Semantic Web in Action: Ontology-driven Information Search, Integration and Analysis

Keynote at the Net Object Days and MATES, Erfurt, Germany, September 23, 2003

Visual Exploration System for Analyzing Trends in Annual Recruitment Using Time-varying Graphs

Annual recruitment data of new graduates are manually analyzed by human resources specialists (HR) in industries, which signifies the need to evaluate the recruitment strategy of HR specialists. Every year, different applicants send in job applications to companies. The relationships between applicants' attributes (e.g., English skill or academic credential) can be used to analyze the changes in recruitment trends across multiple years' data. However, most attributes are unnormalized and thus require thorough preprocessing. Such unnormalized data hinder the effective comparison of the relationship between applicants in the early stage of data analysis. Thus, a visual exploration system is highly needed to gain insight from the overview of the relationship between applicants across multiple years. In this study, we propose the Polarizing Attributes for Network Analysis of Correlation on Entities Association (Panacea) visualization system. The proposed system integrates a time-varying graph model and dynamic graph visualization for heterogeneous tabular data. Using this system, human resource specialists can interactively inspect the relationships between two attributes of prospective employees across multiple years. Further, we demonstrate the usability of Panacea with representative examples for finding hidden trends in real-world datasets and then describe HR specialists' feedback obtained throughout Panacea's development. The proposed Panacea system enables HR specialists to visually explore the annual recruitment of new graduates

Human Resources Recommender system based on discrete variables

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceNatural Language Processing and Understanding has become one of the most exciting and challenging fields in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. With the rapidly changing business environment and surroundings, the importance of having the data transformed in such a way that makes it easy to interpret is the greatest competitive advantage a company can have. Having said this, the purpose of this thesis dissertation is to implement a recommender system for the Human Resources department in a company that will aid the decision-making process of filling a specific job position with the right candidate. The recommender system fill be fed with applicants, each being represented by their skills, and will produce a subset of most adequate candidates given a job position. This work uses StarSpace, a novelty neural embedding model, whose aim is to represent entities in a common vectorial space and further perform similarity measures amongst them

BUILDING DSS USING KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASE APPLIED TO ADMISSION & REGISTRATION FUNCTIONS

This research investigates the practical issues surrounding the development and implementation of Decision Support Systems (DSS). The research describes the traditional development approaches analyzing their drawbacks and introduces a new DSS development methodology. The proposed DSS methodology is based upon four modules; needs' analysis, data warehouse (DW), knowledge discovery in database (KDD), and a DSS module. The proposed DSS methodology is applied to and evaluated using the admission and registration functions in Egyptian Universities. The research investigates the organizational requirements that are required to underpin these functions in Egyptian Universities. These requirements have been identified following an in-depth survey of the recruitment process in the Egyptian Universities. This survey employed a multi-part admission and registration DSS questionnaire (ARDSSQ) to identify the required data sources together with the likely users and their information needs. The questionnaire was sent to senior managers within the Egyptian Universities (both private and government) with responsibility for student recruitment, in particular admission and registration. Further, access to a large database has allowed the evaluation of the practical suitability of using a data warehouse structure and knowledge management tools within the decision making framework. 1600 students' records have been analyzed to explore the KDD process, and another 2000 records have been used to build and test the data mining techniques within the KDD process. Moreover, the research has analyzed the key characteristics of data warehouses and explored the advantages and disadvantages of such data structures. This evaluation has been used to build a data warehouse for the Egyptian Universities that handle their admission and registration related archival data. The decision makers' potential benefits of the data warehouse within the student recruitment process will be explored. The design of the proposed admission and registration DSS (ARDSS) will be developed and tested using Cool: Gen (5.0) CASE tools by Computer Associates (CA), connected to a MSSQL Server (6.5), in a Windows NT (4.0) environment. Crystal Reports (4.6) by Seagate will be used as a report generation tool. CLUST AN Graphics (5.0) by CLUST AN software will also be used as a clustering package. Finally, the contribution of this research is found in the following areas: A new DSS development methodology; The development and validation of a new research questionnaire (i.e. ARDSSQ); The development of the admission and registration data warehouse; The evaluation and use of cluster analysis proximities and techniques in the KDD process to find knowledge in the students' records; And the development of the ARDSS software that encompasses the advantages of the KDD and DW and submitting these advantages to the senior admission and registration managers in the Egyptian Universities. The ARDSS software could be adjusted for usage in different countries for the same purpose, it is also scalable to handle new decision situations and can be integrated with other systems

Structuring visual exploratory analysis of skill demand

The analysis of increasingly large and diverse data for meaningful interpretation and question answering is handicapped by human cognitive limitations. Consequently, semi-automatic abstraction of complex data within structured information spaces becomes increasingly important, if its knowledge content is to support intuitive, exploratory discovery. Exploration of skill demand is an area where regularly updated, multi-dimensional data may be exploited to assess capability within the workforce to manage the demands of the modern, technology- and data-driven economy. The knowledge derived may be employed by skilled practitioners in defining career pathways, to identify where, when and how to update their skillsets in line with advancing technology and changing work demands. This same knowledge may also be used to identify the combination of skills essential in recruiting for new roles. To address the challenges inherent in exploring the complex, heterogeneous, dynamic data that feeds into such applications, we investigate the use of an ontology to guide structuring of the information space, to allow individuals and institutions to interactively explore and interpret the dynamic skill demand landscape for their specific needs. As a test case we consider the relatively new and highly dynamic field of Data Science, where insightful, exploratory data analysis and knowledge discovery are critical. We employ context-driven and task-centred scenarios to explore our research questions and guide iterative design, development and formative evaluation of our ontology-driven, visual exploratory discovery and analysis approach, to measure where it adds value to users’ analytical activity. Our findings reinforce the potential in our approach, and point us to future paths to build on

NewsReader: Using knowledge resources in a cross-lingual reading machine to generate more knowledge from massive streams of news

Abstract In this article, we describe a system that reads news articles in four different languages and detects what happened, who is involved, where and when. This event-centric information is represented as episodic situational knowledge on individuals in an interoperable RDF format that allows for reasoning on the implications of the events. Our system covers the complete path from unstructured text to structured knowledge, for which we defined a formal model that links interpreted textual mentions of things to their representation as instances. The model forms the skeleton for interoperable interpretation across different sources and languages. The real content, however, is defined using multilingual and cross-lingual knowledge resources, both semantic and episodic. We explain how these knowledge resources are used for the processing of text and ultimately define the actual content of the episodic situational knowledge that is reported in the news. The knowledge and model in our system can be seen as an example how the Semantic Web helps NLP. However, our systems also generate massive episodic knowledge of the same type as the Semantic Web is built on. We thus envision a cycle of knowledge acquisition and NLP improvement on a massive scale. This article reports on the details of the system but also on the performance of various high-level components. We demonstrate that our system performs at state-of-the-art level for various subtasks in the four languages of the project, but that we also consider the full integration of these tasks in an overall system with the purpose of reading text. We applied our system to millions of news articles, generating billions of triples expressing formal semantic properties. This shows the capacity of the system to perform at an unprecedented scale

Crime mapping and spatial analysis

Crime maps are becoming significant tools in crime and justice. Advances in the areas of information technology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have opened new opportunities for the use of digital mapping in crime control and prevention programs. Crime maps are also valuable for the study of the ecology and the locational aspects of crime. Maps enable areas of unusually high or low concentration of crime to be visually identified. Maps are however only pictorial representations of the results of more or less complex spatial data analyses. A hierarchical model dealing with crime analysis is proposed and applied to the regional analysis of crime in Tehran, the model helps to identify spatial concentration of crimes in specific area (area based method). In area-based methods, crime data are aggregated into geographical areas such as blocks, precincts, and for each area, the analyst computes a measure of crime value. Multicriteria evaluation concept has been used to assess the crime rate in various blocks a discrete (part) of Tehran city. In this part we used two methods for crime density assessment: • Crime assessment based on crime per block, • Crime assessment based on density of crime per population. After determination of hot spots based on two methods mentioned above spatial function is used to find suitable location to establish new police station or direct patrol to the hot spots to reduce of crime