Cognitive network structure: an experimental study

In this paper we present first experimental results about a small group of people exchanging private and public messages in a virtual community. Our goal is the study of the cognitive network that emerges during a chat seance. We used the Derrida coefficient and the triangle structure under the working assumption that moods and perceived mutual affinity can produce results complementary to a full semantic analysis. The most outstanding outcome is the difference between the network obtained considering publicly exchanged messages and the one considering only privately exchanged messages: in the former case, the network is very homogeneous, in the sense that each individual interacts in the same way with all the participants, whilst in the latter the interactions among different agents are very heterogeneous, and are based on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategy. Finally a recent characterization of the triangular cliques has been considered in order to describe the intimate structure of the network. Experimental results confirm recent theoretical studies indicating that certain 3-vertex structures can be used as indicators for the network aging and some relevant dynamical features.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

A community based approach for managing ontology alignments

The Semantic Web is rapidly becoming a defacto distributed repository for semantically represented data, thus leveraging on the added on value of the network effect. Various ontology mapping techniques and tools have been devised to facilitate the bridging and integration of distributed data repositories. Nevertheless, ontology mapping can benefitfrom human supervision to increase accuracy of results. The spread of Web 2.0 approaches demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this paper, we describe a prototype that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies

Value Gaps in the Planetary Matrix of the World Community as a Limitrophe of War and Peace

The article describes the problem of spontaneous transformation of the planetary matrix of the social world, moving from the cell to the network structure, resulting not only in the changes of the world system of the planetary community, the shapes of national states are melting out gradually, the need for cosmopolitan world perception and thinking of the political elite arises, the managing processes come into the picture, hybrid planetary policy is formed, and finally, qualitatively new conflict forms and even hybrid wars appear. With the change in the planetary matrix structure, there are several fundamental changes in the life-plan of a planetary human being, since the fundamentally different segments of archetypes are activated in the world community's subconsciousness, the values-semantic substrates are mixed in the consciousness, and completely different logical schemes and algorithms of influence on a person are activated in the noosphere. At the same time, this means that in the sphere of national powers the emphasis of state policy, state regulation and public administration tends to shift from the territorial horizon into the plane of regulation of world planetary processes. This tendency also transfers the focus of their organizational efforts from the national and state levels to the political space of interstate and supra-state entities. The most intense points of relations between the actors of the modern integral process are the so-called limitrophes and frontiers

Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

Collaborative Categorization on the Web

Collaborative categorization is an emerging direction for research and innovative applications. Arguably, collaborative categorization on the Web is an especially promising emerging form of collaborative Web systems because of both, the widespread use of the conventional Web and the emergence of the Semantic Web providing with more semantic information on Web data. This paper discusses this issue and proposes two approaches: collaborative categorization via category merging and collaborative categorization proper. The main advantage of the first approach is that it can be rather easily realized and implemented using existing systems such as Web browsers and mail clients. A prototype system for collaborative Web usage that uses category merging for collaborative categorization is described and the results of field experiments using it are reported. The second approach, called collaborative categorization proper, however, is more general and scales better. The data structure and user interface aspects of an approach to collaborative categorization proper are discussed

The various and conflicting notions of information

There are identified within the discourse a number of notions regarding the term information. This paper sets out to explore these sometimes-conflicting notions of information. The reason why conflicting notions occur is the result of different perspectives and understanding of the term information. Within the discourse two camps are identified, firstly, those who identify information as a resource and those who identify information as a processual approach enacted by individuals. The former is not uncommon within the business environment given the relationship seen between information and technology; this view simplifies information as merely structured data. The latter approach requires the involvement of individuals or more succinctly human understanding and interpretation. By viewing information as a processual process enacted by humans one is identifying an alternative view of how information is created, managed, used and developed. The aim is to discuss both views to gain clarity and understanding in terms of why the various and conflicting notions of information impact on its use within organisations. What is highlighted within this paper is that information is a complex and ambiguous term. There is no easy ‘off-the shelf’ solution to managing information. One potentially successful approach is to view information from an epistemological perspective. This requires those having to deal with this complex and ambiguous term a starting point from which to build and gain both an individual and an organisational understanding in terms of the use of information. This allows individuals to set direction, decide where to focus their effort and ultimately how to gain some control over this vital and important issue of ‘information’

SWI-Prolog and the Web

Where Prolog is commonly seen as a component in a Web application that is either embedded or communicates using a proprietary protocol, we propose an architecture where Prolog communicates to other components in a Web application using the standard HTTP protocol. By avoiding embedding in external Web servers development and deployment become much easier. To support this architecture, in addition to the transfer protocol, we must also support parsing, representing and generating the key Web document types such as HTML, XML and RDF. This paper motivates the design decisions in the libraries and extensions to Prolog for handling Web documents and protocols. The design has been guided by the requirement to handle large documents efficiently. The described libraries support a wide range of Web applications ranging from HTML and XML documents to Semantic Web RDF processing. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)Comment: 31 pages, 24 figures and 2 tables. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

Management as a Symbolizing Construction?

In this article, we outline the concept of management as a symbolizing construction. According to Niklas LUHMANN, organizations process by referring to decisions. But decisions are not simply "given" and in principle invisible. This is the reason why organizations institute formalities like protocols, signatures or other insignia of the official that symbolize the decision—without actually being a decision. These symbols allow for making decisions "process-able." And just like a protocol or a signature, management symbolizes decisions as well. Management provides an organizational practice with symbols of decision making without being the "unity" of the decisions, as decisions perpetually have to be reconstructed, redefined and rearranged in the communication of all organizational units. Therefore management symbolizes on the one hand more than it can achieve. On the other hand the importance of management as a symbolizing construction lies in allowing the reconstruction, redefining and rearrangement of decisions by making them visible and recognizable. Heroic managers, meetings, management tools and procedures are solutions to the paradox of decision making. By symbolizing decidedness they create credibilities that conceal the self-referential construction of organizational communication and the paradox of its decision praxis

Comprehensive Review of Opinion Summarization

The abundance of opinions on the web has kindled the study of opinion summarization over the last few years. People have introduced various techniques and paradigms to solving this special task. This survey attempts to systematically investigate the different techniques and approaches used in opinion summarization. We provide a multi-perspective classification of the approaches used and highlight some of the key weaknesses of these approaches. This survey also covers evaluation techniques and data sets used in studying the opinion summarization problem. Finally, we provide insights into some of the challenges that are left to be addressed as this will help set the trend for future research in this area.unpublishednot peer reviewe