Hermes: an Ontology-Based News Personalization Portal

Nowadays, news feeds provide Web users with access to an unlimited amount of news items, however only a subset of them is relevant. Therefore, users should be able to select the most relevant concepts, about which they want to retrieve news. Although keyword search engines provide users with the ability to filter news items, they lack the power of understanding the domain where the news items reside. The aim of this paper is to propose a solution that provides users with the ability to ask for news items related to specific concepts they are interested in. This is accomplished by creating an ontology, developing a classifying system that populates the ontology by making use of a knowledge base, and providing an innovative graph representation of the ontology to retrieve relevant news items. A characteristic feature of our approach is the consideration of both concepts and concept relationships for the retrieval of user-relevant items.semantic web; news classification; ontologies; OWL; SPARQL; decision support

A classification-based approach to economic event detection in Dutch news text

Breaking news on economic events such as stock splits or mergers and acquisitions has been shown to have a substantial impact on the financial markets. As it is important to be able to automatically identify events in news items accurately and in a timely manner, we present in this paper proof-of-concept experiments for a supervised machine learning approach to economic event detection in newswire text. For this purpose, we created a corpus of Dutch financial news articles in which 10 types of company-specific economic events were annotated. We trained classifiers using various lexical, syntactic and semantic features. We obtain good results based on a basic set of shallow features, thus showing that this method is a viable approach for economic event detection in news text

First come, first served: an analysis of pioneer and follower firms' market and nonmarket actions in the European mobile telephone industry

This study examines the relationship between erosion of the first-mover's market share and the differences in competitive behaviour of pioneer firms and followers. Particularly, we pay particular attention to market actions related to innovation, pricing and promotion, and to non-market actions related to judicial issues. The empirical study has been carried out with companies that are present in a dynamic context, such as the European mobile telephone industry. Our results show that when followers take more non-market actions than pioneers the negative effect on the firstentrant's advantage is more significant. On the contrary, we have not found a significant impact of innovating and pricing actions

From supply chains to demand networks. Agents in retailing: the electrical bazaar

A paradigm shift is taking place in logistics. The focus is changing from operational effectiveness to adaptation. Supply Chains will develop into networks that will adapt to consumer demand in almost real time. Time to market, capacity of adaptation and enrichment of customer experience seem to be the key elements of this new paradigm. In this environment emerging technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency ID), Intelligent Products and the Internet, are triggering a reconsideration of methods, procedures and goals. We present a Multiagent System framework specialized in retail that addresses these changes with the use of rational agents and takes advantages of the new market opportunities. Like in an old bazaar, agents able to learn, cooperate, take advantage of gossip and distinguish between collaborators and competitors, have the ability to adapt, learn and react to a changing environment better than any other structure. Keywords: Supply Chains, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Multiagent System.Postprint (published version

The single currency and European citizenship

We could expect that the introduction of the single currency had been accompanied by a significant share of studies and researches about the implications and impacts of such a watershed event on European citizenship. On the contrary, we soon discover to be facing a paradox, which could be phrased as follows: while the purpose of building European citizenship is the very rationale for the project of the single currency, the Scholars – but also the policy community – have mostly underestimated if not neglected this relation, both in terms of public policy making and discourse and of interpretation and forecasting. As a consequence of all of that, relevant features of the single currency happened to remain hidden, poorly considered and almost not thematized. In order to fill this gap, the first part of this article will present the main findings emerged from a documentary research conducted by FONDACA between 2010 and 2011, aimed at mapping the existing academic and policy thematizations about the hidden dimensions of the euro. The second part will be devoted to define “the other side of the coin” as an empirical phenomenon

Assessing the UK policies for broadband adoption

Broadband technology has been introduced to the business community and the public as a rapid way of exploiting the Internet. The benefits of its use (fast reliable connections, and always on) have been widely realised and broadband diffusion is one of the items at the top of the agenda for technology related polices of governments worldwide. In this paper an examination of the impact of the UK government’s polices upon broadband adoption is undertaken. Based on institutional theory a consideration of the manipulation of supply push and demand pull forces in the diffusion of broadband is offered. Using primary and secondary data sources, an analysis of the specific institutional actions related to IT diffusion as pursued by the UK government in the case of broadband is provided. Bringing the time dimension into consideration it is revealed that the UK government has shifted its attention from supply push-only strategies to more interventional ones where the demand pull forces are also mobilised. It is believed that this research will assist in the extraction of the “success factors” in government intervention that support the diffusion of technology with a view to render favourable results if applied to other national settings