Boolean Keyword Search Research Articles

Private ethical fund investors across countries and time: a survey-based review

Purpose – This paper aims to provide an overview of the literature to point out similarities and differences among private ethical investors across countries and time. Over the past three decades, many surveys have been conducted to advance the understanding of the demographic characteristics, motivation and morals of private ethical investors across countries and time. To date, the survey-based evidence on private investors into ethical funds is geographically rather segmented, and the research questions are fairly diverse. This permits only very temporally or regionally selective conclusions. Thereby, the authors identify interesting topics for future research. Design/methodology/approach – To identify the relevant literature for our review, the authors carried out a structured Boolean keyword search using major library services and databases. Findings – When questions about negative screening criteria are presented in a direct investment context, the consensus of private ethical investors “worldwide” (on average) is that social screening issues are most important, followed by ecological and moral topics. The percentage of ethical funds in the fund portfolio of the average private ethical investor in Europe seems to increase when the investor exhibits high degrees of pro-social attitudes and perceived consumer effectiveness. European private ethical investors are of the opinion that ethical funds perform worse but are less risky than conventional funds. Practical implications – The authors make suggestions on how investment companies should design their funds so that they can attract more socially responsible investors. Originality/value – The paper is of particular value because it focuses on private investors in the fast growing retail market of socially responsible investment funds.

Multi-Keyword Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data Without Violation of Privacy

With the advent of Cloud Computing, Data Owners are motivated to outsource their Data to public cloud for great flexibility and economic savings. But only single keyword or Boolean keyword search is available. So it gives undifferentiated results and often consumes more data bandwidth and time. In this paper, we define and solve the problem of multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted cloud data while preserving strict system wise privacy and eliminating unnecessary network traffic by sending back only the most relevant data by using coordinate matching. Data Owner uploads their Data along with the Index file which comprises of a set of keywords to improve retrieval accuracy; the search result is ranked by the cloud server before relaying it to the data user’s request.

Privacy-Preserving Multi-Keyword Ranked Search over Encrypted Cloud Data

With the advent of cloud computing, data owners are motivated to outsource their complex data management systems from local sites to the commercial public cloud for great flexibility and economic savings. But for protecting data privacy, sensitive data have to be encrypted before outsourcing, which obsoletes traditional data utilization based on plaintext keyword search. Thus, enabling an encrypted cloud data search service is of paramount importance. Considering the large number of data users and documents in the cloud, it is necessary to allow multiple keywords in the search request and return documents in the order of their relevance to these keywords. Related works on searchable encryption focus on single keyword search or Boolean keyword search, and rarely sort the search results. In this paper, for the first time, we define and solve the challenging problem of privacy-preserving multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted data in cloud computing (MRSE). We establish a set of strict privacy requirements for such a secure cloud data utilization system. Among various multi-keyword semantics, we choose the efficient measure of coordinate matching, i.e., as many matches as possible, to capture the relevance of data documents to the search query. We further use product similarity to quantitatively evaluate such measure. We first propose a basic idea for the MRSE based on secure inner product computation, and then give two significantly improved MRSE schemes to achieve various stringent privacy requirements in two different threat models. To improve search experience of the data search service, we further extend these two schemes to support more search semantics. Thorough analysis investigating privacy and efficiency guarantees of proposed schemes is given. Experiments on the real-world data set further show proposed schemes indeed introduce low overhead on computation and communication.

Employing Data Warehousing for Contract Administration: e-Dispute Resolution Prototype

Although data warehouse is very practical for decision making, its application in contract administration is rather limited because of the complicated legal issues and the voluminous data involved. This research attempts to bridge this gap in two ways. First, conceptual models of data warehouse are developed to explain the contents and overall features of the system that were verified by 12 experts in Malaysia. Second, an electronic dispute resolution template, known as e-Dispute Resolution (e-DR), is prototyped by using a database tool based on the guidelines of contractual variations agreed by the experts. Subsequently, the prototype is evaluated by 16 professional quantity surveyors from an established consulting firm. The prototype was organized based on a systematic breakdown of issues and incorporated a Boolean keyword search feature. The results show that the concept of datawarehouse is applicable to contract administration and is well received by practitioners. Overall, this article renders significant theoretical and practical contributions in which the resulting e-DR does not only lead toward more informed decision making but is also able to mitigate or prevent contractual disputes in the construction industry, where such a phenomenon seems to be inevitable. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000642. © 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers. CE Database subject headings: Databases; Contracts; Data collection; Dispute resolution; Construction industry. Author keywords: Database application; Contract administration; Data warehouse; e-Dispute Resolution; Contractual variations; Construction industry.