Knowledge search for new product development: a multi-agent based methodology

Manufacturers are the leaders in developing new products to drive productivity. Higher productivity means more products based on the same materials, energy, labour, and capitals. New product development plays a critical role in the success of manufacturing firms. Activities in the product development process are dependent on the knowledge of new product development team members. Increasingly, many enterprises consider effective knowledge search to be a source of competitive advantage. This research presents an exploratory case study conducted at an aircraft manufacturer. This investigation uncovered six, empirically derived and theoretically informed, problems to enterprise knowledge search. They have been articulated as (i) the effectual web bandwidth limits search speed; (ii) less relevant search results based on word-frequency recognition models of search engine; (iii) un-useable techniques for enterprise search; (iv) rigour security, reliability, and company policy; (v) poor search performance about unstructured enterprise knowledge; (vi) the lack of tacit knowledge sharing. Existing search methodologies have focused on the internet search, rather than providing effective search for enterprise. This research aim is developed to assist the manufacturing enterprise in meeting the industrial requirements in the following way: a methodology and system that can improve the information and knowledge search performance in new product development process. Based on the exploratory case findings, a knowledge search methodology and system has been developed. Agent technology is used to fulfil the requirements of enterprise search. Some initial tests were conducted to better understand implementation issues and future deployment of the methodology and system in practice

Effective web crawlers

Web crawlers are the component of a search engine that must traverse the Web, gathering documents in a local repository for indexing by a search engine so that they can be ranked by their relevance to user queries. Whenever data is replicated in an autonomously updated environment, there are issues with maintaining up-to-date copies of documents. When documents are retrieved by a crawler and have subsequently been altered on the Web, the effect is an inconsistency in user search results. While the impact depends on the type and volume of change, many existing algorithms do not take the degree of change into consideration, instead using simple measures that consider any change as significant. Furthermore, many crawler evaluation metrics do not consider index freshness or the amount of impact that crawling algorithms have on user results. Most of the existing work makes assumptions about the change rate of documents on the Web, or relies on the availability of a long history of change. Our work investigates approaches to improving index consistency: detecting meaningful change, measuring the impact of a crawl on collection freshness from a user perspective, developing a framework for evaluating crawler performance, determining the effectiveness of stateless crawl ordering schemes, and proposing and evaluating the effectiveness of a dynamic crawl approach. Our work is concerned specifically with cases where there is little or no past change statistics with which predictions can be made. Our work analyses different measures of change and introduces a novel approach to measuring the impact of recrawl schemes on search engine users. Our schemes detect important changes that affect user results. Other well-known and widely used schemes have to retrieve around twice the data to achieve the same effectiveness as our schemes. Furthermore, while many studies have assumed that the Web changes according to a model, our experimental results are based on real web documents. We analyse various stateless crawl ordering schemes that have no past change statistics with which to predict which documents will change, none of which, to our knowledge, has been tested to determine effectiveness in crawling changed documents. We empirically show that the effectiveness of these schemes depends on the topology and dynamics of the domain crawled and that no one static crawl ordering scheme can effectively maintain freshness, motivating our work on dynamic approaches. We present our novel approach to maintaining freshness, which uses the anchor text linking documents to determine the likelihood of a document changing, based on statistics gathered during the current crawl. We show that this scheme is highly effective when combined with existing stateless schemes. When we combine our scheme with PageRank, our approach allows the crawler to improve both freshness and quality of a collection. Our scheme improves freshness regardless of which stateless scheme it is used in conjunction with, since it uses both positive and negative reinforcement to determine which document to retrieve. Finally, we present the design and implementation of Lara, our own distributed crawler, which we used to develop our testbed

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways."--P. [4] of cove

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

An Overlay Architecture for Personalized Object Access and Sharing in a Peer-to-Peer Environment

Due to its exponential growth and decentralized nature, the Internet has evolved into a chaotic repository, making it difficult for users to discover and access resources of interest to them. As a result, users have to deal with the problem of information overload. The Semantic Web's emergence provides Internet users with the ability to associate explicit, self-described semantics with resources. This ability will facilitate in turn the development of ontology-based resource discovery tools to help users retrieve information in an efficient manner. However, it is widely believed that the Semantic Web of the future will be a complex web of smaller ontologies, mostly created by various groups of web users who share a similar interest, referred to as a Community of Interest. This thesis proposes a solution to the information overload problem using a user driven framework, referred to as a Personalized Web, that allows individual users to organize themselves into Communities of Interests based on ontologies agreed upon by all community members. Within this framework, users can define and augment their personalized views of the Internet by associating specific properties and attributes to resources and defining constraint-functions and rules that govern the interpretation of the semantics associated with the resources. Such views can then be used to capture the user's interests and integrate these views into a user-defined Personalized Web. As a proof of concept, a Personalized Web architecture that employs ontology-based semantics and a structured Peer-to-Peer overlay network to provide a foundation of semantically-based resource indexing and advertising is developed. In order to investigate mechanisms that support the resource advertising and retrieval of the Personalized Web architecture, three agent-driven advertising and retrieval schemes, the Aggressive scheme, the Crawler-based scheme, and the Minimum-Cover-Rule scheme, were implemented and evaluated in both stable and churn environments. In addition to the development of a Personalized Web architecture that deals with typical web resources, this thesis used a case study to explore the potential of the Personalized Web architecture to support future web service workflow applications. The results of this investigation demonstrated that the architecture can support the automation of service discovery, negotiation, and invocation, allowing service consumers to actualize a personalized web service workflow. Further investigation will be required to improve the performance of the automation and allow it to be performed in a secure and robust manner. In order to support the next generation Internet, further exploration will be needed for the development of a Personalized Web that includes ubiquitous and pervasive resources

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research