Shun Shiramatsu

Discourse Analysis of Public Debates Using Corpus Linguistic Methodologies

The aim of this study is to develop a computational method of discourse analysis based on corpus semantics. The objective is to achieve an accurate understanding of the debate content and structure through hypotheses generation. As for verifying the hypotheses, the topic extraction and semantic similarity evaluation from the public debate minute corpus is examined by using a multimethod which includes TFIDF, T-VSM, and MDS. The main issue of public debate and the inconsistency level between participants’ utterance could be described by using the method. The methodology presented in this study is applied to a case example. Finally, the applicability of the proposed methodology to practical debates is discussed.

An e-Participation support system for regional communities based on linked open data, classification and clustering

In this paper, we present an e-Participation Web system for various platforms and mobile phones, based on linked open data, classification and clustering. The system aims at supporting citizen e-Participation in ongoing regional debates by gathering and openly publishing news and opinions from the Web for easy comprehension and commenting. Our study helps us define relevant evaluation criteria for an adequate citizen discussion system in the new context of open government, the Web, and mobile computing. We present the system, O2, and its application citispe@k, as well as its underlying components: ontology structure, classification and clustering. We then conduct a comparison with existing systems and find that our system is a better approach for efficient citizen e-participation when compared to current existing systems.

A Real-Time Collaborative Mechanism for Editing a Web Page and Its Applications

We showed WFE, a real-time collaborative editing (RTCE) mechanism, in which a group of people can edit a web page on a web browser while members of the group share editing contents in real-time. In addition, we proposed applying WFE to a cloud computing environment, and we call the applied application WFE-S. The aim is to improve the system to have high scalability, elasticity, high responsiveness, and free it from maintenance. In this paper, we indicate further detailed implementation of WFE-S and Web applications using WFE-S. We showed that WFE-S enables us to make it easy to develop collaborative work systems as Web applications.

A Goal Matching Service for Facilitating Public Collaboration Using Linked Open Data

Inter-organizational collaboration in the public sphere is essentially important to address sustainability problems in contemporary regional societies. To facilitate public collaboration, we are developing a Web application for sharing public issues and their solutions as public goals. Since participating in abstract or general goals is more difficult than concrete or specific ones, our system provides a functionality to break down individual public goals into concrete subgoals. Our Web application, GoalShare, is based on a linked open dataset of public goals that are linked with titles, participants, subgoals, related issues, related articles, and related geographic regions. GoalShare recommends public goals and users on the basis of similarity calculations taking into account not only surficial and semantic features but also contextual features extracted from subgoals and supergoals. We conducted experiments to investigate the effects of contextual features in subgoals and supergoals. Moreover, we conducted a trial workshop with GoalShare in Ogaki city to improve system design through actual use.

A Fast Synchronization Mechanism for Collaborative Web Applications Based on HTML5

We are developing a collaborative web application for editing PDF documents using web browsers. Our system enables users to edit the same document in real-time. Users can share annotations on papers in real-time on web browsers. One of the advantages of our system is very high availability. Users only need to have their own web browsers. To improve the usability of our system, we need to consider synchronization delay. Synchronization delay consists of network delay and drawing delay. Our system draws PDF files by using JavaScript, it is not fast enough for real-time collaborative editing. We propose a new synchronization method using Canvas API to reduce drawing delay. We show how to implement a real-time collaborative editing system by using the method. We present evaluation results that indicate the method is suited for collaborative web applications.

Approaches to Assessing Public Concerns: Building Linked Data for Public Goals and Criteria Extracted from Textual Content

The importance of public involvement in Japanese regional societies is increasing because they currently face complicated and ongoing social issues due to the post-maturity stage of these societies. Since citizens who have beneficial awareness or knowledge are not always experts on relevant social issues, assessing and sharing public concerns are needed to reduce barriers to public participation. We propose two approaches to assess public concerns. The first is building a linked open data set by extracting public goals for a specific social issue aimed at by citizens or agents from articles or public opinions. This paper deals with hierarchical goals and subgoals for recovery and revitalization from the Great East Japan Earthquake manually extracted from related articles. The data set can be used for developing services to match citizens and agents who aim at similar goals to facilitate collaboration. The second approach is building a linked data set by extracting assessment criteria for a specific social issue from public opinions. This paper deals with candidate terms that potentially represent such criteria for a specific public project automatically extracted from clusters of citizens’ opinions. The data set can be used as evidence for policy-making about the target project.

A Real-Time Collaborative Web Page Editing System WFE-S Based on Cloud Computing Environment

We are developing WFE, a system for Real-Time Collaborative Editing (RTCE) for existing Web pages. We aim to enable several users to perform simultaneous modifications on existing Web pages in their browsers, while modified contents are reflected to other users in real-time. In this paper, we present the application of WFE to a cloud computing environment as well as its advantages. The environment chosen is Google App Engine, which is a platform for developing Web applications. Our comparison experiments show that we can achieve this by using push technology to perform synchronization.

Structuring Japanese Regional Information Gathered from the Web as Linked Open Data for Use in Concern Assessment

We are developing an eParticipation web platform based on Linked Open Data that targets regional communities in Japan. To increase transparency and public participation, we aim to utilize web contents related to target regions for sharing public concerns among citizens, government officials, and experts. We have designed a Linked Open Data set called SOCIA (Social Opinions and Concerns for Ideal Argumentation) to structure regional web contents (e.g. regional news articles, microblog posts, and minutes of city council meetings) and utilize them for eParticipation and concern assessment. The web contents are semi-automatically structured by our text mining system, Sophia, on the basis of regions and events extracted from news articles on the web. Minutes of city council meetings stored in SOCIA are annotated with discourse salience in order to visualize topic transitions in a meeting transcript. We also developed a prototype debate support system called citispe@k that uses SOCIA to help citizens share their concerns. Users can submit agendas, ideas, questions, and answers by referencing the structured regional information in SOCIA. Moreover, they can annotate SOCIA data with tags representing criteria for assessing concerns or utterance intentions.

Towards Continuous Collaboration on Civic Tech Projects: Use Cases of a Goal Sharing System Based on Linked Open Data

Civic hackathon is a participatory event for prototyping of innovative services through collaboration between citizens and engineers towards addressing social issues. Although continuous contributions are needed for improving the prototypes and for applying them to social issues, participants frequently stop contributions after the hackathon due to their day job. To address this problem, we applied our Web system, called GoalShare, which gathers linked open data LOD of hierarchical goals to address social issues, to civic hackathons held in the city of Nagoya in Japan. We compared goal structures between two situations. The results showed that goal structures input by team members themselves with enough instruction time were relatively detailed but varied widely among teams, and those input by a single GoalShare user with limited time remained at a simple overview level but had uniform level of detail. A more user-friendly interface usable without instruction is required for real-world situations.

Implementing a System Enabling Open Innovation by Sharing Public Goals Based on Linked Open Data

Social network channels are used to organise public goals, but unstructured conversation presents a challenge for identifying groups focusing on similar issues. To address the problem, we implemented a web system for creating goals from public issues and for discovery of similar goals. We designed SOCIA ontology to structure information as hierarchical goal structure. Potential collaborators can use the hierarchical information in consensus building. We proposed a method to calculate similarity between public goals on the basis of the hierarchical structure. To apply our proposed method to real-life situation, we designed and implemented an easy-to-use user interface to structure public goals by citizens. We are arranging workshops to use the system in real-life setting for gathering local issues from citizens of Ogaki city to formulate public goals to solve them. We will use the experiences gained from the workshops to improve the system for deployment for open use by communities to utilise open innovation in decision making and for facilitating collaboration between governmental agents and citizens.