Ontology-based information standards development

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Standards may be argued to be important enablers for achieving interoperability as they aim to provide unambiguous specifications for error-free exchange of documents and information. By implication, therefore, it is important to model and represent the concept of a standard in a clear, precise and unambiguous way. Although standards development organisations usually provide guidelines for the process of developing and approving standards, they are usually more concerned with administrative aspect of the process. As a consequence, the state-of-the-art lacks practical support for developing the structure and content of a standard specification. In short, there is no systematic development method currently available: (a) For developing the conceptual model underpinning a standard; and/or (b) to guide a group of stakeholders to develop a standard specification. Semantic interoperability is considered to be an essential factor for effective interoperation – the ability to achieve semantic interoperability effectively and efficiently being strongly equated with quality by some. Semantics require that the meaning of terms, their relationships and also the restrictions and rules in the standards should be clearly defined in the early stages of standard development and act as a basis for the latter stages. This research proposes that ontology can help standards developers and stakeholders to address the issues of improving conceptual models and providing a robust and shared understanding of the domain. This thesis presents OntoStanD, a comprehensive ontology-based standards development methodology, which utilises the best practices of the existing ontology creation methods. The potential value of OntoStanD is in providing a comprehensive, clear and unambiguous method for developing robust information standards, which are more test friendly and of higher quality. OntoStanD also facilitates standards conformance testing and change management, impacts interoperability and also assists in improved communication among the standards development team. Last, OntoStanD provides an approach that is repeatable, teachable and potentially general enough for creating any kinds of information standard.Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe Ltd, Google Anitaborg Memorial Scholarshi

Ontology-based information standards development

Standards may be argued to be important enablers for achieving interoperability as they aim to provide unambiguous specifications for error-free exchange of documents and information. By implication, therefore, it is important to model and represent the concept of a standard in a clear, precise and unambiguous way. Although standards development organisations usually provide guidelines for the process of developing and approving standards, they are usually more concerned with administrative aspect of the process. As a consequence, the state-of-the-art lacks practical support for developing the structure and content of a standard specification. In short, there is no systematic development method currently available: (a) For developing the conceptual model underpinning a standard; and/or (b) to guide a group of stakeholders to develop a standard specification. Semantic interoperability is considered to be an essential factor for effective interoperation – the ability to achieve semantic interoperability effectively and efficiently being strongly equated with quality by some. Semantics require that the meaning of terms, their relationships and also the restrictions and rules in the standards should be clearly defined in the early stages of standard development and act as a basis for the latter stages. This research proposes that ontology can help standards developers and stakeholders to address the issues of improving conceptual models and providing a robust and shared understanding of the domain. This thesis presents OntoStanD, a comprehensive ontology-based standards development methodology, which utilises the best practices of the existing ontology creation methods. The potential value of OntoStanD is in providing a comprehensive, clear and unambiguous method for developing robust information standards, which are more test friendly and of higher quality. OntoStanD also facilitates standards conformance testing and change management, impacts interoperability and also assists in improved communication among the standards development team. Last, OntoStanD provides an approach that is repeatable, teachable and potentially general enough for creating any kinds of information standard.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceFujitsu Laboratories of Europe LtdGoogle Anitaborg Memorial ScholarshipGBUnited Kingdo

Social media, surveillance and news work: On the apps promising journalists a “crystal ball”

Social media platforms are becoming an indispensable resource for journalists. Their use involves both direct interaction with the platforms themselves and, increasingly, the use of specialist third-party apps to find, filter, and follow content and contributors. This article explores some of the ways social media platforms, and their technological ecosystems, are infusing news work. A range of platforms and apps—including Geofeedia, Spike, and Twitter—were critically examined, and their use by trainee journalists (N=81) analysed. The results reveal how journalists can—and do—surveil social network users and their content via sophisticated, professional apps that are also utilised by the police and security forces. While journalists recognise the value of such apps in news work, they also have concerns, including about privacy and popularism. And although the participants in this study thought the apps they used could help with verification, there were warning signs that an over-reliance on the technology could develop, dulling journalists’ critical faculties

Towards Social Event Detection and Contextualisation for Journalists

Conference paperSocial media platforms have become an important source of information in course of a break- ing news event, such as natural calamity, political uproar, etc. News organisations and journal- ists are increasingly realising the value of information being propagated via social media. However, the sheer volume of the data produced on social media is overwhelming and manual inspection of this streaming data for finding, aggregation, and contextualising emerging event in a short time span is a day-to-day challenge by journalists and media organisations. It high- lights the need for better tools and methods to help them utilise this user generated information for news production. This paper addresses the above problem for journalists by proposing an event detection and contextualisation framework that receives an input stream of social media data and generates the likely events in the form of clusters along with a certain context.

Introducing Social Semantic Journalism

In the event of breaking news, a wealth of crowd-sourced data, in the form of text, video and image, becomesavailable on the Social Web. In order to incorporate this data into a news story, the journalist mustprocess, compile and verify content within a very short timespan. Currently this is done manually andis a time-consuming and labour-intensive process for media organisations. This paper proposes SocialSemantic Journalism as a solution to help those journalists and editors. Semantic metadata, natural languageprocessing (NLP) and other technologies will provide the framework for Social Semantic Journalismto help journalists navigate the overwhelming amount of UGC for detecting known and unknown newsevents, verifying information and its sources, identifying eyewitnesses and contextualising the event andnews coverage journalists will be able to bring their professional expertise to this increasingly overwhelminginformation environment. This paper describes a framework of technologies that can be employed byjournalists and editors to realise Social Semantic Journalism

Twitter journalism in ireland: sourcing and trust in the age of social media*

Twitter has been widely adopted into journalistic workflows, as it provides instant and widespread access to a plethora of content about breaking news events, while also serving to disseminate reporting on those events. The content on Twitter, however, poses several challenges for journalists, as it arrives unfiltered, full of noise, and at an alarming velocity. Building on the results of the first national survey of social media use in Irish newsrooms, this paper investigates the adoption of social media into journalistic workflows, journalists\u27 attitudes towards various aspects of social media, and the content and perspectives generated by these online communities. It particularly investigates how Twitter shapes the processes of sourcing and verification in newsrooms, and assesses how notions of trust factor into the adoption of the Twitter platform and content into these processes. The paper further analyses relationships between journalist profile and adopted practices and attitudes, and seeks to understand how Twitter operates in the current journalistic landscape. While this paper draws its data from a survey of journalists in Ireland, the analysis of the relationship between trust, sourcing, and verification reveals broader patterns about journalistic values, and how these values and practices may operate in the field of journalism as a whole

Where is the News Breaking? Towards a Location-based Event Detection Framework for Journalists

Conference paper (published) The rise of user-generated content (UCG) as a source of information in the journalistic lifecycle is driving the need for automated methods to detect, filter, contextualise and verify citizen reports of breaking news events. In this position paper we outline the technological challenges in incorporating UCG into news reporting and describe our proposed framework for exploiting UGC from social media for location-based event detection and filtering to reduce the workload of journalists covering breaking and ongoing news events. News organisations increasingly rely on manually curated UGC. Manual monitoring, filtering, verification and curation of UGC, however, is a time and effort consuming task, and our proposed framework takes a first step in addressing many of the issues surrounding these processes.

Towards Social Semantic Journalism

User-generated content has become a valuable journalistic tool for news coverage and production. This convergence of new and old media, however, poses several challenges to established news organisations. Social media sites produce a wealth of data in the form of text, images and video that must be processed, compiled and verified within a very short timespan before being incorporated into a news story. This unstructured data that lies scattered across the web can be formalised and organised into a ‘web of data’ by Semantic Web technologies. Specifically, Semantic Web technologies have the potential to formalise and integrate artifacts produced and shared across the Social Web. Social Semantic Journalism proposes the utilisation of Semantic Web technologies, and specifically Social Semantic Web ontologies such as FOAF and SIOC, in the process of news production. This potentially provides a journalistic tool to assist in finding, aggregating and verifying user-generated content for news production