Implementing Semantic Search to a Case Management System

The amount of information in today’s information society is immense, which creates a need for intuitive and effective search functionalities and applications. In addition to openly available search applications, organizations need internal search functionalities for optimizing their information management. This thesis provides an implementation suggestion for JoutseNet semantic search application. JoutseNet is a case management system used by the authorities and the employees of the city of Turku. Thesis begins by introducing some relevant fundamentals of natural language processing and search engines. Literature review is utilized to find semantic search implementation methods from previous research papers. Case JoutseNet is introduced with some background information on the case management process and with a brief user research and examination on the current state of the system. Learnings from the fundamental guidelines and conducted research are combined to implement the search application. After the implementation documentation, guidelines for optimizing and testing the application are given. The value and performance of the implementation is yet to be determined because the production data of the JoutseNet system could not be used for research purposes. A comprehensive suggestion is provided, but further research and development is still needed before delivering it to the production environment

Query Workload-Aware Index Structures for Range Searches in 1D, 2D, and High-Dimensional Spaces

abstract: Most current database management systems are optimized for single query execution. Yet, often, queries come as part of a query workload. Therefore, there is a need for index structures that can take into consideration existence of multiple queries in a query workload and efficiently produce accurate results for the entire query workload. These index structures should be scalable to handle large amounts of data as well as large query workloads. The main objective of this dissertation is to create and design scalable index structures that are optimized for range query workloads. Range queries are an important type of queries with wide-ranging applications. There are no existing index structures that are optimized for efficient execution of range query workloads. There are also unique challenges that need to be addressed for range queries in 1D, 2D, and high-dimensional spaces. In this work, I introduce novel cost models, index selection algorithms, and storage mechanisms that can tackle these challenges and efficiently process a given range query workload in 1D, 2D, and high-dimensional spaces. In particular, I introduce the index structures, HCS (for 1D spaces), cSHB (for 2D spaces), and PSLSH (for high-dimensional spaces) that are designed specifically to efficiently handle range query workload and the unique challenges arising from their respective spaces. I experimentally show the effectiveness of the above proposed index structures by comparing with state-of-the-art techniques.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

PowerAqua: Open Question Answering on the Semantic Web

With the rapid growth of semantic information in the Web, the processes of searching and querying these very large amounts of heterogeneous content have become increasingly challenging. This research tackles the problem of supporting users in querying and exploring information across multiple and heterogeneous Semantic Web (SW) sources. A review of literature on ontology-based Question Answering reveals the limitations of existing technology. Our approach is based on providing a natural language Question Answering interface for the SW, PowerAqua. The realization of PowerAqua represents a considerable advance with respect to other systems, which restrict their scope to an ontology-specific or homogeneous fraction of the publicly available SW content. To our knowledge, PowerAqua is the only system that is able to take advantage of the semantic data available on the Web to interpret and answer user queries posed in natural language. In particular, PowerAqua is uniquely able to answer queries by combining and aggregating information, which can be distributed across heterogeneous semantic resources. Here, we provide a complete overview of our work on PowerAqua, including: the research challenges it addresses; its architecture; the techniques we have realised to map queries to semantic data, to integrate partial answers drawn from different semantic resources and to rank alternative answers; and the evaluation studies we have performed, to assess the performance of PowerAqua. We believe our experiences can be extrapolated to a variety of end-user applications that wish to open up to large scale and heterogeneous structured datasets, to be able to exploit effectively what possibly is the greatest wealth of data in the history of Artificial Intelligence

“WARES”, a Web Analytics Recommender System

Il est difficile d'imaginer des entreprises modernes sans analyse, c'est une tendance dans les entreprises modernes, même les petites entreprises et les entrepreneurs individuels commencent à utiliser des outils d'analyse d'une manière ou d'une autre pour leur entreprise. Pas étonnant qu'il existe un grand nombre d'outils différents pour les différents domaines, ils varient dans le but de simples statistiques d'amis et de visites pour votre page Facebook à grands et sophistiqués dans le cas des systèmes conçus pour les grandes entreprises, ils pourraient être shareware ou payés. Parfois, vous devez passer une formation spéciale, être un spécialiste certifiés, ou même avoir un diplôme afin d'être en mesure d'utiliser l'outil d'analyse. D'autres outils offrent une interface d’utilisateur simple, avec des tableaux de bord, pour satisfaire leur compréhension d’information pour tous ceux qui les ont vus pour la première fois. Ce travail sera consacré aux outils d'analyse Web. Quoi qu'il en soit pour tous ceux qui pensent à utiliser l'analyse pour ses propres besoins se pose une question: "quel outil doit je utiliser, qui convient à mes besoins, et comment payer moins et obtenir un gain maximum". Dans ce travail je vais essayer de donner une réponse sur cette question en proposant le système de recommandation pour les outils analytiques web –WARES, qui aideront l'utilisateur avec cette tâche "simple". Le système WARES utilise l'approche hybride, mais surtout, utilise des techniques basées sur le contenu pour faire des suggestions. Le système utilise certains ratings initiaux faites par utilisateur, comme entrée, pour résoudre le problème du “démarrage à froid”, offrant la meilleure solution possible en fonction des besoins des utilisateurs. Le besoin de consultations coûteuses avec des experts ou de passer beaucoup d'heures sur Internet, en essayant de trouver le bon outil. Le système lui–même devrait effectuer une recherche en ligne en utilisant certaines données préalablement mises en cache dans la base de données hors ligne, représentée comme une ontologie d'outils analytiques web existants extraits lors de la recherche en ligne précédente.It is hard to imagine modern business without analytics; it is a trend in modern business, even small companies and individual entrepreneurs start using analytics tools, in one way or another, for their business. Not surprising that there exist many different tools for different domains, they vary in purpose from simple friends and visits statistic for your Facebook page, to big and sophisticated systems designed for the big corporations, they could be free or paid. Sometimes you need to pass special training, be a certified specialist, or even have a degree to be able to use analytics tool, other tools offers simple user interface with dashboards for easy understanding and availability for everyone who saw them for the first time. Anyway, for everyone who is thinking about using analytics for his/her own needs stands a question: “what tool should I use, which one suits my needs and how to pay less and get maximum gain”. In this work, I will try to give an answer to this question by proposing a recommender tool, which will help the user with this “simple task”. This paper is devoted to the creation of WARES, as reduction from Web Analytics REcommender System. Proposed recommender system uses hybrid approach, but mostly, utilize content–based techniques for making suggestions, while using some user’s ratings as an input for “cold start” search. System produces recommendations depending on user’s needs, also allowing quick adjustments in selection without need of expensive consultations with experts or spending lots of hours for Internet search, trying to find out the right tool. The system itself should perform as an online search using some pre–cached data in offline database, represented as an ontology of existing web analytics tools, extracted during the previous online search