Web technologies, the web site for the academic libraries operated only as a simple provider of information about the library and its electronic services to library users. Moreover, an interesting finding was that when the parent institution was involved in the management of the library web site, two parallel and not so co-ordinated management procedures took place; one by the library and one by other(s) university unit(s). In addition, the development and completeness of LWS management processes undertaken by libraries was affected also by a trend for the LWS publishing as a project; rather than as a continuous library activity.
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Orengo, Viviane Moreira. "Assessing relevance using automatically translated documents for cross-language information retrieval." Thesis, Middlesex University, 2004. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/13606/.
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This thesis focuses on the Relevance Feedback (RF) process, and the scenario considered is that of a Portuguese-English Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CUR) system. CUR deals with the retrieval of documents in one natural language in response to a query expressed in another language. RF is an automatic process for query reformulation. The idea behind it is that users are unlikely to produce perfect queries, especially if given just one attempt. The process aims at improving the queryspecification, which will lead to more relevant documents being retrieved. The method consists of asking the user to analyse an initial sample of documents retrieved in response to a query and judge them for relevance. In that context, two main questions were posed. The first one relates to the user's ability in assessing the relevance of texts in a foreign language, texts hand translated into their language and texts automatically translated into their language. The second question concerns the relationship between the accuracy of the participant's judgements and the improvement achieved through the RF process. In order to answer those questions, this work performed an experiment in which Portuguese speakers were asked to judge the relevance of English documents, documents hand-translated to Portuguese, and documents automatically translated to Portuguese. The results show that machine translation is as effective as hand translation in aiding users to assess relevance. In addition, the impact of misjudged documents on the performance of RF is overall just moderate, and varies greatly for different query topics. This work advances the existing research on RF by considering a CUR scenario and carrying out user experiments, which analyse aspects of RF and CUR that remained unexplored until now. The contributions of this work also include: the investigation of CUR using a new language pair; the design and implementation of a stemming algorithm for Portuguese; and the carrying out of several experiments using Latent Semantic Indexing which contribute data points to the CUR theory.
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Al-Rawi, Momen M. "Detecting network Quality of Service on a hop-by-hop basis for on-line multimedia application connections." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2006. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/36046.
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With the highly expanding use of networked on-line multimedia applications in general and Voice Over IP applications in specific, it is vital to assess the quality of service of such applications over public or private networks to identify the problems arising in order to enhance the quality of these applications over networks. This is especially important with increasing large companies utilizing their private intranets for the use of telephone calls to save on their phone budget. The quality of service can be addressed at various levels. This work is concerned with identifying the weak links or hops in a network path of an on-line multimedia application session which contributes to the degradation of the quality of the designated application. Once identified, the degraded hop can be dealt with or potentially replaced by another. Alternatively, the routing table can be altered to bypass the degraded hops.
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Nanas, Nikolaos. "Towards Nootropia : a non-linear approach to adaptive document filtering." Thesis, Open University, 2003. http://oro.open.ac.uk/54624/.
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In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult for users to find relevant information within the accessible glut. Research in Information Filtering (IF) tackles this problem through a tailored representation of the user interests, a user profile. Traditionally, IF inherits techniques from the related and more well established domains of Information Retrieval and Text Categorisation. These include, linear profile representations that exclude term dependencies and may only effectively represent a single topic of interest, and linear learning algorithms that achieve a steady profile adaptation pace. We argue that these practices are not attuned to the dynamic nature of user interests. A user may be interested in more than one topic in parallel, and both frequent variations and occasional radical changes of interests are inevitable over time. With our experimental system "Nootropia", we achieve adaptive document filtering with a single, multi-topic user profile. A hierarchical term network that takes into account topical and lexical correlations between terms and identifies topic-subtopic relations between them, is used to represent a user's multiple topics of interest and distinguish between them. A series of non-linear document evaluation functions is then established on the hierarchical network. Experiments using a variation of TREC's routing subtask to test the ability of a single profile to represent two and three topics of interest, reveal the approach's superiority over a linear profile representation. Adaptation of this single, multi-topic profile to a variety of changes in the user interests, is achieved through a process of self-organisation that constantly readjusts the profile stucturally, in response to user feedback. We used virtual users and another variation of TREC's routing subtask to test the profile on two learning and two forgetting tasks. The results clearly indicate the profile's ability to adapt to both frequent variations and radical changes in user interests.
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Lubanski, Adam Roman. "Returns to the delivery and support of information services for academic research and learning : the importance of data and information support." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1999. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10019785/.
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Back, Jonathan. "Predicting the utility of feedback judgements using cognitive load theory." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2003. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/34088.
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Results from laboratory testing suggest that user-based relevance feedback can significantly improve retrieval performance. However outside the laboratory, feedback systems are rarely utilised when implemented. This thesis explores why users are often reluctant to provide feedback. Modelling interaction involves reconciling the need for prediction with the seemingly individual-specific effect of information. Information behaviour is guided by heuristics and not by logical analysis or deduction. Heuristics impose assumptions that are used to address a problem in a way that is compatible with an individual's knowledge schemata. This thesis argues that feedback heuristics are influenced by the cognitive load imposed on an individual.
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Maleki-Dizaji, Saeedeh. "Evolutionary learning multi-agent based information retrieval systems." Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 2003. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/6856/.
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The volume and variety of information available on the Internet has experienced exponential growth, presenting a difficulty to users wishing to obtain information that accurately matches their interests. A number of factors affect the accuracy of matching user interests and the retrieved documents. First, is the fact that users often do not present queries to information retrieval systems in the form that optimally represents the information they want. Secondly, the measure of a document's relevance is highly subjective and variable between different users. This thesis addresses this problem with an adaptive approach that relies on evolutionary user-modelling. The proposed information retrieval system learns user needs from user-provided relevance feedback. The method combines a qualitative feedback measure obtained using fuzzy inference, and quantitative feedback based on evolutionary algorithms (Genetic Algorithms) fitness measures. Furthermore, the retrieval system's design approach is based on a multi-agent design approach, in order to handle the complexities of the information retrieval system including: document indexing, relevance feedback, user modelling, filtering and ranking the retrieve documents. The major contribution of this research are the combination of genetic algorithms and fuzzy relevance feedback for modelling adaptive behaviour, which is compared against conventional relevance feedback. Novel Genetic Algorithms operators are proposed within the context of textual; the encoding and vector space model for document representation is generalised within the same context.
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Smith, Ashley D. "Who controls the past controls the future : life annotation in principle and practice." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2008. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/266554/.
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The fields of the Semantic Web and Ubiquitous Computing are both relatively new fields within the discipline of Computer Science. Yet both are growing and have begun to overlap as people demand ever-smaller computers with persistent access to the internet. The Semantic Web has the potential to become a global knowledge store duplicating the information on the Web, albeit in a machine-readable form. Such a knowledge base combined with truly ubiquitous systems could provide a great benefit for humans. But what of personal knowledge? Information is generally of more use when linked to other information. Sometimes this information must be kept private, so integrating personal knowledge with the Semantic Web is not desirable. Instead, it should be possible for a computer system to collect and store private knowledge while also being able to augment it with public knowledge from the Web, all without the need for user effort. This thesis begins with a review of both fields, indicating the points at which they overlap. It describes the need for semantic annotation and various processes through which it may be achieved. A method for annotating a human's life using a combination of personal data collected using an ubiquitous system and public data freely available on the Semantic Web is suggested and conceptually compared to human memory. Context-aware computing is described along with its potential to annotate the life of a human being and the hypothesis that today's technology is able to carry out this task is presented. The work then introduces a portable system for automatically logging contextual data and describes a study which used this system to gather life annotations on one specific individual over the course of two years. The implementation of the system and its use is documented and the data collected is presented and evaluated. Finally the thesis offers the conclusion that one type of contextual data is not enough to answer most questions and that multiple forms of data need to be merged in order to get a useful picture of a person's life. The thesis concludes with a brief look into the future of the Semantic Web and how it has the potential to assist in achieving better results in this field of study.
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Vinay, V. "The relevance of feedback for text retrieval." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2007. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1446146/.
Full textAbstract:
Relevance Feedback is a technique that helps an Information Retrieval system modify a query in response to relevance judgements provided by the user about individual results dis played after an initial retrieval. This thesis begins by proposing an evaluation framework for measuring the effectiveness of feedback algorithms. The simulation-based method in volves a brute force exploration of the outcome of every possible user action. Starting from an initial state, each available alternative is represented as a traversal along one branch of a user decision tree. The use of the framework is illustrated in two situations---searching on devices with small displays and for web search. Three well known RF algorithms, Rocchio, Robertson/Sparck-Jones (RSJ) and Bayesian, are compared for these applications. For small display devices, the algorithms are evaluated in conjunction with two strate gies for presenting search results: the top-D ranked documents and a document ranking that attempts to maximise information gain from the user's choices. Experimental results in dicate that for RSJ feedback which involves an explicit feature selection policy, the greedy top-D display is more appropriate. For the other two algorithms, the exploratory display that maximises information gain produces better results. A user study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the relevance feedback methods with real users and compare the results with the findings from the tree analysis. This comparison between the simulations and real user behaviour indicates that the Bayesian algorithm, coupled with the sampled display, is the most effective. For web-search, two possible representations for web-pages are considered---the textual content of the page and the anchor text of hyperlinks into this page. Results indicate that there is a significant variation in the upper-bound performance of the three RF algorithms and that the Bayesian algorithm approaches the best possible. The relative performance of the three algorithms differed in the two sets of experiments. All other factors being constant, this difference in effectiveness was attributed to the fact that the datasets used in the two cases were different. Also, at a more general level, a relationship was observed between the performance of the original query and benefits of subsequent relevance feedback. The remainder of the thesis looks at properties that characterise sets of documents with the particular aim of identifying measures that are predictive of future performance of statis tical algorithms on these document sets. The central hypothesis is that a set of points (corresponding to documents) are difficult if they lack structure. Three properties are identified---the clustering tendency, sensitivity to perturbation and the local intrinsic dimensionality. The clustering tendency reflects the presence or absence of natural groupings within the data. Perturbation analysis looks at the sensitivity of the similarity metric to small changes in the input. The correlation present in sets of points is measured by the local intrinsic dimensionality therefore indicating the randomness present in them. These properties are shown to be useful for two tasks, namely, measuring the complexity of text datasets and for query performance prediction.
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Tanase, Diana. "A model for information retrieval driven by conceptual spaces." Thesis, University of Westminster, 2015. https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/972v9/a-model-for-information-retrieval-driven-by-conceptual-spaces.
Full textAbstract:
A retrieval model describes the transformation of a query into a set of documents. The question is: what drives this transformation? For semantic information retrieval type of models this transformation is driven by the content and structure of the semantic models. In this case, Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) are the semantic models that encode the meaning employed for monolingual and cross-language retrieval. The focus of this research is the relationship between these meanings’ representations and their role and potential in augmenting existing retrieval models effectiveness. The proposed approach is unique in explicitly interpreting a semantic reference as a pointer to a concept in the semantic model that activates all its linked neighboring concepts. It is in fact the formalization of the information retrieval model and the integration of knowledge resources from the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud that is distinctive from other approaches. The preprocessing of the semantic model using Formal Concept Analysis enables the extraction of conceptual spaces (formal contexts)that are based on sub-graphs from the original structure of the semantic model. The types of conceptual spaces built in this case are limited by the KOSs structural relations relevant to retrieval: exact match, broader, narrower, and related. They capture the definitional and relational aspects of the concepts in the semantic model. Also, each formal context is assigned an operational role in the flow of processes of the retrieval system enabling a clear path towards the implementations of monolingual and cross-lingual systems. By following this model’s theoretical description in constructing a retrieval system, evaluation results have shown statistically significant results in both monolingual and bilingual settings when no methods for query expansion were used. The test suite was run on the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Domain Specific 2004-2006 collection with additional extensions to match the specifics of this model.
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Mansourian, Yazdan. "Information visibility on the Web and conceptions of success and failure in Web searching." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2006. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/15101/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis reports the procedure and findings of an empirical study about end users' interaction with web-based search tools. The first part is dedicated to address early research questions to discover web user's conceptions of the invisible web. The second part addresses primary research questions to explore web users' conceptualizations of the causes of their search success/failure and their awareness of and reaction to missed information while searching the web. The third part is devoted to a number of emergent research questions to reexamine the dataset in the light of a number of theoretical frameworks including Locus of Control, Self-efficacy, Attribution Theory and Bounded Rationality and Satisficing theory. The data collection was carried out in three phases based on in-depth, open-ended and semi-structured interviews with a sample of academic staff, research staff and research students from three biology-related departments at the University of Sheffield. A combination of inductive and deductive approaches was employed to address three sets of research questions. The first part of analysis which was based on Grounded Theory led to discovery of a new concept called 'information visibility' which does make a distinction between technical objective conceptions of the invisible web that commonly appear in the literature, and a cognitive subjective conception based on searchers' perceptions of search failure. Accordingly, the study introduced a 'model of information visibility on the web' which suggests a complementary definition for the invisible web. Inductive exploration of the data to address the primary research questions culminated in identification of different kinds of success (i.e. anticipated, serendipitous, and unexpected success) and failure (i.e. unexpected, unexplained and inevitable failure). The results also showed that the participants in the study were aware of the possibility of missing some relevant information in their searches and the risk of missing potentially important information is a matter of concern to them. However, regarding the context of each search they have different perceptions of the importance and the volume of missed information and accordingly they react to it differently. In view of that, two matrices including the "matrix of search impact" and the "matrix of search depth" were developed to address users' search behaviours regarding their awareness of and reaction to missed information. The matrix of search impact suggests that there are different perceptions of the risk of missing information including "inconsequential", "tolerable", "damaging" and "disastrous". The matrix of search depth illustrates different search strategies including "minimalist", "opportunistic", "nervous" and "extensive". The third part of the study indicated that Locus of Control and Attribution Theory are useful theoretical frameworks for helping us to better understand web-based information seeking. Furthermore, interpretation of the data with regards to Bounded Rationality and Satisficing theory supported the inductive findings and showed that web users' estimations of the likely volume and importance of missed information affect their decision to persist in searching. At the final stage of the study, an integrative model of information seeking behaviour on the web was developed. This six-layer model incorporates the results of both inductive and deductive stages of the study.
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Chwalinski, Pawel. "Detection of unsolicited web browsing with clustering and statistical analysis." Thesis, Middlesex University, 2014. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/14411/.
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Unsolicited web browsing denotes illegitimate accessing or processing web content. The harmful activity varies from extracting e-mail information to downloading entire website for duplication. In addition, computer criminals prevent legitimate users from gaining access to websites by implementing a denial of service attack with high-volume legitimate traffic. These offences are accomplished by preprogrammed machines that avoid rate-dependent intrusion detection systems. Therefore, it is assumed in this thesis that the only difference between a legitimate and malicious web session is in the intention rather than physical characteristics or network-layer information. As a result, the main aim of this research has been to provide a method of malicious intention detection. This has been accomplished by two-fold process. Initially, to discover most recent and popular transitions of lawful users, a clustering method has been introduced based on entropy minimisation. In principle, by following popular transitions among the web objects, the legitimate users are placed in low-entropy clusters, as opposed to the undesired hosts whose transitions are uncommon, and lead to placement in high-entropy clusters. In addition, by comparing distributions of sequences of requests generated by the actual and malicious users across the clusters, it is possible to discover whether or not a website is under attack. Secondly, a set of statistical measurements have been tested to detect the actual intention of browsing hosts. The intention classification based on Bayes factors and likelihood analysis have provided the best results. The combined approach has been validated against actual web traces (i.e. datasets), and generated promising results.
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Knoth, Petr. "Linking textual resources to support information discovery." Thesis, Open University, 2015. http://oro.open.ac.uk/42677/.
Full textAbstract:
A vast amount of information is today stored in the form of textual documents, many of which are available online. These documents come from different sources and are of different types. They include newspaper articles, books, corporate reports, encyclopedia entries and research papers. At a semantic level, these documents contain knowledge, which was created by explicitly connecting information and expressing it in the form of a natural language. However, a significant amount of knowledge is not explicitly stated in a single document, yet can be derived or discovered by researching, i.e. accessing, comparing, contrasting and analysing, information from multiple documents. Carrying out this work using traditional search interfaces is tedious due to information overload and the difficulty of formulating queries that would help us to discover information we are not aware of. In order to support this exploratory process, we need to be able to effectively navigate between related pieces of information across documents. While information can be connected using manually curated cross-document links, this approach not only does not scale, but cannot systematically assist us in the discovery of sometimes non-obvious (hidden) relationships. Consequently, there is a need for automatic approaches to link discovery. This work studies how people link content, investigates the properties of different link types, presents new methods for automatic link discovery and designs a system in which link discovery is applied on a collection of millions of documents to improve access to public knowledge.