A New Look at Geography of the World

The rapid expansion of Web content has raised numerous concerns relating to reliable and meaningful information delivery. What users actually need is information that suits the task and context at hand, from a reliable knowledge source, with an assurance of information objectivity and integrity. In this respect, most of the numerous web sites that offer geographical information have, serious drawbacks: Often, advertisements are intermixed. It is hard to tell if information is slanted or censored. Facts presented are usually taken from one single source and not checked against others. Also, most information is of numeric nature. This is particularly true of databases like the one provided by the UN, the Worldbank, Wolfram Alpha, DBpedia, etc. A modest mixture of textual information and a selection of pictures are found in Factbook, Wikipedia, Britannica or Factfish, and maps are employed as in Open Street View, Google Street View, or Geonames. However, cultural or country-specific issues are never addressed. We have started what we believe is the first serious attempt to provide a site that tries to overcome some of those weaknesses in geographyoftheworld.org. Without reinventing the wheel, i.e. using information from various sources as far as copyright issues permit, we are building a site that beyond presenting numerical data we try to consolidate and verify such data and we dig deep into the hearts of countries by mentioning cultural aspects, stories typical for a certain region and a range of pictures with solid description showing the uniqueness of parts of the world

How Social Networks will Change Research

Social Networks have become an integral aspect of our lives in recent years. Developments such as the small-world phenomenon, social curation, and eCommunities are evolving as noteworthy game-changers in an emergent web ecosystem. This paper describes how the way of conducting academic research will change when the resulting omnipresent communication and sharing technology is taken into account. Researchers will have no choice but to embrace SN technologies to fully exploit the true potential of the emerging ecosystem

Mashups : Emerging application development paradigm for a digital journal

The WWW is currently experiencing a revolutionary growth due to its increasing participative community software applications. This paper highlights an emerging application development paradigm on the WWW, called mashup. As blogs have enabled anyone to become a publisher, mashups stimulate web development by allowing anyone to combine existing data to develop web applications. Current applications of mashups include tracking of events such as crime, hurricanes, earthquakes, meta-search integration of data and media feeds, interactive games, and as an organizer for web resources. The implications of this emerging web integration and structuring paradigm remains yet to be explored fully. This paper describes mashups from a number of angles, highlighting current developments while providing sufficient illustrations to indicate its potential implications. It also highlights the role of mashups in complementing and enhancing digital journals by providing insights into the quality academic content, extent of coverage, and the enabling of expanded services. We present pioneering initiatives for the Journal of Universal Computer Science in our efforts to harness the collective intelligence of a collaborative scholarly network

Feature Selection Based on Semantics

The need for an automated text categorization system is spurred on by the extensive increase of digital documents. This paper looks into feature selection, one of the main processes in text categorization. The feature selection approach is based on semantics by employing WordNet [1]. The proposed WordNet-based feature selection approach makes use of synonymous nouns and dominant senses in selecting terms that are reflective of a category’s content. Experiments are carried out using the top ten most populated categories of the Reuters-21578 dataset. Results have shown that statistical feature selection approaches, Chi-Square and Information Gain, are able to produce better results when used with the WordNet-based feature selection approach. The use of the WordNet-based feature selection approach with statistical weighting results in a set of terms that is more meaningful compared to the terms chosen by the statistical approaches. In addition, there is also an effective dimensionality reduction of the feature space when the WordNet-based feature selection method is used

Integrated Multimodal Copy-Paste Checking

Although the use of advanced computing and communications technology has made learning a significantly richer experience for learners, it also introduces greater ease in committing academic cheating. There is a growing increase of internet usage in educational communities. Powerful search engines and media gateways gives an ease of access to wide spreading and different types of information sources, this in turn reduces the need for learners to perform diligent research or study. A learner can easily copy information, found on the internet, relevant to the task at hand. E-learning systems would then need to incorporate extended functionalities to enable multimodal copy-paste checking. Besides the mere detection of text copy-paste activities, there is a need to determine deeper similarity relations in text and various other media formats. Furthermore, the introduction of a facility to monitor and check the student's ways of searching, reading and writing can improve the learning process. Our previous paper [1] describes the architecture and design of an integrated Copy-Paste system aimed to provide a platform addressing these concerns. This paper extends the work and shows our pioneering explorations in extending student modeling capability of e-learning systems. We discuss the use of layered similarity assessment techniques to add value to conventional copy-paste detection systems

Coping with the copy-paste-syndrome

The Copy-Paste Syndrome describes a situation whereby students at all levels are becoming more and more reliant on wide-range of easily-available digital content. This is a universal problem that has to be addressed effectively, especially with the revolutionary development of the Web. Weber (Weber, 2006) refers to it as the Google-Copy-Paste-Syndrome, which according to him will drastically affect the quality of scientific publications, leading to a degradation of the quality of life. The expansion of digital content together with an emerging participative social learning (and E-learning) ecosystem could result in even more devastating implications. As opportunities for the proliferation of such infringements becomes widespread, a holistic solution is required combining an institutional approach together with the application of viable technologies. This paper describes an E-learning ecosystem combined with a copy-paste detection suite to comprehensively address the emerging phenomenon

Data Mining is becoming Extremely Powerful, but Dangerous

Data Mining describes a technology that discovers non-trivial hidden patterns in a large collection of data. Although, this technology has a tremendous impact on our lives, the invaluable contribution of this invisible technology often goes unnoticed. This paper addresses the various forms of data mining shedding light on its expanding role in enriching our life. Emerging forms of data mining are able to perform multidimensional mining on a wide variety of heterogeneous data sources, to provide solutions to many problems. This paper highlights the advantages and disadvantages that arise from the ever-expanding scope of the data mining. Data Mining augments human intelligence by equipping us with the wealth of knowledge, empowering us to perform our daily task more effectively and efficiently. As the mining scope and capacity increases, users and organisations are now more willing (acceptable) to compromise privacy as a trade-off for gaining peace of mind and additional comforts. The huge data stores of the master miners allow them to gain deep insights about individual lifestyles, social and behavioural patterns and business and financial trends resulting in a disproportionate power distributions. Is it then possible to constrain the scope of mining while delivering the promise of better life