An ontological representation of a taxonomy for cybercrime

The modern phenomenon of cybercrime raises issues and challenges on a scale that has few precedents. A particular central concern is that of establishing clarity about the conceptualization of cybercrime and its growing economic cost to society. A further related concern is focused on developing appropriate legal and policy responses in a context where crime transcends national jurisdictions and physical boundaries. Both are predicated on a better understanding of cybercrime. Efforts at defining and classifying cybercrime by the use of taxonomies to date have largely been descriptive with resulting ambiguities. This paper contributes a semi-formal approach to the development of a taxonomy for cybercrime and offers the conceptual language and accompanying constraints with which to describe cybercrime examples. The approach uses the ontology development platform, Protégé and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to present an initial taxonomy for cybercrime that goes beyond the descriptive accounts previously offered. The taxonomy is illustrated with examples of cybercrimes both documented in the Protégé toolset and also using UML

An ontological representation of a taxonomy for cybercrime

The modern phenomenon of cybercrime raises issues and challenges on a scale that has few precedents. A particular central concern is that of establishing clarity about the conceptualization of cybercrime and its growing economic cost to society. A further related concern is focused on developing appropriate legal and policy responses in a context where crime transcends national jurisdictions and physical boundaries. Both are predicated on a better understanding of cybercrime. Efforts at defining and classifying cybercrime by the use of taxonomies to date have largely been descriptive with resulting ambiguities. This paper contributes a semi-formal approach to the development of a taxonomy for cybercrime and offers the conceptual language and accompanying constraints with which to describe cybercrime examples. The approach uses the ontology development platform, Protégé and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to present an initial taxonomy for cybercrime that goes beyond the descriptive accounts previously offered. The taxonomy is illustrated with examples of cybercrimes both documented in the Protégé toolset and also using UML

Crime, policing and social order: on the expressive nature of public confidence in policing

Public confidence in policing is receiving increasing attention from UK social scientists and policy-makers. The criminal justice system relies on legitimacy and consent to an extent unlike other public services: public support is vital if the police and other criminal justice agencies are to function both effectively and in accordance with democratic norms. Yet we know little about the forms of social perception that stand prior to public confidence and police legitimacy. Drawing on data from the 2003/2004 British Crime Survey and the 2006/2007 London Metropolitan Police Safer Neighbourhoods Survey, this paper suggests that people think about their local police in ways less to do with the risk of victimization (instrumental concerns about personal safety) and more to do with judgments of social cohesion and moral consensus (expressive concerns about neighbourhood stability, cohesion and loss of collective authority). Across England and Wales the police may not primarily be seen as providers of a narrow sense of personal security, held responsible for crime and safety. Instead the police may stand as symbolic 'moral guardians' of social stability and order, held responsible for community values and informal social controls. We also present evidence that public confidence in the London Metropolitan Police Service expresses broader social anxieties about long-term social change. We finish our paper with some thoughts on a sociological analysis of the cultural place of policing: confidence (and perhaps ultimately the legitimacy of the police) might just be wrapped up in broader public concerns about social order and moral consensus

Ontological insecurity and subjective feelings of unsafety: Analysing socially constructed fears in Italy

Perception of insecurity arises as a complex social phenomenon affected by factors that go beyond actual crime rates. Previous contributions to the field of fear of crime studies have shown, for instance, that the perception of social and physical disorder may generate insecurity among residents even in contexts where crime is comparatively low. Meanwhile, sociological approaches have led to a conceptualization of insecurity as an umbrella sentiment grounded in a wider feeling of unease. Building further on this assumption, data gathered in a large-scale survey in Italy (n = 15,428) were analysed by implementing exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis with the objective of assessing the validity of a model of 'ontological insecurity'. The results of our analysis support a conceptualization of insecurity where socially constructed anxieties (due to health and financial precariousness), as well as ethnic, sexual and religious-based stigmatization, play a prominent role in determining an individual's feeling of insecurity

Modelling sustainable human development in a capability perspective

In this paper we model sustainable human development as intended in Sen's capability approach in a system dynamic framework. Our purpose is to verify the variations over time of some achieved functionings, due to structural dynamics and to variations of the institutional setting and instrumental freedoms (IF Vortex). The model is composed of two sections. The 'Left Side' one points out the 'demand' for functionings in an ideal world situation. The real world one, on the 'Right Side' indicates the 'supply' of functionings that the socio-economic system is able to provide individuals with. The general model, specifically tailored for Italy, can be simulated over desired time horizons: for each time period, we carry out a comparison between ideal world and real world functionings. On the basis of their distances, the model simulates some responses of decision makers. These responses, in turn influenced by institutions and instrumental freedoms, ultimately affect the dynamics of real world functionings, i.e. of sustainable human development.Functionings, Capabilities, Institutions, Instrumental Freedoms, Sustainable Human Development

Gender, Globalization, and the Ciudad Juarez Femicide in Selenidad and Roberto Bolaño\u27s 2666

Published posthumously in 2004, Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 portrays a vast range of perspectives and locations. Divided into five distinct parts, the book traces the interconnected specters of violence across the wild sprawl of the 20th century and its futures. The largest part of the novel, “The Part About the Crimes,” represents a fictionalized account of the feminicide in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in which hundred of women were killed over the span of years without substantive explanation or legal conclusion. The women, both in reality and in 2666, are often workers at maquiladoras, giant industrial factories whose existence is predicated on a web of economic factors related to the global order of millennial late capitalism. Bolaño describes the bodies of these women as they are found, often mutilated and abandoned in the maquiladora’s dumps (furthering the assertion that the women are the physical bi—products of multinational corporations), objectively describing the possessions found on the victim. These descriptions pile into the hundreds in Bolaño’s book, defying narrative linearity, creating a sense of chaos. Just as the circumstances of the victims’ life and death are varied, so too are the possible perpetrators. The descriptions Bolaño provides are not clues that lead us towards a single point: the reader instead begins to understand that the perpetrators of these ideas are larger than a single person or entity—it is a broader ideology that in essence allows these patterns of violence to keep repeating. This thesis is an examination of this ideology as Bolaño delineates it in his novel (that includes social, economic, and cultural factors), not only in the section about the feminicide, but also in the text as a much larger whole. My hypothesis is therefore that the feminicide in Ciudad Juárez is enabled by cultural attitudes that are propagated and sustained by exploitative economics enabled by globalization. Necessary to this conversation too is an examination of how the media and popular culture reify and disseminate narratives about these systems of objectification and violence. As the scope of 2666 makes clear, the crimes in Ciudad Juárez are not an isolated phenomenon of the ways ideology and its relationship to economics and gender manifest themselves. I explore this issue specifically by looking at the 1995 murder of the pop star Selena and the troubling symbiosis between her subsequent cultural deification and the emergence of Latinas as a corporate demographic in America. Both the text and her death assert clear cultural narratives about the gendered violence in a specifically Latina context. The cultural remembrance of the singer after her death, characterized by Deborah Paredez as “Selenidad” (in her book of the same name), serves as a problematic intersection of the articulation of this ideology in a specific Latina context. Selena’s visibility and cultural significance simultaneously serve as empowering representations and as problematic reifications of narratives of violence and death in conjunction with Latina bodies, giving us a clearer picture of the ways this ideology operates in evening seemingly inane contexts. Though the section about the deaths in Ciudad Juárez (the section is aptly titled “The Part About the Crimes”) is the largest section of 2666, the novel also touches on a circle of academics obsessed with a mysterious German writer, Mexican journalists and politicians, as well as World War II and the Holocaust. Each one of five sections is a different part of the same conversation about how globalized systems of power participate in the cycle of gendered exploitation the maquiladoras represent. This speaks urgently to the “so—what” of examining his text: what real—world implications can we learn by studying the ways these economies and modes of cultural production function? This is the true question at the heart of 2666. Its later discussion of the Holocaust too creates echoes we hear in Ciudad Juárez: how do dominant systems of cultural and economic power perpetrate death on such a horrific scale

An ontological approach to the study of European popular culture

Like any other field of contemporary scholarly research, the Humanities in general, and Cultural Studies in particular are today confronted with the challenges of complexity at an unprecedented scale. What has been described as the \u201castonishing growth\u201d of academic publications worldwide is paralleled by a similar proliferation of browsable online databases, like digital archives, collections and catalogues, which offer access to an immense and continuously increasing volume of virtually interesting research material, stored in the form of information bytes. As we discussed in Deliverable 2.1, \u201cSorting out the archive for the study of European popular culture\u201d, the problem of how to cope with such an unseizable of virtually relevant sources of evidence is all the more sensible in the case of a project like DETECt, which deals with one of the most prolific narrative genres of contemporary media production, that is, the European crime narrative genre. Not only an exhaustive catalogue of this production could easily count\u2014especially when considered in all of its transnational scope\u2014in thousands of thousands, and even\u2014in historical perspective\u2014millions of items, but the transdisciplinary scope of the studies it has inspired has produced a wealth of research in many domains of knowledge. These difficult challenges make DETECt an ideal laboratory for experimenting new methods to manage complexity in a transnational/transcultural research environment. This methodological experimentation aims to respond to the problem of how to generate effective syntheses of portions and/or aspects of a given knowledge domain in a context of information overload. To this purpose, the ontological approach chosen by DETECt focuses on the application of knowledge mapping techniques to encourage the formulation of partial knowledge syntheses within a \u201crealist\u201d, and even \u201cpragmatic\u201d theoretical framework

Exploiting Semantics from Widely Available Ontologies to Aid the Model Building Process

This dissertation attempts to address the changing needs of data science and analytics: making it easier to produce accurate models opening up opportunities and perspectives for novices to make sense of existing data. This work aims to incorporate semantics of data in addressing classical machine learning problems, which is one way to tame the deluge of data. The increased availability of data and the existence of easy-to-use procedures for regression and classification in commodity software allows anyone to search for correlations amongst a large set of variables with scant regard of their meaning. Consequently, people tend to use data indiscriminately, leading to the practice of data dredging. It is easy to use sophisticated tools to produce specious models, which generalize poorly and may lead to wrong conclusions. Despite much effort having been placed on advancing learning algorithms, current tools do little to shield people from using data in a semantically lax fashion. By examining the entire model building process and supplying semantic information derived from high-level knowledge in the form of an ontology, the machine can assist in exercising discretion to help the model builder avoid the pitfalls of data dredging. This work introduces a metric, called conceptual distance, to incorporate semantic information into the model building process. The conceptual distance is shown to be practically computed from large-scale existing ontologies. This metric is exploited in feature selection to enable a machine to take semantics of features into consideration when choosing them to build a model. Experiments with ontologies and real world datasets show the comparable performance of this metric in selecting a feature subset to the traditional data-driven measurements, in spite of using only labels of features, not the associated measures. Further, a new end-to-end model building process is developed by using the conceptual distance as a guideline to explore an ontological structure and retrieve relevant features automatically, making it convenient for a novice to build a semantically pertinent model. Experiments show that the proposed model building process can help a user to produce a model with performance comparable to that built by a domain expert. This work offers a tool to help the common man battle the hazard of data dredging that comes from the indiscriminate use of data. The tool results in models with improved generalization and easy to interpret, leading to better decisions or implications

Cyber-victimization Trends in Trinidad & Tobago: The Results of An Empirical Research

Cybertechnology has brought benefits to the Caribbean in the form of new regional economic and social growth. In the last years, Caribbean countries have also become attractive targets for cybercrime due to increased economic success and online presence with a low level of cyber resilience. This study examines the online-related activities that affect cybercrime victimization by using the Routine Activity Theory (RAT). The present study seeks to identify activities that contribute to different forms of cybercrime victimization and develop risk models for these crimes, particularly the understudied cyber-dependent crimes of Hacking and Malware. It also aims to explore if there are similarities or differences in factors leading to victimization, which correlate to the classification of crimes as either cyber-dependent or cyber-enabled. The data analysis suggests that there is significant applicability for RAT in explaining Online Harassment victimization, while the usability of the RAT for predicting Malware victimization proved to be minimal, with only two significant variables being identified, with both being associated with Capable Guardianship

Mapping semantic knowledge for unsupervised text categorisation

Text categorisation is challenging, due to the complex structure with heterogeneous, changing topics in documents. The performance of text categorisation relies on the quality of samples, effectiveness of document features, and the topic coverage of categories, depending on the employing strategies; supervised or unsupervised; single labelled or multi-labelled. Attempting to deal with these reliability issues in text categorisation, we propose an unsupervised multi-labelled text categorisation approach that maps the local knowledge in documents to global knowledge in a world ontology to optimise categorisation result. The conceptual framework of the approach consists of three modules; pattern mining for feature extraction; feature-subject mapping for categorisation; concept generalisation for optimised categorisation. The approach has been promisingly evaluated by compared with typical text categorisation methods, based on the ground truth encoded by human experts