Holistic Information Retrieval Through Textual Data Mining

Information retrieval can be likened to a mining process. Searchers drill through a document space using keywords to extract document subsets. These subsets must be reviewed to extract the topically relevant documents from the irrelevant. Searchers interactively learn from the relevance of the document subsets and re- submit more search arguments to perhaps narrow the search to obtain more relevant documents or broaden the search to improve the likelihood of recalling the highest percentage of relevant documents from the document space. Searchers may be aided in the search by using a document organization scheme used by human categorizers to organize the document space. Such schemes, such as the Library of Congress Classification System, tend to be rigid and dated. Documents are greatly increasing and number and organizational schemes such as the LCCS are not adapting well to the varying content of books and documents being added to the document space. What is needed is an automatic mapping tool that 1) takes the document space as it is, 2) creates a conceptual map of the space, and 3) clusters like documents and places them together on the map. This research (in progress) is an attempt to determine the value of the Kohonen Self-Organizing Map (SOM) (Kohonen, 1995) for use as an interactive textual data mining tool for categorization of large sets of documents. The SOM algorithm analyzed 339 Management Information Systems Quarterly abstracts from 1985 to 1997. The first analysis resulted in a map of two major regions -- Information and Systems. This demonstrated that the SOM was working correctly but produced a potentially uninteresting map. What may be more interesting is the next level of conceptual detail, i.e., the major conceptual areas of the MISQ document space below this high level of abstraction. To obtain this map, management, information, and systems was added to a stop-word list and the Kohonen algorithm was reapplied to obtain a mapping of the MISQ literature at this second level of detail below Management Information Systems. At both levels of abstraction, the 339 abstracts were partitioned among the conceptual regions. This suggests the possibility for an interactive tool that aids searchers in exploring large document spaces by using a divide and conquer approach of information retrieval whereby the tool clusters similar documents into topical regions of the map for exploratory browsing

Research Enterprise Office Search Portal

All the employees in University Technology Petronas need to access information instantaneously in order to enhance their functionality and efficacy. Is it easy to collaborate and gather the right information at the right time? Is all the research within a company documented? Is it easily available to all employees? And what happens when an employee leaves the company? This project is an analysis of current practices and outcomes of the search portal and the nature of it as they are evolving in most of the organizations. The findings suggest that interest in search engines across a variety of industries is very high, the technological foundations are varied, and the major concerns revolve around achieving the correct amount and type of accurate research and garnering support for contributing to the search portal. Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are drawn from the study findings. This project focused on the search function. The research is on how to make this search portal useful to the University Technology Petronas (UTP) community that is the UTP staff and lecturers. These search portal solutions are ideal for operations and maintenance manuals that once were reserved for 3-inch thick binders sitting on the shelves of many treatment plants. Moving the manual standard procedures, troubleshooting, theory, alarms, and equipment descriptions to an electronic, web-based solution offers many benefits. For one, the information can be updated and kept current much more effectively because it can be changed in one place and instantly updated at all access points. By developing this search portal, the staff and lecturers will be able to get information fast and efficiently

Designing Systems that Support the Blogosphere for Deliberative Discourse

Web 2.0 has great potential to serve as a public sphere (Habermas, 1974; Habermas, 1989) – a distributed arena of voices where all who want to do so can participate. A well-functioning public sphere is important for pluralistic decision-making at many levels, ranging from small organizations to society at large. In this paper, we analyze the capability of the blogosphere in its current form to support such a role. This analysis leads to the identification of the principal issues that prevent the blogosphere from realizing its full potential as a public sphere. Most significantly, we propose that the sheer volume of content overwhelms blog readers, forcing them to restrict themselves to only a small subset of valuable content. This ultimately reduces their level of informedness. Based on past research on managing discourse, we propose four design artifacts that would alleviate these issues: a communal repository, textual clustering, visual cues, and a participation facility for blog users. We present a prototype system, called FeedWiz, which implements several of these design artifacts. Based on this initial design, we formulate a research agenda for the creation of new tools that effectively harness the potential of the growing body of user-generated content in the blogosphere and beyond

Visualization of Career-Related Computer-Mediated Communication for Increased Knowledge Management

Retention and retrieval of organizational memory has been the concentration of many conceptualized models of an organizational memory information system (OMIS). This thesis presents an extended view for system development of an OMIS from a knowledge management perspective. The United States Air Force maintains various career-related mailing lists (listservs) for information technology (IT) specialists sponsored by the Air Force Communications Agency (AFCA). AFCA has realized the importance of monitoring the communication for patterns in content and behavior. This thesis details an experimental study, which includes a repository of computer-mediated communication (CMC) of IT specialists, analyzed by software created for this study, the OrgDiscovery system. This system is designed to visualize the content and behavior patterns of computer-mediated communication. The purpose of this study is to show that visualization of mailing list communication provides a more usable method to make conclusions about the participants of mailing lists versus the text-based Microsoft Outlook. M.S. Outlook is the mail program currently being used by management to store and review mailing list emails

Information Visualization for Collaborative Computing

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of ArizonaA prototype tool classifies output from an electronic meeting system into a manageable list of concepts, topics, or issues that a group can further evaluate. In an experiment with output from GroupSystems electronic meeting system, the tool's recall ability was comparable to that of a human facilitator, but took roughly a sixth of the time