42930138
Evaluating an Infectious Disease Information Sharing and Analysis System
Infectious disease informatics is a subfield of security informatics that focuses on information analysis and management issues critical to the prevention, detection, and management of naturally occurring or terrorist-engineered infectious disease outbreaks. We have developed a research prototype called BioPortal which provides an integrated environment to support cross-jurisdictional and cross-species infectious disease information sharing, integration, analysis, and reporting. This paper reports a pilot study evaluating BioPortal's usability, user satisfaction, and potential impact on practice.
21266732
User Misconceptions of Information Retrieval Systems
In this paper, we report results of an investigation where thirty subjects were observedperforming subject-based search in an online catalog system. The observationshave revealed a range of misconceptions users have when performing subject-basedsearch. We have developed a taxonomy that characterizes these misconceptions andhypotheses about the causes of the misconceptions. Directions for improving searchperformance are also suggested.
19452291
Cross-Jurisdictional Activity Networks to Support Criminal Investigations
Border and transportation security is a critical part of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) national strategy. DHS strategy calls for the creation of "smart borders" where information from local, state, federal, and international sources can be combined to support risk-based management tools for border-management agencies. Sharing cross-jurisdictional law enforcement data is important because criminals take advantage of the fact that information sharing between law enforcement jurisdictions is very limited. Challenges to information integration in this important domain include policy and privacy concerns, data security requirements, semantic or schema-level matching of legacy system data, and identity matching. The BorderSafe project leverages the skills and experiences of a diverse group of researchers, law enforcement officials, and government agencies to address data sharing needs in the Southwest United States. Our demo presents a framework for combining law enforcement data across jurisdictions to support criminal investigation and describes how that framework was used in combining three large, overlapping datasets to produce an integrated system for visualizing criminal activity networks.
38977435
Sharing and Visualizing Infectious Disease Datasets Using the WNV-BOT Portal System
Infectious disease outbreaks are critical threats to public health and national security. Information systems play a central role in developing an effective comprehensive approach to prevent, detect, respond to, and manage infectious disease outbreaks of plants, animals, and humans.
40127439
Authorship Analysis in Cybercrime Investigation
Criminals have been using the Internet to distribute a wide range of illegal materials globally in an anonymous manner, making criminal identity tracing difficult in the cybercrime investigation process. In this study we propose to adopt the authorship analysis framework to automatically trace identities of cyber criminals through messages they post on the Internet. Under this framework, three types of message features, including style markers, structural features, and content-specific features, are extracted and inductive learning algorithms are used to build feature-based models to identify authorship of illegal messages. To evaluate the effectiveness of this framework, we conducted an experimental study on data sets of English and Chinese email and online newsgroup messages. We experimented with all three types of message features and three inductive learning algorithms. The results indicate that the proposed approach can discover real identities of authors of both English and Chinese Internet messages with relatively high accuracies.
35410760
Collaborative Workflow Management for Interagency Crime Analysis
To strengthen homeland security, there is a critical need for new tools that can facilitate real time collaboration among various law enforcement agencies. Through a field study, we find that law enforcement work is knowledge intensive and involves complex collaborative processes interrelating a large number of disparate units in a loosely defined virtual organization. To support knowledge intensive collaboration, we propose a new workflow centric framework to seamlessly integrate previously separate techniques from the fields of information retrieval and workflow management. Specifically, we develop a collaborative workflow management framework for interagency crime analysis. The key contribution of our research is that by integrating various state-of-the-art techniques innovatively, the proposed system can support real time collaboration processes in a virtual organization that evolves dynamically.
1872726
An analysis of image queries in the field of art history
This study investigates end-users’ image queries by comparing the features of the queries to those identified in previous studies by Enser and McGregor (1992), Jorgensen (1995), and Fidel (1997). Twenty-nine college students majoring in art history were recruited. They were required to finish a term paper including at least 20 images. The participants’ image queries were collected by preand postsearch questionnaires, and three human reviewers mapped these queries into the previously identified features. Enser and McGregor’s categories of Unique and Nonunique, and Jorgensen’s classes of Location, Literal Object, Art Historical Information, People, and People-Related Attributes received high degrees of matching by three reviewers. This finding can be applied to add more details to Enser and McGregor’s four categories (Unique, Nonunique, Unique with refiners, and Nonunique with refiners) and to regroup Jorgensen’s 12 classes of image attributes.
8713624
Intelligent agents meet semantic web in a smart meeting room
We describe a new smart meeting room system called EasyMeeting that explores the use of FIPA agent technologies, Semantic Web ontologies, logic reasoning, and security and privacy policies. Building on a pervasive computing system that we have developed previously, EasyMeeting can provide relevant services and information to meeting participants based on their situational needs. Our system exploits the context-aware support provided by the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA). Central to CoBrA is an intelligent broker agent that maintains a shared model of context for all computing entities in the space and enforces the privacy policies defined by the users. We also describe the use of CoBrA ontologies, logic reasoning, and privacy protection mechanisms, and evaluate our initial user experience studies.
9863446
ITTALKS: An Application of Agents in the Semantic Web
Effective use of the vast quantity of information now available on the web will require the use of "Semantic Web" markup languages such as the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML). Such languages will enable the automated gathering and processing of much information that is currently available but insufficiently utilized. Effectively, such languages will facilitate the integration of multi-agent systems with the existing information infrastructure. As part of our exploration of SemanticWeb technology, and DAML in particular, we have constructed ITTALKS, a web-based system for automatic and intelligent notification of information technology talks. In this paper, we describe the ITTALKS system, and discuss the numerous ways in which the use of Semantic Web concepts and DAML extend its ability to provide an intelligent online service to both the human community and the agents assisting them.
3265105
A coalgebraic approach to Kleene algebra with tests
Kleene algebra with tests is an extension of Kleene algebra, the algebra of regular expressions, which can be used to reason about programs. We develop a coalgebraic theory of Kleene algebra with Tests, along the lines of the coalgebraic theory of regular expressions based on deterministic automata. Since the known automata-theoretic presentation of Kleene algebra with tests does not lend itself to a coalgebraic theory, we define a new interpretation of Kleene algebra with tests expressions and a corresponding automata-theoretic presentation. One outcome of the theory is a coinductive proof principle, that can be used to establish equivalence of our Kleene algebra with tests expressions.
17347401
RDF-based schema mediation for database grid
In presence of grid where a huge amount of databases can be involved in sharing cycle, database tools and middlewares should be well suited for schema mediation and query processing in a semantically meaningful way. Dart is an implemented prototype system whose goal is to provide a semantic solution for database resource sharing capable of deployment in grid settings. This paper particularly concerns the problems of schema mediation in DartGrid. Our approach mainly involves the following notions: a) we use RDF/OWL to define the mediated ontologies for integration, b) we devise a set of rules for automatically converting the relational schema to RDF/OWL description called source data semantic, c) we define the source data semantic (source schema) as the view of shared ontologies (mediated schema), d) query is formulated and posed on the shared ontologies. A set of grid services is developed for the implementation of above functionalities.