published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The use of mobile devices to access the World Wide Web is becoming more prevalent. When browsing webpages on small-screen devices, it is difficult to locate information of interest since the limited screen space can be fully packed with information. Also, browsing Web tables on small-screen devices is a non-trivial problem. To fit a large table in a small-screen device, the association between data values and their corresponding headers may be disrupted. It is difficult to locate information accurately if the data meanings are lost. For visually impaired users, the problem is even more challenging. Sequential presentation of the webpage by a screen reader is too time-consuming if the information of interest is placed at or near the end of the webpage. Therefore, there is a need to re-organize useful information in webpages in order to enhance information finding on small-screen devices. In this thesis, various adaptations are proposed by exploring and exploiting relationships between Web elements in the webpage. In the current literature, some proposed heuristics are based on specific HTML elements, which cannot be generalized. Some other algorithms assume a correct DOM structure, which would fail if the webpage is not properly marked up. Many algorithms extract blocks without assigning them the proper titles. A gap needs to be filled, such that extracted blocks will be given a proper title through exploring the relationships between semantic elements. In this thesis, I propose to integrate relationship analysis and DOM-tree structure traversal for identifying logical sections together with their section headings. By extracting all the section headings, a table of content can be constructed to provide direct access to interested sections in an efficient way. Relationship analysis is a critical complement to the DOM structure for identifying the semantic content hierarchy when a webpage is not properly marked up. By exploring relationships between table cells, the structure of an unstructured Web table can be extracted. The semantic meanings of the data values are retained by preserving the data values and their corresponding headers. A novel way of accessing a webpage, which converts the page itself and its Web table into menu-based presentation, is then proposed. Converting the webpage into an Interactive Voice Response System introduces yet another mode of access which can enhance the accessibility of the webpage. In addition to improving mobile accessibility, the proposed adaptations can also benefit the visually impaired users. Experiments show that the average effectiveness and efficiency of adaptation with direct access are improved by 18% and 15% respectively, which are clearly better than the case without adaptation. Also, by adapting the Web table into a series of menu pages, the effectiveness and efficiency are improved by 61% and 37% respectively. For the evaluations with visually impaired users, the adaptation with direct access can greatly improve efficiency by 85%. Some complicated Web tables in fact could not be properly interpreted by visually impaired users; the Web table adaptation makes them accessible. Information finding indeed becomes more efficient and effective when using the adapted versions. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

An early vision in Computer Science was to create intelligent systems ca- pable of reasoning on large amounts of data. Independent results in the areas of Description Logic and Relational Databases have advanced us towards this vision. Description Logic research has advanced the understanding of the tradeoff between the computational complexity of reasoning and the expressiveness of logic languages, and now underpins the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web comprises a graph data model (RDF), an ontology language for knowledge representation and reasoning (OWL) and a graph query language (SPARQL). Database research has advanced the theory and practice of management of data, embodying features such as views and recursion which are capable of representing reasoning. Despite the independent advances, the interface between Relational Databases and Semantic Web is poorly understood. This dissertation revisits this vision with respect to current technology and addresses the following question: How and to what extent can Relational Databases be integrated with the Semantic Web? The thesis is that much of the existing Relational Database infrastructure can be reused to support the Semantic Web. Two problems are studied. Can a Relational Database be automatically virtualized as a Semantic Web data source? This paradigm comprises a single Relational Database. The first contribution is an automatic direct mapping from a Relational Database schema and data to RDF and OWL. The second contribution is a method capable of evalu- ating SPARQL queries against the Relational Database, per the direct mapping, by exploiting two existing relational query optimizations. These contributions are embodied in a system called Ultrawrap. Empirical analysis consistently yield that SPARQL query execution performance on Ultrawrap is comparable to that of SQL queries written directly for the relational representation of the data. Such results have not been previously achieved. Can a Relational Database be mapped to existing Semantic Web ontologies and act as a reasoner? This paradigm comprises an OWL ontology including inheritance and transitivity, a Relational Database and mappings between the two. A third contribution is a method for Relational Databases to support inheritance and transitivity by compiling the ontology as mappings, implementing the mappings as SQL views, using SQL recursion and optimizing by materializing a subset of views. This contribution is implemented in an extension of Ultrawrap. Empirical analysis reveals that Relational Databases are able to effectively act as reasoners. / text

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They say marriages are made in heaven, but in today’s digital, wired world, they are increasingly made online. But they still have to be solemnized in the offline world, especially in India, where the entire extended family is involved in the sacred process. It is this echoing sentiment in the Indian cultural code that is driving singles to matrimonial Web sites – creating a concept where tradition marries technology. And despite the constant evolution of these sites that include membership fees and increased risk of the misuse of personal information displayed in members’ profiles, there are more users now than ever before. / text

<p> Catfishing - the practice of deceiving others online by creating profiles of individuals who do not exist in the real-world - represents the current moment on the converging timelines of social networking technology and the politics of online self-representation. This type of online deception signifies the culmination of several issues regarding users' relationships to cyberspace: reliance on technology for socialization; increasingly blurred correspondences between offline and online selves; users' propensities to value technological objects over living people; and humanity's predisposition for deception in day-to-day interactions. When all of these strands converge, the result is catfishing, a term coined following the 2011 documentary <i>Catfish</i> that has since spawned a TV show and a tell-all book. My argument moves from an examination of the histories of online hoaxes and social networking to a narrower focus on the social aspects of avoidance rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon to an even more pointed discussion of individual, self-professed motives behind such deception. This project is a call-to-action inviting readers to consider the authenticity of their own interactions - both online and in the physical real - and to champion a stronger correspondence between our offline identities and our online self-representations. In addition, by situating online identity creation as a rhetorical action, I argue that understanding the elements of catfishing can help with teaching first-year writing students about the rhetorical situation, including audience awareness, purpose, convention, tone, visualization, and ethos. Finally, I hope this project will revive a conversation in modern rhetoric and composition theory concerning online identity formation that has subsided within the last decade.</p>

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<p> This guide was created to serve as a tool for crisis communications to assist in crafting ethical responses to crises using social media as the primary communications channel. The guide combines Stakeholder Theory (Freeman, 1984)&mdash;a management theory that focuses on the importance of different groups of people, not just shareholders&mdash;with Situational Crisis Communication (Coombs, 2007). The guide also adheres to two of Kant&rsquo;s Categorical Imperatives as the ethical basis and marker. To create the guide, the author relied on archival, or documentary, research to provide the background information and theory to inform the creation of the guide. The guide is broken up into four parts&mdash;an overview of crisis communication, pre-crisis planning, active crisis communication, and post-crisis communication/reputation rebuilding. The guide is meant to be used as a tool, and is not an exhaustive how-to for handling a crisis.</p>

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / In this article, we report our implementation and comparison of two text clustering techniques. One is based on Wardâ s clustering and the other on Kohonenâ s Self-organizing Maps. We have evaluated how closely clusters produced by a computer resemble those created by human experts. We have also measured the time that it takes for an expert to â â clean upâ â the automatically produced clusters. The technique based on Wardâ s clustering was found to be more precise. Both techniques have worked equally well in detecting associations between text documents. We used text messages obtained from group brainstorming meetings.

Most Web search tools integrate sponsored results with results from their internal editorial database in providing results to users. The goal of this research is to get a better idea of how much of the screen real estate displays â realâ editorial results as compared to sponsored results. The overall average results are that 40% of all results presented on the first screen are â realâ results, and when the entire first Web page is considered, 67% of the results are non-sponsored results. For general search tools like Google, 56% of the first screen and 82% of the first Web page contain non-sponsored results. Other results include that query structure makes a significant difference in the percentage of non-sponsored results returned by a search. Similarly, the topic of the query can also have a significant effect on the percentage of sponsored results displayed by most Web search tools.