A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web

Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future prospects

Introduction to the special issue on cross-language algorithms and applications

With the increasingly global nature of our everyday interactions, the need for multilingual technologies to support efficient and efective information access and communication cannot be overemphasized. Computational modeling of language has been the focus of Natural Language Processing, a subdiscipline of Artificial Intelligence. One of the current challenges for this discipline is to design methodologies and algorithms that are cross-language in order to create multilingual technologies rapidly. The goal of this JAIR special issue on Cross-Language Algorithms and Applications (CLAA) is to present leading research in this area, with emphasis on developing unifying themes that could lead to the development of the science of multi- and cross-lingualism. In this introduction, we provide the reader with the motivation for this special issue and summarize the contributions of the papers that have been included. The selected papers cover a broad range of cross-lingual technologies including machine translation, domain and language adaptation for sentiment analysis, cross-language lexical resources, dependency parsing, information retrieval and knowledge representation. We anticipate that this special issue will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers interested in topics of cross-lingual natural language processing.Postprint (published version

Determination and evaluation of web accessibility

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; however, access to the web and its many applications cannot be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses a variety of concerns ranging from societal, political, and economic to individual, physical, and intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus, there are many perspectives from which web accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility framework is proposed using as its base a layered evaluation framework from Computer Supported Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard, ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is employed in recognition of the collaborative nature of the web and its importance in facilitating communication. The latter is employed to refine and extend the technical issues and to highlight the need for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of the web developer and maintainer as well as the web user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility framework is to provide web developers and maintainers with a practical basis for considering web accessibility through the development of a set of accessibility factors associated with each identified layer

A commentary on social & experiential (e-)retailing and (e-)shopping deserts

Purpose – The last ten years have seen a gradual withdrawal of retail facilities from many local areas and the consequent growth of ‘shopping deserts’, resulting in social and health disbenefits. This paper examines the potential for e-shopping to fill the vacuum and to assist disadvantaged shoppers. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses prior published research to comment on the extent to which e-retailing may be the shopping solution of the future? Findings – The Internet has limited potential to compensate for shopping deserts, as consumers who do not have a good range of physical shops within walking distance also tend to lack access to the Internet. Research limitations/implications – The paper is based solely on prior research. The authors recommend action research that may hopefully help excluded shoppers to become more included by addressing the problems of access to e-shopping. Practical implications – Government, service providers and e-retailers are may consider interventions such as subsidised Internet access, training and the provision of e-cash. Originality/value – The paper links research from diverse fields relating to shopping deserts, the digital divide, health, wellbeing, social and experiential aspects of (e-)shopping

Higher education decision making and decision support systems

The authors illustrate several issues in decision support and decision support systems (DSS), state of the art research in these fields, and also their own studies in designing a higher education DSS. The final section contains our contribution in outlining the modules of the DSS, involving the present systems and databases of FSEGA and UBB, results and activities belonging to FSEGA students, teaching and research staff, to assist decisions for all the actors implicated in the processes, in various specific situations.decision support, decision support systems (DSS), higher education institutions, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Development of Distributed Research Center for analysis of regional climatic and environmental changes

We present an approach and first results of a collaborative project being carried out by a joint team of researchers from the Institute of Monitoring of Climatic and Ecological Systems, Russia and Earth Systems Research Center UNH, USA. Its main objective is development of a hardware and software platform prototype of a Distributed Research Center (DRC) for monitoring and projecting of regional climatic and environmental changes in the Northern extratropical areas. The DRC should provide the specialists working in climate related sciences and decision-makers with accurate and detailed climatic characteristics for the selected area and reliable and affordable tools for their in-depth statistical analysis and studies of the effects of climate change. Within the framework of the project, new approaches to cloud processing and analysis of large geospatial datasets (big geospatial data) inherent to climate change studies are developed and deployed on technical platforms of both institutions. We discuss here the state of the art in this domain, describe web based information-computational systems developed by the partners, justify the methods chosen to reach the project goal, and briefly list the results obtained so far