Marco A. Palomino

Web‐based horizon scanning: concepts and practice

Purpose – In this review, the aim is first to define horizon scanning and then outline the general approach currently employed by many organisations using web‐based resources. It then aims to discuss the benefits and drivers of horizon scanning, to identify some organisations currently undertaking activities in the field, and explain in detail how the web‐based horizon scanning approach is implemented. The aim is then to conclude with a discussion of good practice and areas for further research.Design/methodology/approach – The basis for this review is a symposium held at the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in March 2010, where groups undertaking horizon scanning activities shared practices and reviewed the state of the art. Practitioners from both public sector and private organisations attending this symposium, as well as others, were invited to contribute to the manuscript, developing this as an iterative exercise over the last year.Findings – Structured processes of web‐based horizon scan...

SharpSpider: spidering the Web through Web services

Web search engines have become an indispensable utility for Internet users. In the near future, however, Web search engines will not only be expected to provide quality search results, but also to enable applications to search and exploit their index repositories directly. We present here SharpSpider, a distributed, C# spider designed to address the issues of scalability, decentralisation and continuity of a Web crawl. Fundamental to the design of SharpSpider is the publication of an API for use by other services on the network. Such an API grants access to a constantly refreshed index buiU after successive crawls of the Web.

The Online Dissemination of Nature–Health Concepts: Lessons from Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Relating to “Nature-Deficit Disorder”

Evidence continues to grow supporting the idea that restorative environments, green exercise, and nature-based activities positively impact human health. Nature-deficit disorder, a journalistic term proposed to describe the ill effects of people’s alienation from nature, is not yet formally recognized as a medical diagnosis. However, over the past decade, the phrase has been enthusiastically taken up by some segments of the lay public. Social media, such as Twitter, with its opportunities to gather “big data” related to public opinions, offers a medium for exploring the discourse and dissemination around nature-deficit disorder and other nature–health concepts. In this paper, we report our experience of collecting more than 175,000 tweets, applying sentiment analysis to measure positive, neutral or negative feelings, and preliminarily mapping the impact on dissemination. Sentiment analysis is currently used to investigate the repercussions of events in social networks, scrutinize opinions about products and services, and understand various aspects of the communication in Web-based communities. Based on a comparison of nature-deficit-disorder “hashtags” and more generic nature hashtags, we make recommendations for the better dissemination of public health messages through changes to the framing of messages. We show the potential of Twitter to aid in better understanding the impact of the natural environment on human health and wellbeing.

Evaluating Business Intelligence Gathering Techniques for Horizon Scanning Applications

Business intelligence systems exploit futures and foresight techniques to assist decision makers in complex and rapidly changing environments. Such systems combine elements of text and data mining, forecasting and optimisation. We are particularly interested in the development of horizon scanning applications, which involve the systematic search for incipient trends, opportunities, challenges and constraints that might affect the probability of achieving management goals. In this paper, we compare and contrast a couple of case studies that we have carried out in collaboration with Lloyds of London and RAL Space to evaluate the use of various information retrieval techniques to optimise the collection of Web-based information. Also, we discuss the implementation of potential improvements to our previous work which aim to develop a semi-automated horizon scanning system.

Instability in Search Engine Results: Lessons Learned in the Context of Horizon Scanning Applications

Horizon scanning, the systematic search for information to identify potential threats, risks, emerging issues and opportunities, has become an increasingly important part of strategic decision making. Although horizon scanning has its roots in the pre-electronic information era, it has blossomed with the availability of Web-based information. Dedicated analysts responsible for scanning the horizon make frequent use of search engines to retrieve information. Regrettably, the results yielded by popular search engines are often inconsistent and redundant. Thus, post processing heuristics have to be employed to select the most relevant data. This paper focusses on the first steps of this process, and analyses the result counts provided by different search engine interfaces in response to a set of queries meant to gather information about new and emerging trends.

Unsupervised extraction of keywords from news archives

We present a comparison of four unsupervised algorithms to automatically acquire the set of keywords that best characterise a particular multimedia archive: the Belga News Archive. Such keywords provide the basis of a controlled vocabulary for indexing the pictures in this archive. Our comparison shows that the most successful algorithm is TextRank, derived from Googles PageRank, which determines the importance of a word by the number of words with which it co-occurs, and the relative importance of those co-occurring words. Next most successful is information radius, originally used to estimate the overall semantic distance between two corpora, but here adapted to examine the contributions of individual words to that overall distance. Third most successful was the chi-square test, which determined which keywords were more typical of Belgas Archive than a representative corpus of English language. Finally, the least successful approach was the use of raw frequency, whereby the most frequent words were the most important ones, unless they were present in a stop-word list. All four algorithms are readily portable to other domains and languages, though TextRank has the advantage that it does not require a comparison corpus.

Comparison between SVM-Light, a search engine-based approach and the mediamill baselines for assigning concepts to video shot annotations

This paper describes work performed at the University of Sunderland as part of the EU-funded VITALAS project. Text feature vectors, extracted from the TRECVID video data set, were submitted to an SVM-light implementation of support vector machine, which aimed to label each video shot with the relevant concepts from the 101-concept MediaMill set. Sunderland also developed a search engine designed to match text queries derived from the test data against concept descriptors derived from the training data using the TF.IDF measure. The search engine-based approach outperformed SVM-light, but did not perform overall as well as the MediaMill baseline for text feature extraction. However, the search-engine approach is much simpler than the supervised learning approach of MediaMill, and did outperform the MediaMill baseline for 31 of the 101 concept categories.

Disability, social inclusion and the marketing of tourist attractions

ABSTRACT The participation of persons with a disability (PWDs) in tourism has received growing academic interest in recent years. This paper contributes to a reflection on how accessible tourism relates to the sustainable development paradigm. To investigate this relationship, it goes beyond the question of PWDs’ access to tourism services, and adopts an inclusiveness perspective. Inclusion is examined in terms of legislation, marketing and imagery, and representations of PWDs as consumers embedded within social units – and families in particular. These dimensions are explored empirically in a study of visitor attractions in Cornwall (England) based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of brochures and websites. The study shows that the marketing materials of Cornish visitor attractions mainly focus on access, and the imagery used largely projects quasi invisibility or provides ambiguous messages. Communication with PWDs rarely addresses the family unit, making the family tourism experience intangible in the pre-trip phase. These results point at weaker implementation of inclusiveness, which corroborates previous findings of watered down definitions of rights to tourism under neo-liberal ideologies and economic crises. The paper discusses implications for social inclusion and highlights avenues for future research.

An evaluation of concept suggestion strategies for professional multimedia archives

Choosing the optimal terms to represent a search engine query is not trivial, and may involve an iterative process such as relevance feedback, repeated unaided attempts by the user or the automatic suggestion of additional terms, which the user may select or reject. This is particularly true of a multimedia search engine which searches on concepts as well as user-input terms, since the user is unlikely to be familiar with all the system-known concepts. We propose three concept suggestion strategies: suggestion by normalised textual matching, by semantic similarity, and by the use of a similarity matrix. We have evaluated these three strategies by comparing machine suggestions with the suggestions produced by professional annotators, using the measures of micro- and macro- precision and recall. The semantic similarity strategy outperformed the use of a similarity matrix at a range of thresholds. Normalised textual matching, which is the simplest strategy, performed almost as well as the semantic similarity one on recall-based measures, and even better on precision-based and F-based measures.

Monitoring and Controlling Distributed Applications with Relocatable Objects

The Java programming language and its environment are highly regarded as suitable choices for the development and deployment of distributed applications. Portability, an object oriented approach, support for multi-threading programming and a special set of libraries for remote procedure calls, are some of the features that make Java an excellent choice for the implementation of distributed applications. A considerable number of projects on Java distributed systems have already been completed. Here we can list Charlotte, SuperWeb, Javelin, Javelin++, Java/DSM, Voyager and Babylon. Based on Java, the Babylon package [1] was designed to integrate into a single comprehensive system both new and previously researched ideas in Java distributed computing. It retains parts of the underlying mechanisms used in Ajents [2], a previous project from which Babylon took part of its source code. Babylon also has some innovative additions that are not currently supported by Java, such as remote object creation, remote class loading, asynchronous remote method invocation and object migration. From the point of view of application designers, Babylon can be deployed as a layer of middleware which facilitates the use of clusters of computational resources allowing selective migration of code-containing objects from one computational environment to another. From the point of view of programmers, Babylon can be seen as a collection of Java class libraries that provides the necessary software infrastructure to support straightforward access to information that is distributed, within organisations and all around the world. It is relevant to note that all of the Babylon class libraries are written in pure Java. Among other things, this means that Babylon can be executed on any standard Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and it is potentially open to a vast audience of programmers. Besides, the Babylon package contains some useful features that are not currently supported by Java. Consequently, it reduces the difficulty of writing distributed programs. Babylon is implemented using Java RMI. It has been shown, however, that Java RMI is very slow for high performance computing [4]. Most of the researchers in the field agree that it is inappropriate for interactive applications [3]. Given that the key features of Babylon are principally based on Java RMI, all the drawbacks and limitations of Java RMI are inherited by Babylon. The motivation behind this work is the submission of a contribution that eventually helps Babylon to become a better tool in the field of Java distributed object applications. To this end, we have developed graphical components to provide monitoring and management capabilities for a Babylon application. We have also made a number of technical extensions to the existing Babylon system, including upgrading it to the Java 2 security model, and we have adapted it to use a better implementation of RMI, because we believe that its dependency on Sun’s RMI represents a drawback. Due to space limitations, we cannot state in this document all the details of our work, but readers may wish to take a look at [5] for a comprehensive description of our investigation.