Extraction of ontology and semantic web information from online business reports

CAINES, Content Analysis and INformation Extraction System, employs an information extraction (IE) methodology to extract unstructured text from the Web. It can create an ontology and a Semantic Web. This research is different from traditional IE systems in that CAINES examines the syntactic and semantic relationships within unstructured text of online business reports. Using CAINES provides more relevant results than manual searching or standard keyword searching. Over most extraction systems, CAINES extensively uses information extraction from natural language, Key Words in Context (KWIC), and semantic analysis. A total of 21 online business reports, averaging about 100 pages long, were used in this study. Based on financial expert opinions, extraction rules were created to extract information, an ontology, and a Semantic Web of data from financial reports. Using CAINES, one can extract information about global and domestic market conditions, market condition impacts, and information about the business outlook. A Semantic Web was created from Merrill Lynch reports, 107,533 rows of data, and displays information regarding mergers, acquisitions, and business segment news between 2007 and 2009. User testing of CAINES resulted in recall of 85.91%, precision of 87.16%, and an F-measure of 86.46%. Speed with CAINES was also greater than manually extracting information. Users agree that CAINES quickly and easily extracts unstructured information from financial reports on the EDGAR database

Consumer Feedback: Does Rating Reflect Reviewers’ Feelings?

Consumer feedbacks have been widely used for product improvement. These consumer reviews revealcustomer sentiments (e.g., like/dislike, fulfilled/unfulfilled etc.) about products and the degree of sentiments aswell. These reviews are good sources to gauge customer feelings, which are important to make essentialbusiness decisions. In this research, we analyzed textual movie reviews semi-automatically using linguisticanalysis instead of using manual mechanisms. Generally, adjectives in text reviews express reviewers’ feelingsabout a product while adverbs (gradable) explain the degree of these feelings. Using a well-known moviereview database, we analyzed the pattern of adjectives and adverbs that appeared in reviewers’ comments. Wecompared the frequencies of these adjective and adverbial words with the symbolic ratings (A+ to F) of therespective reviews and found strong correlation between the positive/negative terms (adjectives and adverbs)embedded in the text and their corresponding symbolic ratings

Black Girls Coming of Age: Sexuality and Segregation in New Orleans, 1930-1954.

This dissertation explores sexuality in the lives of African American girls living in New Orleans during the late Jim Crow period. I investigate interracial sexual violence, which many black girls experienced and most feared. I also explore sexual mores and how girls negotiated between the pressures to live up to standards of purity with simultaneous racist representations of black women and girls as sexually promiscuous. And finally, I explore experiences of intimacy and love in black girls' lives. I argue that black girls in segregated New Orleans faced a double bind—on one side was the reality of Jim Crow violence; on the other, middle-class African Americans' expectations of purity and respectability. This project makes three main historiographical contributions. First, by centering the lives of black girls, my work uncovers the gendered violence of segregation. By considering a wide range of archival sources—including court documents, newspaper reports, police records, and delinquency home records—I make black female lives and suffering visible, and expose the links between segregation, sexuality and sexism. Second, the dissertation unearths the emotional violence of living in a legal and public culture that treated blacks as second class citizens. Such a project is crucial for uncovering not only the trauma of racial violence, but also for understanding the legacy of that violence today. Drawing on a close reading of social workers' reports, sociologists' interviews with children during the period, black girls' writing, photographs, and oral history interviews with women who grew up in New Orleans allows me to approach the elusive inner worlds of black girls. Third, this dissertation broadens understandings of urban histories of race relations by connecting methods from social history, cultural geography and cultural history—in order to reformulate how we think about a Jim Crow city. I argue that black girls' notion of self was highly dependent on their place in the urban geography. Overall, I seek to understand how segregation disciplined black girls' bodies at the same time that black girls carved out spaces of intimacy and pleasure in the face of racialized constraints.Ph.D.History & Women's StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64646/1/kisha_1.pd

A qualitative analysis of an ontology based issue resolution system for cyber attack management

Cyber-attacks are increasing at an alarming rate and the attackers have progressively improved in devising attacks towards specific targets. To further develop the area of cyber-attack communication, we propose an ontology based issue resolution system used to identify and defend against cyber-attacks. The issue resolution system (IRS) facilitates attack discovery and suggestive defenses for a small to medium sized organizations. We validate our IRS Ontology using qualitative study of security expert professionals and highlight future work intended to simulate the IRS in a virtual attack test environment

The Role of Enterprise Architecture in the Quest for IT Value

Organizations in virtually every industry are facing unprecedented pressures from many external forces. In an environment characterized by more regulatory mandates, more customer demands for better products and services, and an accelerated pace of technological change, some executive teams are turning to enterprise architecture (EA) to help their organizations better leverage their IT investments. The results of our study show there is a positive relationship between the stage of EA maturity and three areas of IT value: (1) ability to manage external relationships, (2) ability to lower operational costs, and (3) strategic agility. We also found positive relationships between EA maturity and improved business-IT alignment and risk management. Although these findings are based on responses from 140 CIOs working in a single industry that has been slower than others to leverage IT (U.S. hospitals), we believe they provide useful guidelines to help organizations in all industries increase the value from their IT investments

TeleEducation Initiatives for Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of the African Virtual University in Kenya

A journal article by Dr. Clive Tsuma Katiba, an adjunct faculty at USIU-A