Shah Khusro

Semantics discovery in social tagging systems: A review

Web 2.0 has brought many collaborative and novel applications which transformed the web as a medium and resulted in its exponential growth. Tagging systems are one of these killer applications. Tags are in free-form but represent the link between objective information and users’ cognitive information. However, tags have ambiguity problem reducing precision. Hence search and retrieval pose a challenge on folksonomy systems which have flat, unstructured, non-hierarchical organization with unsupervised vocabulary. We present a brief survey of different approaches for adding semantics in folksonomies thus bringing structure and precision in search and navigation. We did comparative analysis to estimate the significance of each source of semantics. Then, we have categorized the approaches in a systematic way and summarized the feature set support. Based on the survey we end up with recommendations. Our survey and conclusion will prove to be relevant and beneficial for engineers and designers aiming to design and maintain well structured folksonomy with precise search and navigation results.

Recommender Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Research Opportunities

A recommender system is an Information Retrieval technology that improves access and proactively recommends relevant items to users by considering the users’ explicitly mentioned preferences and objective behaviors. A recommender system is one of the major techniques that handle information overload problem of Information Retrieval by suggesting users with appropriate and relevant items. Today, several recommender systems have been developed for different domains however, these are not precise enough to fulfil the information needs of users. Therefore, it is necessary to build high quality recommender systems. In designing such recommenders, designers face several issues and challenges that need proper attention. This paper investigates and reports the current trends, issues, challenges, and research opportunities in developing high-quality recommender systems. If properly followed, these issues and challenges will introduce new research avenues and the goal towards fine-tuned and high-quality recommender systems can be achieved.

On methods and tools of table detection, extraction and annotation in PDF documents

Table detection, extraction and annotation have been an important research problem for years. To handle this issue, different approaches have been designed for different types of documents. Among these PDF is a widely used format for preserving and presenting different types of documents. We investigate the state of the art in table detection, extraction and annotation in PDF documents. Because of varying table structural anatomy, the state of the art in table-related research enumerates a number of approaches that are critically and analytically investigated for identifying their strengths and limitations as well as for making recommendations for further improvement. An evaluation framework is contributed that compares different information extraction tools that may be used in table detection, extraction and annotation. We found very limited attention towards these aspects in books, especially books in PDF format. There is no searching solution that can find books having tables that are semantically related to a table in a given book.

Confluence of social network, social question and answering community, and user reputation model for information seeking and experts generation

Social question and answering (Q&A) is one of the most effective approaches to knowledge acquisition using information seeking and collaboration. Most modern social Q&A systems use a static points-based user reputation model, which has the effect of diminishing the value of experts. In order to overcome this issue, we have developed a dynamic points-based user reputation model that takes user rating and social network analysis as input. The impact weight of each relation and user ratings are not static but are dependent on the current level of asker and answerer and on the difficulty level of the question. We propose a novel social Q&A platform that is the confluence of different features of social network, social Q&A, and the dynamic points-based user reputation model. The beta version of the system was evaluated by conducting a clinical study for 4 months in different academic environments. The results show that the proposed social Q&A outperforms the available static points-based social Q&A systems in representing the actual user reputation with an increased user satisfaction.

A distortion based technique for preserving privacy in OLAP data cube

This paper is about privacy preservation of the data in OLAP data cube. Data cube is a multidimensional view of a database, which helps in analysis of data from different perspectives. Preserving privacy of individuals data while providing all data available for the analysis is one of the main challenges for OLAP systems. Because legitimate queries on aggregated values lead to the inference of individuals data or sensitive data. We propose a data perturbation technique called uniformly adjusted distortion, which initially distorts one cell and then uniformly distributes this distortion in the whole data cube. This uniform distribution not only preserves the aggregates but also provides maximum accuracy with range sum queries and high availability.

In Search of a Semantic Book Search Engine on the Web: Are We There Yet?

Books being a valuable source of knowledge and learning, have always been searched for on the Web. Traditional Web Information Retrieval (IR) techniques of searching and ranking are applied for this purpose. These techniques, however, are basically designed for dealing with hyperlinked collections of rich text in the form of web pages. Books are inherently different from web pages and the traditional Web IR techniques do not account for their well-organized structure and the logically connected content. Book searching solutions currently available on the Web and in other digital environments, however, do not exploit these implicit semantics resulting in not satisfying the requirements of all stakeholders including readers, authors, publishers, and librarians. These semantics hidden in the well thought out structure and the logical connections in book contents are only visible to human beings. The position put forward here is that most of the available searching solutions treat books as plaintext collections leading to inaccurate and imprecise book search results. Ways and means must, therefore, be found to treat books differently from other web documents and to use their structural semantics and logical connections in the content for searching, ranking and recommendations. Development of comprehensive book structure ontology will help in harvesting these implicit semantics. Similarly, in order to fulfill information needs of the readers, different domain-level ontologies are required so that book contents can be conceptually connected and be made machine ‘understandable’. Moreover, tables in a book consist of structured data and are a rich source of semantics. Similarly, the context of images and figures may be exploited for relating contents within and across books. Discovery and the subsequent utilization of these semantics in book IR process will result in more precise and accurate systems and to the satisfaction of all stakeholders.

A Touch Sensitive Keypad Layout for Improved Usability of Smartphones for the Blind and Visually Impaired Persons

Blind users face a number of challenges in performing common operations of text-entry, text selection, and text manipulation on smartphones. The existing keypad layouts make it difficult for the users to easily operate a touch screen device even for entry-level activities. This necessitates the need for customizing the current keypad and dialer to enable a blind user to perform common activities of making a call, sending and receiving SMS messages and e-mails and browsing internet without visual feedback. Based on our prior study on screen division layouts, this paper proposes and evaluates a dialer and keyboard for blind users of a smartphone. The proposed keypad was tested on selected groups of blind users from both the countries where the research was performed. They were initially trained on using the proposed keypad. Their experiences were then recorded using interviews and observation. The responses were then tested and analyzed using standard statistical tests. The results were then compared with the existing ordinary and QWERTY keypads. These results show that the proposed keypad and dialer has a gentle learning curve and results in minimum typing errors thus reducing cognitive load on the blind user.

POEM: Practical ontology engineering model for semantic web ontologies

Abstract Sundown of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the World Wide Web. A decade later, semantic web (SW) envisioned enriching of web-accessible information and services with machine-processable semantics to solve the problems of information management and sharing which are aroused by the success of the web. However, success of the SW largely depends on the availability of formal ontologies for representing and structuring information in different domains. To facilitate web ontology engineering (OE), methodologies are proposed by the researchers since years. However, OE particularly web OE is still immature and none of the methodologies is standardized for web OE projects as yet. This paper presents an evolutionary SW ontology engineering methodology called POEM. POEM presents a complete methodology comprising of various phases for performing conceptualization, designing, implementation, evaluation, and project management tasks. POEM exploits and incorporates the large experiences from the widely used software engineering standards to make the methodology more realistic and provide greater functionality. Due to its broad nature, POEM has the potential applicability in a wider range of OE projects. Comparison of POEM with other OE methodologies has ascertained POEM as more advantageous and easy methodology for SW ontology engineering.

Structural modeling and analysis of dengue-mediated inhibition of interferon signaling pathway.

Dengue virus (DENV) belongs to the family Flaviviridae and can cause major health problems worldwide, including dengue fever and dengue shock syndrome. DENV replicon in human cells inhibits interferon α and β with the help of its non-structural proteins. Non-structural protein 5 (NS5) of DENV is responsible for the proteasome-mediated degradation of signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) 2 protein, which has been implicated in the development of resistance against interferon-mediated antiviral effect. This degradation of STAT2 primarily occurs with the help of E3 ubiquitin ligases. Seven in absentia homologue (SIAH) 2 is a host protein that can mediate the ubiquitination of proteins and is known for its interaction with NS5. In this study, comprehensive computational analysis was performed to characterize the protein-protein interactions between NS5, SIAH2, and STAT2 to gain insight into the residues and sites of interaction between these proteins. The objective of the study was to structurally characterize the NS5-STAT2, SIAH2-STAT2, and NS5-SIAH2 interactions along with the determination of the possible reaction pattern for the degradation of STAT2. Docking and physicochemical studies indicated that DENV NS5 may first interact with the host SIAH2, which can then proceed towards binding with STAT2 from the side of SIAH2. These implications are reported for the first time and require validation by wet-lab studies.

Social question and answer sites: the story so far

Purpose Social question and answer (SQA) site is one of the factors that boosted up and popularized the vision of social web. It enables community members to post highly valued answers to globally asked questions and information seekers to grab intellectual information in a contextual, concise, and meaningful format at the cost of investing a few minutes. The purpose of this paper is to present a common architecture, history, and a comprehensive review of such sites. Design/methodology/approach A critical and analytical investigation of the state-of-the-art SQA sites and relevant literature has been carried out with the intention to explore the noticeable features of such sites. Findings By studying relevant literature, and analysing a number of existing systems, a number of research challenges are identified and a generic architecture of SQA sites is contributed. Practical implications The review contributes a comprehensive knowledge about SQA systems and aims to be helpful to new researchers who want to get a broad picture of SQA systems on a single platform. The domain is in its infancy and requires tremendous efforts from the research community to explore its salient aspects with respect to the human world. Originality/value The study inspects SQA sites on a large scale and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, future research challenges, and a generic architecture of SQA sites.