Search

Purpose – In editorial peer review systems of journals, one does not always accept the best papers. Due to different human perceptions, the evaluation of papers by peer review (for a journal) can be different from the impact that a paper has after its publication (measured by number of citations received) in this or another journal. This system (and corresponding problems) is similar to the information retrieval process in a documentary system. Also there, one retrieves not always the most relevant documents for a certain topic. This is so because the topic is described in the command language of the documentary system and this command does not always completely cover the "real topic" that one wants to describe. This paper aims to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach – Based on this statement classical information retrieval evaluation techniques were applied to the evaluation of peer review systems. Basic in such an information retrieval evaluation are the notions of precision and recall and the precision-recall-curve. Such notions are introduced here for the evaluation of peer review systems. Findings – The analogues of precision and recall are defined and their curve constructed based on peer review data from the journal Angewandte Chemie – International Edition and on citation impact data of accepted papers by this journal or rejected but published elsewhere papers. It is concluded that, due to the imperfect peer review process (based on human evaluation), if we want to publish a high amount of qualified papers (the ones we seek), several non-qualified papers should also be accepted. Originality/value – The authors conclude that, due to the imperfect peer review process (based on human evaluation), if we want to publish a high amount of qualified papers (the ones we seek), one will also accept several non-qualified papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for academic researchers to retrieve patents and research papers is increasing, because applying for patents is now considered an important research activity. However, retrieving patents using keywords is a laborious task for researchers, because the terms used in patents for the purpose of enlarging the scope of the claims are generally more abstract than those used in research papers. Therefore, we have constructed a framework that facilitates patent retrieval for researchers, and have integrated research papers and patents by analysing the citation relationships between them. We obtained cited research papers in patents using two steps: (1) detection of sentences containing bibliographic information, and (2) extraction of bibliographic information from those sentences. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted two experiments. In the experiment involving Step 1, we prepared 42,073 sentences, among which a human subject manually identified 1,476 sentences containing citations of papers. For Step 2, we prepared 3,000 sentences, in which the titles, authors, and other bibliographic information were manually identified. We obtained a precision of 91.6%, and a recall of 86.9% in Step 1, and a precision of 86.2% and a recall of 85.1% in Step 2. Finally, we constructed an information retrieval system that provided two methods of retrieving research papers and patents. One method was retrieval by query, and another was from the citation relationships between research papers and patents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of information technologies, more and more information retrieval tools, containing a wide variety of information, can be found. Internet resources, universal and specialized search engines, virtual libraries are becoming the main information retrieval tools for students. The article introduces an exploratory (pilot) research aiming to find out the differences of information retrieval between Lithuanian and Portuguese students. Šiauliai State College offers a unique study programme Information Management, having a signed contract of a double diploma with Porto (Portugal) Polytechnic Institute Porto Accounting and Business School (ISCAP). 10 Portuguese and 10 Lithuanian students participated in the research. The online questionnaire was forwarded to the students of ISCAP Porto Accounting and Business School and to the second year students of the study programme of Information Management at Šiauliai State College. The research revealed that the respondents Lithuanian students look for scientific papers and books, whereas Portuguese students search for basic information and scientific papers. All the respondents of the survey identified Google Scholar as the most important search engine for scientific information retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Information specialists conducting searches for systematic reviews need to consider key questions around which and how many sources to search. This is particularly important for public health topics where evidence may be found in diverse sources. Objectives: The objective of this review is to give an overview of recent studies on information retrieval guidance and methods that could be applied to public health evidence and used to guide future searches. Methods: A literature search was performed in core databases and supplemented by browsing health information journals and citation searching. Results were sifted and reviewed. Results: Seventy‐two papers were found and grouped into themes covering sources and search techniques. Public health topics were poorly covered in this literature. Discussion: Many researchers follow the recommendations to search multiple databases. The review topic influences decisions about sources. Additional sources covering grey literature eliminate bias but are time‐consuming and difficult to search systematically. Public health searching is complex, often requiring searches in multidisciplinary sources and using additional methods. Conclusions: Search planning is advisable to enable decisions about which and how many sources to search. This could improve with more work on modelling search scenarios, particularly in public health topics, to examine where publications were found and guide future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Entering data about published research results should be implemented as a web application that enables authors to input their own data without the knowledge of the bibliographic standard. The aim of this research is to develop a research management system based on a bibliographic standard and to provide data exchange with other research management systems based on the Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) data model. Design/methodology/approach - Object-oriented methodology was used for information system modelling. The modelling was carried out using the computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool that supports the Unified Modelling Language 2.0 (UML 2.0). The implementation was realised using a set of open-source solutions written in Java. Findings - The result is a system for managing data about published research results. The main system features are the following: public access via the web; authors input data about their own publications by themselves; data about publications are stored in the MARC 21 format; and the user interface enables authors to input data without the knowledge of the MARC 21 format. Research limitations/implications - A method of verifying accuracy of entered data has not been considered yet. It is necessary to allow authorised persons to verify the accuracy of the data. After verifying the accuracy the authors cannot change the data. Practical implications - This software system has been verified and tested on data about published results of researchers employed at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia. This system can be used for evaluation and reporting on scientific research results, generating bibliographies of researchers, research groups and institutions etc. Originality/value - A part of the research management system for entering data about authors and published results is implemented. Data about publications are stored in a bibliographic format and authors can input data about their own publications without the knowledge of the bibliographic standard. The main feature of the system architecture is mutual independence of the component for interaction with users and the component for persisting and retrieving data from the bibliographic records database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes social cognitive learning theory to guide and explain the development of prototype educational experiences for information systems concepts. The paper applies the major framework of social cognitive learning theory, its recognition of the reciprocity and interaction among cognitive, behavioral, environmental, and physiological/affective influences. In this learning process, it is argued that people learn from a variety of experiences and from the observation of the actions of others. This paper uses social cognitive learning theory to explain the structure for an MIS educational experience, and applies a group support system (GSS) in a course module with specific learning objectives. Finally, the paper describes an MIS classroom experience (a module covering systems analysis [SA] methodology) which has been used to apply the GSS to prototype MIS problems (working scenarios with questions and organizational data). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to look at the recent growth of the Internet, and how it has greatly increased the amount of information that is accessible and the number of resources that are available to users. To exploit this growth, it must be possible for users to find the information and resources they need. Existing techniques for organizing systems have evolved from those used on centralized systems, but these techniques are inadequate for organizing information on a global scale. Design/methodology/approach - The paper describes Prospero, a distributed file system based on the Virtual System Model. Prospero provides tools to help users organize Internet resources. Findings - These tools allow users to construct customized views of available resources, while taking advantage of the structure imposed by others. Originality/value - Prospero provides a framework that can tie together various indexing services, producing the fabric on which resource discovery techniques can be applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citation analysis was used to measure the impact of GESAMP, the Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection, which since 1969 has published reports for the United Nations and seven of its agencies. Web of Science was used to search for citations to 114 publications, of which 15 are journal articles or books. Citations to grey literature can be difficult to locate and interpret, but two-thirds of the 1436 citations, in 1178 citing papers, are to grey literature items. The distribution of citations and self-citation are examined. Journal versions were cited more than corresponding reports. Core journals for GESAMP citations include seven environmental science journals and a social science journal. This paper confirms that citation searching can successfully measure the impact of organizations producing grey literature. Such publications can be very influential, diffusing widely from their source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term ''Big Data'' refers to massive volumes of data that grow at an increasing rate and encompass complex data types such as audio and video. While the applications of Big Data and analytic techniques for business purposes have received considerable attention, it is less clear how external sources of Big Data relate to the transaction processing-oriented world of accounting information systems. This paper uses the Resource-Event- Agent Enterprise Ontology (REA) (McCarthy 1982; International Standards Organization [ISO] 2007) to model the implications of external Big Data sources on business transactions. The five-phase REA-based specification of a business transaction as defined in ISO (2007) is used to formally define associations between specific Big Data elements and business transactions. Using Big Data technologies such as Apache Hadoop and MapReduce, a number of information extraction patterns are specified for extracting business transaction-related information from Big Data. We also present a number of analytics patterns to demonstrate how decision making in accounting can benefit from integrating specific external Big Data sources and conventional transactional data. The model and techniques presented in this paper can be used by organizations to formalize the associations between external Big Data elements in their environment and their accounting information artifacts, to build architectures that extract information from external Big Data sources for use in an accounting context, and to leverage the power of analytics for more effective decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic search has emerged as a possible way for addressing the challenges of traditional keyword-based retrieval systems such as the vocabulary gap between the query and document spaces. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic retrieval framework that uses semantic entity linking systems for forming a graph representation of documents and queries, where nodes represent concepts extracted from documents and edges represent semantic relatedness between those concepts. The core of our proposed work is a semantic-enabled language model that estimates the probability of generating query concepts given values assigned to document concepts. The semantic retrieval framework also provides basis for interpolating keyword-based retrieval systems with the semantic-enabled language model. We conduct comprehensive experiments over several Trec document collections and analyze the performance of different configurations of the framework across multiple retrieval measures. Our experimental results show that the proposed semantic retrieval model has a synergistic impact on the results obtained through the state-of-the-art keyword-based systems, and the consideration of semantic information can complement and enhance the performance of such retrieval models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The science of cartography went through revolutionary changes in the post-World War II period. In the near future the new types of artifacts and materials produced by the cartographers of this period will form the basis for the study of the history of modern cartography. Computer software, new computational devices, computer hardware, and complex mathematical algorithms all need to be preserved in a way that allows researchers access to the concepts and techniques that make up the cartography of today and the future. The following paper is a case study in the preservation of collections that are typically not part of the traditional materials found in map libraries. Although this paper is pragmatic in nature and focuses in particular on the software and algorithms found in the John Snyder Collection of satellite mapping materials now in the Library of Congress, it also addresses the many conceptual and theoretical problems that arise in the preservation of what the author calls ‘foundational collections’ in the history of cartography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users can actually find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address. The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that they provide a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses an axiomatic approach for the semantic integration of ontologies, an approach that extends to first order logic, a previous approach1 based on information flow. This axiomatic approach is represented in the Information Flow Framework (IFF), a metalevel framework for organizing the information that appears in digital libraries, distributed databases and ontologies. The paper argues that the semantic integration of ontologies is the two-step process of alignment and unification. Ontological alignment consists of the sharing of common terminology and semantics through a mediating ontology. Ontological unification, concentrated in a virtual ontology of community connections, is fusion of the alignment diagram of participant community ontologies--the quotient of the sum of the participant portals modulo the ontological alignment structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even as data and analytics-driven applications are becoming increasingly popular, retrieving data from shared databases poses a threat to the privacy of their users. For example, investors/patients retrieve records about stocks/diseases they are interested in from a stock/medical database. Knowledge of such interest is sensitive information that the database server would have access to, unless some mitigating measures are deployed. Private information retrieval (PIR) is a promising security primitive to protect the privacy of users' interests. PIR allows the retrieval of a data record from a database without letting the database server know which record is being retrieved. The privacy guarantees could either be information theoretic or computational. Alternatively, anonymizers, which hide the identities of data users, may be used to protect the privacy of users' interests for some situations. In this paper, we study rPIR, a new family of information-theoretic PIR schemes using ramp secret sharing. We have designed four rPIR schemes, using three ramp secret sharing approaches, achieving answer communication costs close to the cost of non-private information retrieval. Evaluation shows that, for many practical settings, rPIR schemes can achieve lower communication costs and the same level of privacy compared with traditional information-theoretic PIR schemes and anonymizers. Efficacy of the proposed schemes is demonstrated for two very different scenarios (outsourced data sharing and P2P content delivery) with realistic analysis and experiments. In many situations of these two scenarios, rPIR's advantage of low communication cost outweighs its disadvantages, which results in less expenditure and/or better quality of service compared with what may be achieved if traditional information-theoretic PIR and anonymizers are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. During the last fifty years, improved information retrieval techniques have become necessary because of the huge amount of information people have available, which continues to increase rapidly due to the use of new technologies and the Internet. Stemming is one of the processes that can improve information retrieval in terms of accuracy and performance. Aim. This paper provides a detailed assessment of the current status of the stemming process framed in an information retrieval application field by tracing its historical evolution. Method. Papers presenting the first approaches for stemming were reviewed to extract their main features, benefits and drawbacks. Additionally, papers dealing with stemmers for non-English languages or with some more recent proposals were also consulted and compiled. Finally, experimental papers defining the most well-known methods and metrics aimed at evaluating and classifying stemmers were also taken into account to expose their contributions and results. Results. Even if not all researchers agree on the benefits and drawbacks of using stemming in an information retrieval process in general terms, many of them agree on its benefits in specific contexts, such as when the language is highly inflective, when documents are short or when there is limited space for storing data. Some researchers also state that the nature of the documents can influence the performance and the accuracy of the stemmer. Conclusions. Despite many researchers having investigated this field over many years, there are still some open questions, such as how to evaluate a stemmer independently of the information retrieval process, or how much a stemmer improves an information retrieval application in terms of speed. As a summary, some guidelines are also provided to help readers to determine which is the best stemmer for their needs and the tasks they have to carry out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a brief history of the research and development of information retrieval systems starting with the creation of electromechanical searching devices, through to the early adoption of computers to search for items that are relevant to a user's query. The advances achieved by information retrieval researchers from the 1950s through to the present day are detailed next, focusing on the process of locating relevant information. The paper closes with speculation on where the future of information retrieval lies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose - This paper seeks to report on an Internet-based system for hypermedia information discovery and retrieval and wide-area distributed asynchronous collaboration designed and built at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Design/methodology/approach - The NCSA is developing Mosaic clients - user-friendly information browsers - for the three most popular desktop computing environments of the mid-1990s: the Unix-based X Window System, the Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows 3.1. This paper primarily discusses the X client, as it has the most advanced functionality of the three at this time. Findings - The system, called NCSA Mosaic, integrates cleanly into existing Internet protocols, formats, data sources, and environments, and provides powerful new capabilities for using and sharing information across the Internet. Originality/value - NCSA is making the complete Mosaic system freely available and distributable for all academic and research organizations and purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper seeks to develop a specified typology of various levels of semantic interoperability, designed to provide semantically expressive and functional means to interconnect typologically different sub-systems in an international comprehensive knowledge organization system, supporting advanced information retrieval and exploration strategies. Design/methodology/approach - Taking the analysis of rudimentary forms of a functional interoperability based on simple pattern matching as a starting-point, more refined strategies to provide semantic interoperability, which is actually reaching the conceptual and even thematic level, are being developed. The paper also examines the potential benefits and perspectives of the selective transfer of modelling strategies from the field of semantic technologies for the refinement of relational structures of inter-system and inter-concept relations as a requirement for expressive and functional indexing languages supporting advanced types of semantic interoperability. Findings - As the principles and strategies of advanced information retrieval systems largely depend on semantic information, new concepts and strategies to achieve semantic interoperability have to be developed. Research limitations/implications - The approach has been developed in the functional and structural context of an international comprehensive system integrating several heterogeneous knowledge organization systems and indexing languages by interconnecting them to a central conceptual structure operating as a spine in an overall system designed to support retrieval and exploration of bibliographic records representing complex conceptual entities. Originality/value - Research and development aimed at providing technical and structural interoperability has to be complemented by a thorough and precise reflection and definition of various degrees and types of interoperability on the semantic level as well. The approach specifies these levels and reflects the implications and their potential for advanced strategies of retrieval and exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern retrieval test collections are built through a process called pooling in which only a sample of the entire document set is judged for each topic. The idea behind pooling is to find enough relevant documents such that when unjudged documents are assumed to be nonrelevant the resulting judgment set is sufficiently complete and unbiased. Yet a constant-size pool represents an increasingly small percentage of the document set as document sets grow larger, and at some point the assumption of approximately complete judgments must become invalid. This paper shows that the judgment sets produced by traditional pooling when the pools are too small relative to the total document set size can be biased in that they favor relevant documents that contain topic title words. This phenomenon is wholly dependent on the collection size and does not depend on the number of relevant documents for a given topic. We show that the AQUAINT test collection constructed in the recent TREC 2005 workshop exhibits this biased relevance set; it is likely that the test collections based on the much larger GOV2 document set also exhibit the bias. The paper concludes with suggested modifications to traditional pooling and evaluation methodology that may allow very large reusable test collections to be built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose — The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether the often paradoxical and conceptually contradictory discipline of information retrieval OR) can be understood more clearly when it is analyzed from a dialectical perspective. Design/methodology/approach — Conceptual analysis and literature review. Findings — A dialectical understanding of meaning can assist in clarifying some aspects of the complex nature of current IR theory. Research limitations/implications — Philosophy has the potential to explore the conflicts and contradictions in IR and should not be used just as a means of synthesis and resolution. The use of the philosophy of meaning should include a broader understanding of the philosophical oppositions which lie behind the nature of meaning. Originality/value — This paper suggests a new perspective on the role of meaning in IR: the dialectical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of the study reported here was to assess the degree to which new forms of web-based information and communication resources impact on the formal toxicology literature, and the extent of any change between 2000 and 2005. Design/methodology/approach - The paper takes the form of an empirical examination of the full content of four toxicology journals for the year 2000 and for the year 2005, with analysis of the results, comparison with similar studies in other subject areas, and with a small survey of the information behaviour of practising toxicologists. Findings - Scholarly communication in toxicology has been relatively little affected by new forms of information resource (weblogs, wikis, discussion lists, etc.). Citations in journal articles are still largely to ‘traditional’ resources, though a significant increase in the proportion of web-based material being cited in the toxicology literature has occurred between 2000 and 2005, from a mean of 3 per cent to a mean of 19 per cent. Research limitations/implications - The empirical research is limited to an examination of four journals in two samples of one year each. Originality/value - This is the only recent study of the impact of new ICTs on toxicology communication. It adds to the literature on the citation of digital resources in scholarly publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to assess the present situation in the development of indigenous digital libraries in India. The study aims to evaluate different retrieval features of Indian digital libraries, especially those provide access to multilingual and multimedia documents. Design/methodology/approach - For this study, eight digital libraries originated in India, which are available in 24 × 7 timeframe and accessible worldwide through the internet, have been identified and selected. The retrieval features and other information on these digital libraries have been collected mostly from their respective websites and from other published literature, annual reports, etc. Findings - The paper finds that Indian digital libraries provide universal access to informative and culturally rich digital content related to South Asian region. The digitisation efforts in Indian institutions make these digital libraries operational. Research limitations/implications - The institutional repositories and open access archives of Indian institutions that give access to the current research literature are not included in this study, because their retrieval features are mostly similar to each other as they use either DSpace or GNU EPrints open source software. Practical implications - Indigenous digital libraries in India provide universal access to information and knowledge related to culture and heritage of people of South Asian counties. This study gives an insight on how diverse contents are integrated and disseminated to the end-users in a user-friendly manner. This study also indicates research initiatives on different aspects of multilingual contents in this region. Originality/value - No such evaluation on Indian digital libraries has been done from the perspective of information retrieval features. This study will generate new knowledge in area of indigenous digital libraries in a developing country like India. This study is also an attempt to popularise Indian indigenous digital libraries among the world community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the collaborative tagging phenomenon and explore some of the reasons for its emergence. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews the related literature and discusses some of the problems associated with, and the potential of, collaborative tagging approaches for knowledge organisation and general resource discovery. A definition of controlled vocabularies is proposed and used to assess the efficacy of collaborative tagging. An exposition of the collaborative tagging model is provided and a review of the major contributions to the tagging literature is presented. Findings – There are numerous difficulties with collaborative tagging systems (e.g. low precision, lack of collocation, etc.) that originate from the absence of properties that characterise controlled vocabularies. However, such systems can not be dismissed. Librarians and information professionals have lessons to learn from the interactive and social aspects exemplified by collaborative tagging systems, as well as their success in engaging users with information management. The future co-existence of controlled vocabularies and collaborative tagging is predicted, with each appropriate for use within distinct information contexts: formal and informal. Research limitations/implications – Librarians and information professional researchers should be playing a leading role in research aimed at assessing the efficacy of collaborative tagging in relation to information storage, organisation, and retrieval, and to influence the future development of collaborative tagging systems. Practical implications – The paper indicates clear areas where digital libraries and repositories could innovate in order to better engage users with information. Originality/value – At time of writing there were no literature reviews summarising the main contributions to the collaborative tagging research or debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not easy to obtain the right information from the Web for a particular Web user or a group of users due to the obstacle of automatically acquiring Web user profiles. The current techniques do not provide satisfactory structures for mining Web user profiles. This paper presents a novel approach for this problem. The objective of the approach is to automatically discover ontologies from data sets in order to build complete concept models for Web user information needs, It also proposes a method for capturing evolving patterns to refine discovered ontologies. In addition, the process of assessing relevance in ontology is established. This paper provides both theoretical and experimental evaluations for the approach. The experimental results show that all objectives we expect for the approach are achievable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Reports on the trial of an automated order routine for the University Library in Newcastle which began in April 1966. Design/methodology/approach - Presents the author's experiences of the manual order processing system, and the impetus for trialling an automated system. The stages of the automated system are described in detail. Findings - Time spent on processing recommendation slips was reduced by 30 percent using the automated system. Important data and printouts can be produced which should lead to a reduction in clerical time and enable accounting to be done automatically. Originality/value - The paper has historical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper presents FIRDoR, which is a recommended methodology for document retrieval using the Fuzzy Inference System, with the goal of converging the area of interest of the user with that of the documents recovered. With the increasing number of documents available today on the internet and in databases, the task of assisting users in finding relevant information becomes very complex using conventional methods due to the difficulty in retrieving and ranking results. This study performs an experiment in order to identify the needs of the user, by their areas of interest, and the fuzzy classification approach in terms of a semantic document in order to make a recommendation. For the experiment, a base of 918 papers and 8 researchers were used and the results were gratifying, with a high degree of certainty in the recommendation of papers of importance for the user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information Retrieval (IR) systems assist users in finding information from the myriad of information resources available on the Web. A traditional characteristic of IR systems is that if different users submit the same query, the system would yield the same list of results, regardless of the user. Personalised Information Retrieval (PIR) systems take a step further to better satisfy the user's specific information needs by providing search results that are not only of relevance to the query but are also of particular relevance to the user who submitted the query. PIR has thereby attracted increasing research and commercial attention as information portals aim at achieving user loyalty by improving their performance in terms of effectiveness and user satisfaction. In order to provide a personalised service, a PIR system maintains information about the users and the history of their interactions with the system. This information is then used to adapt the users' queries or the results so that information that is more relevant to the users is retrieved and presented. This survey paper features a critical review of PIR systems, with a focus on personalised search. The survey provides an insight into the stages involved in building and evaluating PIR systems, namely: information gathering, information representation, personalisation execution, and system evaluation. Moreover, the survey provides an analysis of PIR systems with respect to the scope of personalisation addressed. The survey proposes a classification of PIR systems into three scopes: individualised systems, community-based systems, and aggregate-level systems. Based on the conducted survey, the paper concludes by highlighting challenges and future research directions in the field of PIR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Because of the increasing number of electronic resources, designing efficient tools to retrieve and exploit them is a major challenge. Some improvements have been offered by semantic Web technologies and applications based on domain ontologies. In life science, for instance, the Gene Ontology is widely exploited in genomic applications and the Medical Subject Headings is the basis of biomedical publications indexation and information retrieval process proposed by PubMed. However current search engines suffer from two main drawbacks: there is limited user interaction with the list of retrieved resources and no explanation for their adequacy to the query is provided. Users may thus be confused by the selection and have no idea on how to adapt their queries so that the results match their expectations. Results: This paper describes an information retrieval system that relies on domain ontology to widen the set of relevant documents that is retrieved and that uses a graphical rendering of query results to favor user interactions. Semantic proximities between ontology concepts and aggregating models are used to assess documents adequacy with respect to a query. The selection of documents is displayed in a semantic map to provide graphical indications that make explicit to what extent they match the user's query; this man/machine interface favors a more interactive and iterative exploration of data corpus, by facilitating query concepts weighting and visual explanation. We illustrate the benefit of using this information retrieval system on two case studies one of which aiming at collecting human genes related to transcription factors involved in hemopoiesis pathway. Conclusions: The ontology based information retrieval system described in this paper (OBIRS) is freely available at: http://www.ontotoolkit.mines-ales.fr/ObirsClient/. This environment is a first step towards a user centred application in which the system enlightens relevant information to provide decision help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently direct optimization of information retrieval (IR) measures has become a new trend in learning to rank. In this paper, we propose a general framework for direct optimization of IR measures, which enjoys several theoretical advantages. The general framework, which can be used to optimize most IR measures, addresses the task by approximating the IR measures and optimizing the approximated surrogate functions. Theoretical analysis shows that a high approximation accuracy can be achieved by the framework. We take average precision (AP) and normalized discounted cumulated gains (NDCG) as examples to demonstrate how to realize the proposed framework. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the algorithms deduced from our framework are very effective when compared to existing methods. The empirical results also agree well with the theoretical results obtained in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a high performance storage system for RDF documents is introduced. The system employs optimised index structures for RDF data and efficient RDF query evaluation. The index scheme consists of three types of indices. Triple index manages basic RDF triples by dividing original RDF graph into several sub-graphs. Path index manages frequent RDF path patterns for long path query performance enhancement. Context index is optional for context oriented RDF data and temporal RDF data. In this paper, we describe the organisation of index structures, which shows the process of evaluating queries based on the index structures, and provide a performance comparison with exist RDF database through several benchmark experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective distance functions in high-dimensional data space, such as those used for clustering, nearest neighbor search, and indexing, are very important in solutions for many data mining problems. Recent research has shown that if the Pearson variation of the distance distribution converges to zero with increasing dimensionality, the distance function will become unstable (or meaningless) in high-dimensional space, even with the commonly used Lp, metric in the euclidean space. However, the necessary condition for unstability of a distance function, which is required for function design, remains unknown. In this paper, we shall prove that the following conditions are equivalent to unstability: 1) the Pearson variation of the distance distribution for any given query converges to 0 with increasing dimensionality, 2) the ratio of the distances of any two points to th query converges in probability to 1 with increasing dimensionality, and 3) the second moment coefficient converges to 1 with increasing dimensionality. With these results, we have the necessary and the sufficient conditions for unstability, whose negatives imply the sufficient and necessary conditions for stability. Based on these theoretical results, we employ some effective and valid indices for testing the stability of a distance function. In addition, this theoretical analysis inspires us that unstable phenomena are rooted in variation of the distance distribution. To demonstrate the theoretical results, we design a meaningful distance function, called the Shrinkage-Divergence Proximity (SDP), based on a given distance function. It is shown empirically that the SDP significantly outperforms other measures in terms of stability in high-dimensional data space, and is thus more suitable for distance-based applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laws set requirements that force organizations to assess the security and privacy of their IT systems and impose them to implement minimal precautionary security measures. Several IT solutions (e.g., Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Access Control Infrastructure, etc.) have been proposed to address security and privacy issues. However, understanding why, and when such solutions have to be adopted is often unanswered because the answer comes only from a broader perspective, accounting for legal and organizational issues. Security engineers and legal experts should analyze the business goals of a company and its organizational structure and derive from there the points where security and privacy problems may arise and which solutions best fit such (legal) problems. The paper investigates the methodological support for capturing security and privacy requirements of a concrete health care provider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose our approach of graphical querying based on the spatio-temporal metadata. This proposition improves information retrieve and presents documents suitable to the user's needs. We propose the extension of the XQuery language by new operators integrated in its initial grammar, called XQuery++. We present more examples of XQuery++ queries using spatio-temporal operators. Our extension is validated in a prototype called GXQuery+ +, designed by UML. In the end, an evaluation of our metadata use in queries is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for mining complete frequent itemsets. This algorithm is referred to as the TM (Transaction Mapping) algorithm from hereon. In this algorithm, transaction ids of each itemset are mapped and compressed to continuous transaction intervals in a different space and the counting of itemsets is performed by intersecting these interval lists in a depth-first order along the lexicographic tree. When the compression coefficient becomes smaller than the average number of comparisons for intervals intersection at a certain level, the algorithm switches to transaction id intersection. We have evaluated the algorithm against two popular frequent itemset mining algorithms, FP-growth and dEclat, using a variety of data sets with short and long frequent patterns. Experimental data show that the TM algorithm outperforms these two algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the representation of national and international agricultural economic information in the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). While LCC presents geographically-specific information within a larger context of agriculture as a field of study, NAICS presents agriculture as part of the overall depiction of economic activity in and between countries. To facilitate statistical aggregation and cross-comparison, NAICS has normalized economic activity by presenting it as a series of abstract activities that can be uniformly measured across different countries and regions. This rigorous standardization of economic data, while effective for statistical analysis, threatens to diminish the specific national, cultural and social contexts in which such data must be interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares two influential attempts at presenting a comprehensive framework of knowledge management. For each perspective the author examines theoretical foundations, highlights conceptual elements and themes, and discusses the role of information and information management. Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi analyze the dynamics of knowledge creation, particularly the importance of tacit knowledge and its conversion into explicit knowledge. Thomas H. Davenport and Lawrence Prusak focus on the design of organizational processes that enable knowledge generation, codification, and transfer. It is suggested that, to a degree, the concepts and practices of each model reflect the national cultures of their authors-Japan and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet search engines allow access to online information from all over the world. However, there is currently a general assumption that users are fluent in the languages of all documents that they might search for. This has for historical reasons usually been a choice between English and the locally supported language. Given the rapidly growing size of the Internet, it is likely that future users will need to access information in languages in which they are not fluent or have no knowledge of at all. This paper shows how information retrieval and machine translation can be combined in a cross-language information access framework to help overcome the language barrier. We present encouraging preliminary experimental results using English queries to retrieve documents from the standard Japanese language BMIR-J2 retrieval test collection. We outline the scope and purpose of cross-language information access and provide an example application to suggest that technology already exists to provide effective and potentially useful applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss a new kind of information system that helps people be ready for information work and locate documents. This system differs from a traditional information retrieval system by relying extensively on descriptions of both how a document is used and the purposes it is used for. These descriptions are gathered as the document is electronically used and manipulated (e.g., by a word processor or e-mail system). A formal language represents this information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]