Semantic Retrieval System for Nigerian Onion Domain Ontology

With the recent Nigerian Government’s effort to diversify its economy, several efforts have been put in place by the Government to revitalize Nigerian Agricultural sector as part of the diversification effort. Part of effort put in place to revitalize Agriculture it to encourage local and international investment into Agriculture in the country.  However, due to lack of enough information on the agricultural activities in the country remains a challenge in the revitalization of the country’s agriculture. Although Google and other search engines provide access to data on the Web, these search engines are base on traditional keyword search and therefore lack semantics which affect the effectiveness of the retrieved results.   This paper presents semantic document retrieval of Nigerian Onion domain. The work involves developing Ontology for Nigerian Onion domain. Protégées Ontology editor is then used to store the Ontology and OWL-DL query is used to retrieve the documents semantically.  To measure the effectiveness of the proposed work, precision and recall evaluation metrics were used. Keywords: Ontology, Onion, Information Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval, Domai

Proposta de um modelo de produção de e-books interativos

O avanço das Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação faz com que os mundos real e digital se aproximem cada vez mais. Artefatos antes disponíveis fisicamente, agora são oferecidos também em formato digital. Livros, cuja produção tradicional demanda quantidades consideráveis de recursos naturais, podem agora ser encontrados na forma digital, com recursos multimídia e formas inovadoras de organização do conhecimento, particularmente interessantes no contexto educacional. Porém, poucas iniciativas servem-se adequadamente desses recursos. Este trabalho investiga o uso de ontologias para a organização de conteúdos de livros digitais. As soluções propostas foram analisadas segundo normas de qualidade e proposto um modelo para a produção de e-books, com novos recursos para suporte à leitura, como roteiro de estudo, mapa de conhecimento, recomendação de leitura internas ou externas, criação automática de perguntas e glossário

Computer-based tools for supporting forest management. The experience and the expertise world-wide

Report of Cost Action FP 0804 Forest Management Decision Support Systems (FORSYS)Computer-based tools for supporting forest management. The experience and the expertise world-wide answers a call from both the research and the professional communities for a synthesis of current knowledge about the use of computerized tools in forest management planning. According to the aims of the Forest Management Decision Support Systems (FORSYS) (http://fp0804.emu.ee/) this synthesis is a critical success factor to develop a comprehensive quality reference for forest management decision support systems. The emphasis of the book is on identifying and assessing the support provided by computerized tools to enhance forest management planning in real-world contexts. The book thus identifies the management planning problems that prevail world-wide to discuss the architecture and the components of the tools used to address them. Of importance is the report of architecture approaches, models and methods, knowledge management and participatory planning techniques used to address specific management planning problems. We think that this synthesis may provide effective support to research and outreach activities that focus on the development of forest management decision support systems. It may contribute further to support forest managers when defining the requirements for a tool that best meets their needs. The first chapter of the book provides an introduction to the use of decision support systems in the forest sector and lays out the FORSYS framework for reporting the experience and expertise acquired in each country. Emphasis is on the FORSYS ontology to facilitate the sharing of experiences needed to characterize and evaluate the use of computerized tools when addressing forest management planning problems. The twenty six country reports share a structure designed to underline a problem-centric focus. Specifically, they all start with the identification of the management planning problems that are prevalent in the country and they move on to the characterization and assessment of the computerized tools used to address them. The reports were led by researchers with background and expertise in areas that range from ecological modeling to forest modeling, management planning and information and communication technology development. They benefited from the input provided by forest practitioners and by organizations that are responsible for developing and implementing forest management plans. A conclusions chapter highlights the success of bringing together such a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. This book benefited from voluntary contributions by 94 authors and from the involvement of several forest stakeholders from twenty six countries in Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia over a three-year period. We, the chair of FORSYS and the editorial committee of the publication, acknowledge and thank for the valuable contributions from all authors, editors, stakeholders and FORSYS actors involved in this project

Ontological Approach for Semantic Modelling of Malay Translated Qur’an

This thesis contributes to the areas of ontology development and analysis, natural language processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), and Language Resource and Corpus Development. Research in Natural Language Processing and semantic search for English has shown successful results for more than a decade. However, it is difficult to adapt those techniques to the Malay language, because its complex morphology and orthographic forms are very different from English. Moreover, limited resources and tools for computational linguistic analysis are available for Malay. In this thesis, we address those issues and challenges by proposing MyQOS, the Malay Qur’an Ontology System, a prototype ontology-based IR with semantics for representing and accessing a Malay translation of the Qur’an. This supports the development of a semantic search engine and a question answering system and provides a framework for storing and accessing a Malay language corpus and providing computational linguistics resources. The primary use of MyQOS in the current research is for creating and improving the quality and accuracy of the query mechanism to retrieve information embedded in the Malay text of the Qur’an translation. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we describe a new architecture of morphological analysis for MyQOS and query algorithms based on MyQOS. Data analysis consisted of two measures; precision and recall, where data was obtained from MyQOS Corpus conducted in three search engines. The precision and recall for semantic search are 0.8409 (84%) and 0.8043(80%), double the results of the question-answer search which are 0.4971(50%) for precision and 0.6027 (60%) for recall. The semantic search gives high precision and high recall comparing the other two methods. This indicates that semantic search returns more relevant results than irrelevant ones. To conclude, this research is among research in the retrieval of the Qur’an texts in the Malay language that managed to outline state-of-the-art information retrieval system models. Thus, the use of MyQOS will help Malay readers to understand the Qur’an in better ways. Furthermore, the creation of a Malay language corpus and computational linguistics resources will benefit other researchers, especially in religious texts, morphological analysis, and semantic modelling

Industrial Clustering as a tool to enhance competitiveness of the economy of the KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.The South African government has in the past 20 years developed various industrial policies that were geared towards industrialisation and making meaningful contributions towards the creation of jobs, dealing with the issues of inequality and poverty. Some provinces including the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) then followed suit in tailoring the national policies and strategies to ensemble their respective provincial imperatives. Subsequently, the Industrial Clustering concept was employed as a special purpose vehicle in order to enhance competitiveness of the various priority sectors. The study interrogated the challenges that were experienced by the KZN Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs supported industrial clusters. It was that discovered that some industrial clusters collapsed and failed to sustain due to governance, inconsistent funding, leadership, lack of co-ordination and government proactive or induced approach in initiating clusters. The study further analysed the regional and international competitiveness of industries, knowledge-based theory of spatial clustering of industries, the dynamic nature of localization, regionally concentrated specialized firms linked vertically by value chains gain from complementary competencies and vertical and horizontal integration of firms showing a critical importance of similar or substitutive competencies, leading to cognitive proximities, innovation and enabling mutual learning processes. In a bid find an everlasting solution, an industrial clustering framework was developed in order to ensure that industrial clusters are guided and supported in terms of the provision of the policy imperatives and financial resources. Further, the five (5) supported industrial clusters (Maritime Cluster, Wood and Wood Product Cluster, Music Cluster, Textile and Clothing Cluster and Fashion Council) by KwaZulu-Natal government unanimously agreed that government should play a facilitation role in developing policies and strategies that are destined to promote industrialization and organisational competitiveness of the industrial clusters. Lastly, the study re-affirmed the relevance of Porter’s Diamond Model as there are unprecedented benefits that are accrued by individual members who join the industrial clusters