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

The interplay between cognitive, conative, and affective constructs along the entrepreneurial learning process

Purpose: Although the role of reflections in entrepreneurship education is undeniable, the research has focused mainly on their advantages and consequences for learning process, whereas their dynamics and interrelations with other mental processes remain unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to better understand how personality and intelligence constructs: cognition, conation, and affection evolve and change along the learning process during entrepreneurship education. Design/methodology/approach: To better understand reflective processes in entrepreneurial learning this paper adopts the tripartite constructs of personality and intelligence. By employing longitudinal explorative research approach and self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm, the authors follow students’ reflections during their two-year learning processes. First, the authors try to identify how the interplay between the cognitive, conative, and affective aspects emerges in students’ reflections. Then, the authors investigate how this interplay evolves during the individual learning process and finally, by looking for similarities in these learning pathways, the authors aim to identify patterns of students’ reflective learning process. Findings: All constructs are present during the learning process and all are prone to change. The individual constructs alone shed no light on the interplay between different constructs, but rather that the interplay between sub-constructs should be taken into consideration as well. This seems to be particularly true for cognition, as procedural and declarative knowledge have very different profiles. Procedural knowledge emerges together with emotions, motivation, and volition, whereas the profile of declarative knowledge is individual. The unique profile of declarative knowledge in students’ reflections is an important finding as declarative knowledge is regarded as the center of current pedagogic practices. Research limitations/implications The study broadens the understanding of reflective practices in the entrepreneurial learning process and the interplay between affective, cognitive, and conative sub-constructs and reflective practices in entrepreneurship education. The findings clearly indicate the need for further research on the interplay between sub-constructs and students’ reflection profiles. The authors see the study as an attempt to apply an exploratory statistical method for the problem in question. Practical implications: The results are able to advise pedagogy. Practical implications concern the need to develop reflective practises in entrepreneurial learning interventions to enhance all three meta-competencies, even though there are so far no irrefutable findings to indicate that some types of reflection may be better than others. Originality/value: The results of the analysis indicate that it is possible to study the complex and dynamic interplay between sub-constructs of cognitive, conative and affective constructs. Moreover, the research succeeded in identifying both individual variations and general reflection patterns and changes in these during the learning process. This was possible by adopting a longitudinal explorative research approach with SOM analyses.Peer reviewe

Is Optical Optimal? Visualizing Document Sets to Facilitate Efficient Selection of Relevant Items

The visual representation of a cluster of similar text documents is typically accomplished with interactive information visualizations, yet some benefit can be derived even from static diagrams of the document collections. This study examines the comparative efficacy of text and diagram presentation formats for representing such collections, and attempts to determine the degree to which the format of an interface can affect users' ability to select relevant information being provided there. The hypothesis under examination holds that adults locate relevant documents more efficiently from a node-link diagram of the document set than from a textual list with the commonly used title-and- snippet format. Empirical data from a 40-person user study does not provide statistically significant support for the hypothesis; literature on similar studies helps to contextualize and explain this outcome, and directions for future study are suggested

Documentation : a reflective practice approach

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, June 2005.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-112).The Center for Reflective Community Practice in MIT's Department of Urban studies is involved in projects helping community organizers working on social change. In order to foster reflection, they are currently utilizing what they refer to as "Critical Moments Reflection". This method entails the identification and naming of key shifts or turning points (critical moments) in the process of the community organizers' work. To drive learning through reflection, they use stories relevant to the turning points, they then analyze those moments using a pre-specified genre of poignant questions. I have created an application, the CMReflector, that aids in the process of Critical Moments Reflection. It will facilitate the process of documentation by utilizing some of the rich computational tools that we now have access to. Since the learning that people acquire through their work stays largely under the surface, there is need to systematically examine the lessons learned and articulate the knowledge and questions that have come out of such work. The application provides an organizational structure and taxonomy around which to compile tacit knowledge and its representation, allowing for exploration of such knowledge in a richer fashion. In order to leverage the use of archived materials, tools such as TalkTV (an application that re-sequeces television content) have been used to augment my application allowing for a "low floor" entry to multiple media editing by the users. It is envisaged that these tools aid in bringing forth the intrinsic "ifs" and "thens," as well as generating the potential for serendipitous learning experiences. All this is very useful in bringing some form of rigor into the practice of reflective inquiry.by Luke Odhiambo Ouko.S.M

Generating User-centric Dynamic and Adaptable Knowledge Models for World Wide Web

GENERATING USER-CENTRIC DYNAMIC AND ADAPTABLE KNOWLEDGE MODELS FOR WORLD WIDE WEB By LEI LI JUNE, 2007 Committee Chair: Dr. Vijay Vaishnavi Major Department: Computer Information Systems In the current Internet age, more and more people, organizations, and businesses access the web to share and search for information. A web-based resource is often organized and presented based on its knowledge models (categorization structures). The static and inflexible knowledge models of web-based resources have become a major challenge for web users to successfully use and understand the information on the web. In this dissertation, I propose a research approach to generate user-centric dynamic and adaptable knowledge models for web-based resources. The user-centric feature means that a knowledge model is created based on a web user specified perspective for a web resource and that the user can provide feedback on the model building process. The dynamic feature means the knowledge models are built on the fly. The adaptable feature means the web user can have control of the user adaptation process by specifying his or her perspective for the web resource of interest. In this study, I apply a design science paradigm and follow the General Design Cycle (Vaishnavi and Kuechler 2004) during the course of research. A research prototype, Semantic Facilitator TM SM V2.0, has been implemented based on the proposed approach. A simulation-based experimentation is used to evaluate the research prototype. The experimental results show that the proposed research approach can effectively and efficiently create knowledge models on the fly based on a web user preferred perspective for the web resource. I found that incorporating user feedback into the modeling building process can greatly improve the quality of the knowledge models. At the end of the dissertation, I discuss the limitations and future directions of this research

A Multidimensional Perceptual Map Approach to Project Prioritization and Selection

When prioritizing projects, managers usually have to evaluate multiple attributes (dimensions) of project data. However, these dimensions are usually condensed into one or two indicators in many existing analysis processes. For example, projects are commonly prioritized using a scoring approach: they are evaluated according to predefined categories, which are then aggregated into one or two priority numbers. We argue that aggregated scores may only offer a limited view of project importance. This often leads decision makers to ignore the possible differences masked by the aggregation. Following the design science research paradigm, this paper presents a visual exploration approach based on multi-dimensional perceptual maps. It incorporates human intuition in the process and maintains the multidimensionality of project data as a decision basis for project prioritization and selection. A prototype system based on the approach was developed and qualitatively evaluated by a group of project managers. A qualitative analysis of the data collected shows its utility and usability

Organizing learning materials through hierarchical topic maps: an illustration through Chinese herb medication

[[abstract]]This research aims to use hierarchical topic maps to compile digital learning material and to discuss its design and application possibilities. The system renders tremendous original assets and then embeds a self-organizing map (SOM) in the material database to produce topical learning materials, as in this case, an illustration through Chinese herb medication. It helps to demonstrate robust professional information as well as knowledge structures, and provides a customized and interactive learning dynamic to support both progressive and constructive learning styles. The paper first gives a detailed procedural description of the material construction, explains how topic map techniques were applied, and observes the implications and potentials of the technology to education. Both the technical and educational evaluations of using SOM topic maps in compilation of learning materials have resulted in positive feedback. SOM allows users to review the complete databank in structural hierarchical order, which provides comprehensive understanding of the entire set of learning materials, and also brings opportunities to users to discover knowledge related to their study area.[[notice]]補正完

Collaborative Knowledge Visualisation for Cross-Community Knowledge Exchange

The notion of communities as informal social networks based on shared interests or common practices has been increasingly used as an important unit of analysis when considering the processes of cooperative creation and sharing of knowledge. While knowledge exchange within communities has been extensively researched, different studies observed the importance of cross-community knowledge exchange for the creation of new knowledge and innovation in knowledge-intensive organizations. Especially in knowledge management a critical problem has become the need to support the cooperation and exchange of knowledge between different communities with highly specialized expertise and activities. Though several studies discuss the importance and difficulties of knowledge sharing across community boundaries, the development of technological support incorporating these findings has been little addressed. This work presents an approach to supporting cross-community knowledge exchange based on using knowledge visualisation for facilitating information access in unfamiliar community domains. The theoretical grounding and practical relevance of the proposed approach are ensured by defining a requirements model that integrates theoretical frameworks for cross-community knowledge exchange with practical needs of typical knowledge management processes and sensemaking tasks in information access in unfamiliar domains. This synthesis suggests that visualising knowledge structures of communities and supporting the discovery of relationships between them during access to community spaces, could provide valuable support for cross-community discovery and sharing of knowledge. This is the main hypothesis investigated in this thesis. Accordingly, a novel method is developed for eliciting and visualising implicit knowledge structures of individuals and communities in form of dynamic knowledge maps that make the elicited knowledge usable for semantic exploration and navigation of community spaces. The method allows unobtrusive construction of personal and community knowledge maps based on user interaction with information and their use for dynamic classification of information from a specific point of view. The visualisation model combines Document Maps presenting main topics, document clusters and relationships between knowledge reflected in community spaces with Concept Maps visualising personal and shared conceptual structures of community members. The technical realization integrates Kohonen’s self-organizing maps with extraction of word categories from texts, collaborative indexing and personalised classification based on user-induced templates. This is accompanied by intuitive visualisation and interaction with complex information spaces based on multi-view navigation of document landscapes and concept networks. The developed method is prototypically implemented in form of an application framework, a concrete system and a visual information interface for multi-perspective access to community information spaces, the Knowledge Explorer. The application framework implements services for generating and using personal and community knowledge maps to support explicit and implicit knowledge exchange between members of different communities. The Knowledge Explorer allows simultaneous visualisation of different personal and community knowledge structures and enables their use for structuring, exploring and navigating community information spaces from different points of view. The empirical evaluation in a comparative laboratory study confirms the adequacy of the developed solutions with respect to specific requirements of the cross-community problem and demonstrates much better quality of knowledge access compared to a standard information seeking reference system. The developed evaluation framework and operative measures for quality of knowledge access in cross-community contexts also provide a theoretically grounded and practically feasible method for further developing and evaluating new solutions addressing this important but little investigated problem

The Application of Text Mining and Data Visualization Techniques to Textual Corpus Exploration

Unstructured data in the digital universe is growing rapidly and shows no evidence of slowing anytime soon. With the acceleration of growth in digital data being generated and stored on the World Wide Web, the prospect of information overload is much more prevalent now than it has been in the past. As a preemptive analytic measure, organizations across many industries have begun implementing text mining techniques to analyze such large sources of unstructured data. Utilizing various text mining techniques such as n -gram analysis, document and term frequency analysis, correlation analysis, and topic modeling methodologies, this research seeks to develop a tool to allow analysts to maneuver effectively and efficiently through large corpuses of potentially unknown textual data. Additionally, this research explores two notional data exploration scenarios through a large corpus of text data, each exhibiting unique navigation methods analysts may elect to take. Research concludes with the validation of inferential results obtained through each corpus’s exploration scenario

A Multidimensional and Visual Exploration Approach to Project Portfolio Management

Managing projects in an organization, especially a project-oriented organization, is a challenging task. Project data has a large volume and is complex to manage. It is different from managing a single project, because one needs to integrate and synthesize information from multiple projects and multiple perspectives for high-level strategic business decisions, such as aligning projects with business objectives, balancing investment and expected return, and allocating resources. Current methods and tools either do not well integrate multiple aspects or are not intuitive and easy to use for managers and executives. In this dissertation project, a multidimensional and visual exploration approach was designed and evaluated to provide a unique and intuitive option to support decision making in project portfolio management. The research followed a general design science research methodology involving phases of awareness of problem, suggestion, development, evaluation and conclusion. The approach was implemented into a software system using a prototyping method and was evaluated through user interviews. The evaluation result demonstrates the utility and ease-of-use of the approach, and confirms design objectives. The research brings a new perspective and provides a new decision support tool for project portfolio management. It also contributes to the design knowledge of visual exploration systems for business portfolio management by theorizing the system