Arno Scharl

Diffusion and success factors of mobile marketing

Mobile marketing offers direct communication with consumers, anytime and anyplace. This paper reviews mobile marketing and then investigates the most successful form of mobile communication, short message services (SMS), via a quantitative content analysis of the Fortune Global 500 Web sites and qualitative interviews with European experts. The content analysis explores the diffusion of SMS technology and sheds light on mobile marketing campaigns of large multinational organizations. Combining a literature review with results from the qualitative survey leads to a conceptual model of successful SMS advertising. The paper closes with future research avenues for this emerging marke ting tool.

Quantitive Evaluation of Web site Content and Structure

Describes an approach automatically to classify and evaluate publicly accessible World Wide Web sites. The suggested methodology is equally valuable for analyzing content and hypertext structures of commercial, educational and non‐profit organizations. Outlines a research methodology for model building and validation and defines the most relevant attributes of such a process. A set of operational criteria for classifying Web sites is developed. The introduced software tool supports the automated gathering of these parameters, and thereby assures the necessary “critical mass” of empirical data. Based on the preprocessed information, a multi‐methodological approach is chosen that comprises statistical clustering, textual analysis, supervised and non‐supervised neural networks and manual classification for validation purposes.

An investigation and conceptual model of SMS marketing

Mobile marketing, also known as wireless marketing, promises vast opportunities. Still in an experimental phase, businesses have little experience using this new marketing tool. Mobile services offer companies powerful marketing potential via direct communication with consumers, anytime and anywhere, but little research on this subject exists. This paper discusses Short Message Services (SMS), which belong to the first and most successful forms of mobile data transmission. Based on a literature review and exploratory qualitative research, this paper defines mobile marketing, describes its most popular application, text messaging, introduces a conceptual model of success factors for implementing mobile marketing, and proposes future research avenues.

The Geospatial Web

This volume emphasizes the applications and implications of the Geospatial Web and the role of contextual knowledge in shaping the emerging network society. There is a clear focus on applied geospatial aspects. The book has contributions from a very active research community. Containing chapters from renowned researchers and practitioners, this volume will be invaluable to all interested in this field.

An Integrated Approach to Measure Web Site Effectiveness in the European Hotel Industry

This study employs a novel method of Web content extraction and analysis to investigate the evolving competitive landscape in an important business-to-consumer (B2C) area: travel and tourism. Findings from a comprehensive Web mining endeavor and a supplier survey shed light on the effectiveness of tourism Web sites. Important dimensions of the automated measurement are ease of navigation, interactive elements such as reservation and booking features, volume of textual and graphical information, number of available languages, and the textual diversity of documents. Precise textual information and interactive features are crucial to the success of a hotel Web site, measured in terms of tourists’ awareness, electronic inquiries, and online bookings. The article discusses differences between four European destinations and the implications of benchmarks for Web site management.

Extracting and Grounding Contextualized Sentiment Lexicons

A context-aware approach based on machine learning and lexical analysis identifies ambiguous terms and stores them in contextualized sentiment lexicons, which ground the terms to concepts corresponding to their polarity.

Enriching semantic knowledge bases for opinion mining in big data applications

This paper presents a novel method for contextualizing and enriching large semantic knowledge bases for opinion mining with a focus on Web intelligence platforms and other high-throughput big data applications. The method is not only applicable to traditional sentiment lexicons, but also to more comprehensive, multi-dimensional affective resources such as SenticNet. It comprises the following steps: (i) identify ambiguous sentiment terms, (ii) provide context information extracted from a domain-specific training corpus, and (iii) ground this contextual information to structured background knowledge sources such as ConceptNet and WordNet. A quantitative evaluation shows a significant improvement when using an enriched version of SenticNet for polarity classification. Crowdsourced gold standard data in conjunction with a qualitative evaluation sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of the concept grounding, and on the quality of the enrichment process.

Crowdsourcing research opportunities: lessons from natural language processing

Although the field has led to promising early results, the use of crowdsourcing as an integral part of science projects is still regarded with skepticism by some, largely due to a lack of awareness of the opportunities and implications of utilizing these new techniques. We address this lack of awareness, firstly by highlighting the positive impacts that crowdsourcing has had on Natural Language Processing research. Secondly, we discuss the challenges of more complex methodologies, quality control, and the necessity to deal with ethical issues. We conclude with future trends and opportunities of crowdsourcing for science, including its potential for disseminating results, making science more accessible, and enriching educational programs.

Between Flexibility and Automation: An Evaluation of Web Technology from a Business Process Perspective

Web information systems hold great potential to streamline and improve business-to-business-transactions. However, not all Web technologies are equally suited to support the different business processes throughout their distinct phases. In this paper, we outline a framework to improve the conceptual design of Web-based information systems to support business-to-business transactions. The framework consists of three parts. The first part delineates the different phases of commercial transaction processes, part two introduces a model to evaluate process infrastructures, and part three categorizes Web technologies and underlying communication models. By combining the three parts, we can match available systems with the requirements of transaction processes in a structured way. This integration allows improving long-term process efficiency, and helps to identify areas where the information system functionality is currently inadequate.

Games with a purpose for social networking platforms

The online games market has matured in recent years. It is now a multi-billion dollar business with hundreds of millions players worldwide. At the same time, social networking platforms have witnessed unprecedented growth rates and increasingly offer developer interfaces to leverage and extend their built-in core functionality. Benefiting from these trends, games with a purpose are a proven way of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds to address tasks that are trivial for humans but still not solvable by computer algorithms in a satisfying manner. This paper presents an application framework to develop interactive games with a purpose on top of social networking platforms, suitable for deployment in both mobile and Web-based environments. A set of analytic tools helps to evaluate the results and to pre-process the gathered data for use in external applications.