Tadachika Ozono

MiNet: Building Ad-Hoc Peer-to-Peer Networks for Information Sharing Based on Mobile Agents

The Internet is a very popular for information sharing technology since users can share information in organizations and communities. In this paper, we present a flexible peer-to-peer networking technology for information sharing on the Internet called MiNet. In some certain communities, MiNet can construct an ad-hoc network for information sharing. MiNet enables users to share information based on mobile agents, which are implemented in a mobile agent framework MiLog. MiNet can construct ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks by encapsulating information and sending it as mobile agents that can migrate in MiNet beyond firewalls, proxies, and NATs in LANs. Therefore, MiNet can construct VPNs, which consist of several LANs covered by firewalls, etc. MiNet agents can automatically choose a destination platform according to its policies. We show the document sharing system MiDoc as an application based on MiNet. Since MiDoc is implemented using MiNet, MiDoc users can share any document among any LANs.

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 Dynamic Rearrangement Mechanism of Web Page Layouts Using Web Agents

This paper describes a dynamic rearrangement mechanism of Web page layouts. The aim of this research is to provide webmasters or administrators with a means of determining easily the best suited content layout of their Web pages in a short period of time by automatically testing and relocating the contents with a trend of user actions. We will become able to modify dynamically the structure and layout of Web pages on the client browsers using the information of user behaviors. Our method provides the means of changing the contents inside or between Web pages and updating the contents on Web browsers, and it shorten the period of time for optimization.

A nurse scheduling system based on dynamic constraint satisfaction problem

In this paper, we describe a new nurse scheduling system based on the framework of Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). In the system, we must deal with dynamic changes to scheduling problem and with constraints that have different levels of importance. We describe the dynamic scheduling problem as a Dynamic Weighted Maximal CSP (DW-MaxCSP) in which constraints can be changed dynamically. It is usually undesirable to drastically modify the previous schedule in the re-scheduling process. A new schedule should be as close to as possible to the previous one. To obtain stable solutions, we propose methodology for keeping similarity to the previous schedule by using provisional constraints that explicitly penalize changes from the previous schedule. We have confirmed the efficacy of our system experimentally.

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.