Meeting of the MINDS: an information retrieval research agenda

Since its inception in the late 1950s, the field of Information Retrieval (IR) has developed tools that help people find, organize, and analyze information. The key early influences on the field are well-known. Among them are H. P. Luhn's pioneering work, the development of the vector space retrieval model by Salton and his students, Cleverdon's development of the Cranfield experimental methodology, Spärck Jones' development of idf, and a series of probabilistic retrieval models by Robertson and Croft. Until the development of the WorldWideWeb (Web), IR was of greatest interest to professional information analysts such as librarians, intelligence analysts, the legal community, and the pharmaceutical industry

The step project:societal and political engagement of young people in environmental issues

Decisions on environmental topics taken today are going to have long-term consequences that will affect future generations. Young people will have to live with the consequences of these decisions and undertake special responsibilities. Moreover, as tomorrow’s decision makers, they themselves should learn how to negotiate and debate issues before final decisions are made. Therefore, any participation they can have in environmental decision making processes will prove essential in developing a sustainable future for the community.However, recent data indicate that the young distance themselves from community affairs, mainly because the procedures involved are ‘wooden’, politicians’ discourse alienates the young and the whole experience is too formalized to them. Authorities are aware of this fact and try to establish communication channels to ensure transparency and use a language that speaks to new generations of citizens. This is where STEP project comes in.STEP (www.step4youth.eu) is a digital Platform (web/mobile) enabling youth Societal and Political e-Participation in decision-making procedures concerning environmental issues. STEP is enhanced with web/social media mining, gamification, machine translation, and visualisation features.Six pilots in real contexts are being organised for the deployment of the STEP solution in 4 European Countries: Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. Pilots are implemented with the direct participation of one regional authority, four municipalities, and one association of municipalities, and include decision-making procedures on significant environmental questions.</p

Business Ontology for Evaluating Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper presents a software solution that is developed to automatically classify companies by taking into account their level of social responsibility. The application is based on ontologies and on intelligent agents. In order to obtain the data needed to evaluate companies, we developed a web crawling module that analyzes the company’s website and the documents that are available online such as social responsibility report, mission statement, employment structure, etc. Based on a predefined CSR ontology, the web crawling module extracts the terms that are linked to corporate social responsibility. By taking into account the extracted qualitative data, an intelligent agent, previously trained on a set of companies, computes the qualitative values, which are then included in the classification model based on neural networks. The proposed ontology takes into consideration the guidelines proposed by the “ISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibility”. Having this model, and being aware of the positive relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and financial performance, an overall perspective on each company’s activity can be configured, this being useful not only to the company’s creditors, auditors, stockholders, but also to its consumers.corporate social responsibility, ISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibility, ontology, web crawling, intelligent agent, corporate performance, POS tagging, opinion mining, sentiment analysis

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented