Business intelligence gap analysis: a user, supplier and academic perspective

Business intelligence (BI) takes many different forms, as indicated by the varying definitions of BI that can be found in industry and academia. These different definitions help us understand of what BI issues are important to the main players in the field of BI; users, suppliers and academics. The goal of this research is to discover gaps and trends from the standpoints of BI users, BI suppliers and academics, and to examine their effects on business and academia. Consultants also play an important role since they can be seen as the link between users and suppliers. Two research methods are combined to accomplish this goal. We examine the BI focus of users and suppliers through a survey, and we gain insight to the BI focus of academics, vendor-neutral consultants (typical representatives like Forrester, Gartner and IDC) and vendor- specific consultants (typical representatives like IBM, Information builders, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) through their publications. Previous studies indicate that similar article analyses often focus on academic research methods only. That means that the results so far often reveal the academic perspective. Unlike these previous studies, the perspective of this research is not limited to academics. Our results provide insight of the BI trends and BI issue ranking of BI users, suppliers, academics, vendors neutral consultants and vendor specific consultant

A Model for Personalized Keyword Extraction from Web Pages using Segmentation

The World Wide Web caters to the needs of billions of users in heterogeneous groups. Each user accessing the World Wide Web might have his / her own specific interest and would expect the web to respond to the specific requirements. The process of making the web to react in a customized manner is achieved through personalization. This paper proposes a novel model for extracting keywords from a web page with personalization being incorporated into it. The keyword extraction problem is approached with the help of web page segmentation which facilitates in making the problem simpler and solving it effectively. The proposed model is implemented as a prototype and the experiments conducted on it empirically validate the model's efficiency.Comment: 6 Pages, 2 Figure

Morpes: A Model for Personalized Rendering of Web Content on Mobile Devices

With the tremendous growth in the information communication sector, the mobile phones have become the prime information communication devices. The convergence of traditional telephony with the modern web enabled communication in the mobile devices has made the communication much effective and simpler. As mobile phones are becoming the crucial source of accessing the contents of the World Wide Web which was originally designed for personal computers, has opened up a new challenge of accommodating the web contents in to the smaller mobile devices. This paper proposes an approach towards building a model for rendering the web pages in mobile devices. The proposed model is based on a multi-dimensional web page segment evaluation model. The incorporation of personalization in the proposed model makes the rendering user-centric. The proposed model is validated with a prototype implementation.Comment: 10 Pages, 2 Figure

A Utility-Theoretic Approach to Privacy in Online Services

Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by introducing methods to personalize services based on special knowledge about users and their context. For example, a user's demographics, location, and past search and browsing may be useful in enhancing the results offered in response to web search queries. However, reasonable concerns about privacy by both users, providers, and government agencies acting on behalf of citizens, may limit access by services to such information. We introduce and explore an economics of privacy in personalization, where people can opt to share personal information, in a standing or on-demand manner, in return for expected enhancements in the quality of an online service. We focus on the example of web search and formulate realistic objective functions for search efficacy and privacy. We demonstrate how we can find a provably near-optimal optimization of the utility-privacy tradeoff in an efficient manner. We evaluate our methodology on data drawn from a log of the search activity of volunteer participants. We separately assess users’ preferences about privacy and utility via a large-scale survey, aimed at eliciting preferences about peoples’ willingness to trade the sharing of personal data in returns for gains in search efficiency. We show that a significant level of personalization can be achieved using a relatively small amount of information about users

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed