Jong Woo Kim

Capturing and reusing knowledge in engineering change management: A case of automobile development

The development of complex products, such as automobiles, involves engineering changes that frequently require redesigning or altering the products. Although it has been found that efficient management of knowledge and collaboration in engineering changes is crucial for the success of new product development, extant systems for engineering changes focus mainly on storing documents related to the engineering changes or simply automating the approval processes, while the knowledge that is generated from collaboration and decision-making processes may not be captured and managed easily. This consequently limits the use of the systems by the participants in engineering change processes. This paper describes a model for knowledge management and collaboration in engineering change processes, and based on the model, builds a prototype system that demonstrates the model’s strengths. We studied a major Korean automobile company to analyze the automobile industry’s unique requirements regarding engineering changes. We also developed domain ontologies from the case to facilitate knowledge sharing in the design process. For achieving efficient retrieval and reuse of past engineering changes, we used a case-based reasoning (CBR) with a concept-based similarity measure.

Agent-based adaptive travel planning system in peak seasons

Abstract With the wide spread of Internet, intelligent systems to support travel planning have been progressed during last decade. The current on-line travel support systems, however, have limits in their capabilities to adapt to the changes in travel plans. When the preferred travel plan is not available, especially during peak seasons, a traveler needs to re-plan by compromising his or her preferences, which requires time consuming and cumbersome efforts. This paper introduces an adaptive travel planning system with intelligent agent that can adapt to the dynamics of travel plans. This system consists of an adaptive travel-planning model, which is served as knowledge for agent to find alternatives and choose the best one, and a collaboration mechanism between the agents. This system provides more acceptable travel plans to travelers while reducing the risk of having no ticket in hand. The usefulness of the system is illustrated using a specific travel planning scenario.

A hybrid classification method using error pattern modeling

This paper presents a new hybrid classification method using error pattern modeling to improve classification accuracy when the data type of a target variable is binary. The proposed method tries to increase prediction accuracy by combining two different supervised learning methods. That is, the algorithm extracts a subset of training cases that are predicted inconsistently by two methods, and the extracted data subset is used to learn when each method works better. The learned discrimination model is called error pattern models and is used to merge the prediction results of two different methods to generate final prediction. The proposed method has been tested using 13 real-world data sets. The analysis results show that the performance of the proposed method is superior to other hybrid methods and the single usage of existing classification methods such as artificial neural networks and decision tree induction. In particular when prediction inconsistency ratio of the two methods is high, the proposed hybrid method provides significant improvement of prediction accuracy.

Understanding collaborative filtering parameters for personalized recommendations in e-commerce

AbstractnCollaborative Filtering (CF) is a popular method for personalizing product recommendations for e-Commerce and customer relationship management (CRM). CF utilizes the explicit or implicit product evaluation ratings of customers to develop personalized recommendations. However, there has been no in-depth investigation of the parameters of CF in relation to the number of ratings on the part of an individual customer and the total number of ratings for an item.nnWe empirically investigated the relationships between these two parameters and CF performance, using two publicly available data sets, EachMovie and MovieLens. We conducted three experiments. The first two investigated the relationship between a particular customer’s number of ratings and CF recommendation performance. The third experiment evaluated the relationship between the total number of ratings for a particular item and CF recommendation performance. We found that there are ratings thresholds below which recommendation performance increases monotonically, i.e., when the numbers of customer and item ratings are below threshold levels, CF recommendation performance is affected. In addition, once rating numbers surpass threshold levels, the value of each rating decreases. These results may facilitate operational decisions when applying CF in practice.n

Semantic constraint specification and verification of ebXML business process specifications

Abstract Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML) Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) supports the specification of the set of elements required to configure a runtime system in order to execute a set of ebXML business transactions. The BPSS is available in two stand-alone representations; a UML version and an XML version. Due to the limitations of UML notations and XML syntax, however, the current ebXML BPSS specification is insufficient to formally specify semantic constraints of modeling elements. In this study, we propose a classification scheme for BPSS semantic constraints, and describe how to represent those semantic constraints formally using Object Constraint Language. As a way to verify a particular Business Process Specification (BPS) with formal semantic constraint modeling, we suggest a rule-based approach to represent the formal semantic constraints, and describe a detail mechanism to apply the rule-based specified constraints to the BPS in a prototype implementation.

Research on Adoption of Mobile Virtual Community in China and Korea

Due to the widespread development of mobile internet, more and more users will transfer to mobile virtual community from web community. This study attempts to understand factors affecting the adoption of mobile virtual community in addition to those affecting other mobile services. An adoption model that reflects the characteristics of mobile virtual community is developed. The model consists of the factors in virtual community and common mobile services and is tested both in China and Korea. Our findings show that perceived cost, perceived ease of use and social influence will affect intention to use significantly. Social capital and trust are crucial factors affecting perceived usefulness in mobile virtual community. We also find that the adoption patterns in China and Korea have great differences. In Korea adopters put more weight on perceived cost, perceived ease of use and perceived similarity, while in China adopters put more weight on perceived playfulness and familiarity.

Communication, Opponents, and Clan Performance in Online Games: A Social Network Approach

Online gamers form clans voluntarily to play together and to discuss their real and virtual lives. Although these clans have diverse goals, they seek to increase their rank in the game community by winning more battles. Communications among clan members and battles with other clans may influence the performance of a clan. In this study, we compared the effects of communication structure inside a clan, and battle networks among clans, with the performance of the clans. We collected battle histories, posts, and comments on clan pages from a Korean online game, and measured social network indices for communication and battle networks. Communication structures in terms of density and group degree centralization index had no significant association with clan performance. However, the centrality of clans in the battle network was positively related to the performance of the clan. If a clan had many battle opponents, the performance of the clan improved.

Feature reduction for product recommendation in internet shopping malls

One of the widely used methods for product recommendation in internet storefronts is matching product features with target customer profiles. When using this method, it is very important to choose a suitable subset of features for recommendation efficiency and performance, which, however, has not been rigorously researched so far. In this paper, we utilise a dataset collected from a virtual shopping experiment in a Korean internet book shopping mall to compare several popular methods of feature selection from other disciplines for product recommendation: the vector-space model, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF), the Mutual Information (MI) method and the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The application of SVD showed the best performance in the analysis results.

A Comparative Study of Mobile Services among China, Korea and Japan

Due to the widespread use of cellular phones, various kinds of mobile services have been introduced to improve users’ convenience, utilization, and entertainment. Since differences exist in technological infrastructures, government policies, cultures, and competitive landscapes, the configurations and utilization of mobile services vary in different countries. In this paper, we describe the differences of mobile services in China, Korea, and Japan. We also discuss the reasons that may have caused such differences.

Metadata Ontology Design for B2B Business Process Registries

B2B registries are information systems to register B2B related business information such as companies` profiles, business documents, business processes, and services and to provide query facilities to find information about potential business partners. Focusing on the design of the registry for B2B business processes, in this paper, a metadata ontology is designed to register B2B business processes. In practice, there are several competitive business process definition languages such as ebXML BPSS (Business Process Specification Schema), WSBPEL (Web Service Business Process Execution Language), BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), and so on. In order to register heterogeneous business processes based on different representation frameworks, the proposed metadata ontology consists of three layers, common metadata, language-specific metadata, and interrelationship metadata. To show the usefulness of the proposed metadata ontology, two examples which are represented by ebXML BPSS and WSBPEL respectively are described in order to show how the proposed metadata ontology is used to registry B2B business processes. To implement the proposed metadata ontology using ebXML registry, metadata mapping scheme to ebRIM (ebXML Registry Information Model) is also suggested.