Creating sparks: comparing search results using discriminatory search term word co-occurrence to facilitate serendipity in the enterprise.

Categories or tags that appear in faceted search interfaces which are representative of an information item, rarely convey unexpected or non-obvious associated concepts buried within search results. No prior research has been identified which assesses the usefulness of discriminative search term word co-occurrence to generate facets to act as catalysts to facilitate insightful and serendipitous encounters during exploratory search. In this study, 53 scientists from two organisations interacted with semi-interactive stimuli, 74% expressing a large/moderate desire to use such techniques within their workplace. Preferences were shown for certain algorithms and colour coding. Insightful and serendipitous encounters were identified. These techniques appear to offer a significant improvement over existing approaches used within the study organisations, providing further evidence that insightful and serendipitous encounters can be facilitated in the search user interface. This research has implications for organisational learning, knowledge discovery and exploratory search interface design

An ontology matching approach for semantic modeling: A case study in smart cities

This paper investigates the semantic modeling of smart cities and proposes two ontology matching frameworks, called Clustering for Ontology Matching-based Instances (COMI) and Pattern mining for Ontology Matching-based Instances (POMI). The goal is to discover the relevant knowledge by investigating the correlations among smart city data based on clustering and pattern mining approaches. The COMI method first groups the highly correlated ontologies of smart-city data into similar clusters using the generic k-means algorithm. The key idea of this method is that it clusters the instances of each ontology and then matches two ontologies by matching their clusters and the corresponding instances within the clusters. The POMI method studies the correlations among the data properties and selects the most relevant properties for the ontology matching process. To demonstrate the usefulness and accuracy of the COMI and POMI frameworks, several experiments on the DBpedia, Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, and NOAA ontology databases were conducted. The results show that COMI and POMI outperform the state-of-the-art ontology matching models regarding computational cost without losing the quality during the matching process. Furthermore, these results confirm the ability of COMI and POMI to deal with heterogeneous large-scale data in smart-city environments.publishedVersio

Applying Wikipedia to Interactive Information Retrieval

There are many opportunities to improve the interactivity of information retrieval systems beyond the ubiquitous search box. One idea is to use knowledge bases—e.g. controlled vocabularies, classification schemes, thesauri and ontologies—to organize, describe and navigate the information space. These resources are popular in libraries and specialist collections, but have proven too expensive and narrow to be applied to everyday webscale search. Wikipedia has the potential to bring structured knowledge into more widespread use. This online, collaboratively generated encyclopaedia is one of the largest and most consulted reference works in existence. It is broader, deeper and more agile than the knowledge bases put forward to assist retrieval in the past. Rendering this resource machine-readable is a challenging task that has captured the interest of many researchers. Many see it as a key step required to break the knowledge acquisition bottleneck that crippled previous efforts. This thesis claims that the roadblock can be sidestepped: Wikipedia can be applied effectively to open-domain information retrieval with minimal natural language processing or information extraction. The key is to focus on gathering and applying human-readable rather than machine-readable knowledge. To demonstrate this claim, the thesis tackles three separate problems: extracting knowledge from Wikipedia; connecting it to textual documents; and applying it to the retrieval process. First, we demonstrate that a large thesaurus-like structure can be obtained directly from Wikipedia, and that accurate measures of semantic relatedness can be efficiently mined from it. Second, we show that Wikipedia provides the necessary features and training data for existing data mining techniques to accurately detect and disambiguate topics when they are mentioned in plain text. Third, we provide two systems and user studies that demonstrate the utility of the Wikipedia-derived knowledge base for interactive information retrieval