Profiling Users and Knowledge Graphs on the Web

Profiling refers to the process of collecting useful information or patterns about something. Due to the growth of the web, profiling methods play an important role in different applications such as recommender systems. In this thesis, we first demonstrate how knowledge graphs (KGs) enhance profiling methods. KGs are databases for entities and their relations. Since KGs have been developed with the objective of information discovery, we assume that they can assist profiling methods. To this end, we develop a novel profiling method using KGs called Hierarchical Concept Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (HCF-IDF), which combines the strength of traditional term weighting method and semantics in a KG. HCF-IDF represents documents as a set of entities and their weights. We apply HCF-IDF to two applications that recommends researchers and scientific publications. Both applications show HCF-IDF captures topics of documents. As key result, the method can make competitive recommendations based on only the titles of scientific publications, because it reveals relevant entities using the structure of KGs. While the KGs assist profiling methods, we present how profiling methods can improve the KGs. We show two methods that enhance the integrity of KGs. The first method is a crawling strategy that keeps local copies of KGs up-to-date. We profile the dynamics of KGs using a linear regression model. The experiment shows that our novel crawling strategy based on the linear regression model performs better than the state of the art. The second method is a change verification method for KGs. The method classifies each incoming change into a correct or incorrect one to mitigate administrators who check the validity of a change. We profile how topological features influence on the dynamics of a KG. The experiment demonstrates that the novel method using the topological features can improve change verification. Therefore, profiling the dynamics contribute to the integrity of KGs

Semantic data mining and linked data for a recommender system in the AEC industry

Even though it can provide design teams with valuable performance insights and enhance decision-making, monitored building data is rarely reused in an effective feedback loop from operation to design. Data mining allows users to obtain such insights from the large datasets generated throughout the building life cycle. Furthermore, semantic web technologies allow to formally represent the built environment and retrieve knowledge in response to domain-specific requirements. Both approaches have independently established themselves as powerful aids in decision-making. Combining them can enrich data mining processes with domain knowledge and facilitate knowledge discovery, representation and reuse. In this article, we look into the available data mining techniques and investigate to what extent they can be fused with semantic web technologies to provide recommendations to the end user in performance-oriented design. We demonstrate an initial implementation of a linked data-based system for generation of recommendations

Finding co-solvers on Twitter, with a little help from Linked Data

In this paper we propose a method for suggesting potential collaborators for solving innovation challenges online, based on their competence, similarity of interests and social proximity with the user. We rely on Linked Data to derive a measure of semantic relatedness that we use to enrich both user profiles and innovation problems with additional relevant topics, thereby improving the performance of co-solver recommendation. We evaluate this approach against state of the art methods for query enrichment based on the distribution of topics in user profiles, and demonstrate its usefulness in recommending collaborators that are both complementary in competence and compatible with the user. Our experiments are grounded using data from the social networking service Twitter.com

DeepCity: A Feature Learning Framework for Mining Location Check-ins

Online social networks being extended to geographical space has resulted in large amount of user check-in data. Understanding check-ins can help to build appealing applications, such as location recommendation. In this paper, we propose DeepCity, a feature learning framework based on deep learning, to profile users and locations, with respect to user demographic and location category prediction. Both of the predictions are essential for social network companies to increase user engagement. The key contribution of DeepCity is the proposal of task-specific random walk which uses the location and user properties to guide the feature learning to be specific to each prediction task. Experiments conducted on 42M check-ins in three cities collected from Instagram have shown that DeepCity achieves a superior performance and outperforms other baseline models significantly

Collaborative recommendations with content-based filters for cultural activities via a scalable event distribution platform

Nowadays, most people have limited leisure time and the offer of (cultural) activities to spend this time is enormous. Consequently, picking the most appropriate events becomes increasingly difficult for end-users. This complexity of choice reinforces the necessity of filtering systems that assist users in finding and selecting relevant events. Whereas traditional filtering tools enable e.g. the use of keyword-based or filtered searches, innovative recommender systems draw on user ratings, preferences, and metadata describing the events. Existing collaborative recommendation techniques, developed for suggesting web-shop products or audio-visual content, have difficulties with sparse rating data and can not cope at all with event-specific restrictions like availability, time, and location. Moreover, aggregating, enriching, and distributing these events are additional requisites for an optimal communication channel. In this paper, we propose a highly-scalable event recommendation platform which considers event-specific characteristics. Personal suggestions are generated by an advanced collaborative filtering algorithm, which is more robust on sparse data by extending user profiles with presumable future consumptions. The events, which are described using an RDF/OWL representation of the EventsML-G2 standard, are categorized and enriched via smart indexing and open linked data sets. This metadata model enables additional content-based filters, which consider event-specific characteristics, on the recommendation list. The integration of these different functionalities is realized by a scalable and extendable bus architecture. Finally, focus group conversations were organized with external experts, cultural mediators, and potential end-users to evaluate the event distribution platform and investigate the possible added value of recommendations for cultural participation