Web Information Sources Research Articles

Framework for scoring the scientific reputation of researchers

In the scientific community, there is no single, objective, and precise metric for ranking the work of researchers based on their scientific merit. Most existing metrics are based on the number of publications associated with an author along with the number of citations received by those publications. However, there is no standard metric officially used to evaluate the researchers’ careers. In this paper, the Framework for Reputation Estimation of Scientific Authors (FRESA) to address this issue is depicted. It is a system able to estimate the reputation of a researcher focusing on the achieved publications. It calculates two indexes making use of the relevance and the novelty concepts in the scientific domain. The system can depict the scientific trajectories of the researchers through the proposed indexes to illustrate their evolution over time. FRESA uses web information sources and applies similarity measures, text mining techniques, and clustering algorithms to also rank and group the researchers. The presented work is experimental, rendering promising results.

The differential effect of environmental jolts and information sources on dynamic capabilities

AbstractChallenges in the business environment are typically categorized as threats or opportunities. Firms develop dynamic capabilities to cope with these challenges and improve strategic fit. However, evidence of a causal relationship between unpredictable environmental challenges (jolts) and dynamic capabilities is inconclusive. This study explores how information about positive (opportunity) and negative (threat) jolts communicated via two information sources affects dynamic capabilities. A 2 × 2 experiment was conducted among 131 managers. The findings indicate that human‐based information sources dominate web‐based information sources, particularly when the information reveals potential threats. The use of human information sources is associated with stronger dynamic capabilities than reliance on web information sources. Moreover, the findings confirm that the manifestation of dynamic capabilities differs between opportunities and threats.

ECOLOGICAL MARKETING IN THE FUNCTION OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The modern marketing concept uses all the existing and finds new potentials in order for companies to communicate as successfully as possible and respond to market demands. At the end of the 20th century, humanity's concern for the preservation of the environment influenced the growing demand for environmentally friendly products and services. With the emergence of a new market segment, environmentally conscious consumers, there was a need to develop ecological marketing.
 The commitment of a company for ecological business involves the adoption of a new concept of ecological development of effective and efficient marketing mix in order to address local, regional and global environmental issues. Therefore, ecological marketing must incorporate environmental care into its study in a standard marketing mix of variable sizes. Through classical instruments of marketing mix i.e., product, price, distribution and promotion of ecological marketing aims to identify, anticipate, meet the needs of consumers and society in a profitable and sustainable manner.
 Sustainable development is a process allowing development to take place without degrading or depleting the resources on which it is based. This is, in general, possible either by managing resources in such a way that they can self-renew to the extent that they are used, or by greater representation and use of resources where the regeneration period is short. With such an approach, resources can serve future, to the same extent, as present generations.
 The demand for organic products has influenced the development of organic production, because in addition to the economic and ethical dimension, it also contains an ecological dimension. Marketing of organic products means placing on the market of certified organic food products, in order to meet the needs of consumers, make a profit and preserve the environment. The model of marketing organic products has theoretical and practical significance from the aspect of strict control and certification from production and procurement of inputs, organic production, purchase and sale, processing, commercialization of products and distribution channels to consumers or customers.
 The paper starts with the assumption that the ecological marketing is in the function of sustainable development. Each ecological product occupies a special position, i.e., a place in the minds of consumers in relation to competitors, which is the result of their ranking based on attributes or dimensions important to consumers. The methods used in this paper are based on secondary or existing sources of information (books, monographs, research projects and studies, articles, papers, web information and other available bibliographic sources). The aim of the research is to see what ecological marketing is, and then what combination of marketing instruments is necessary in the function of sustainable development. The subject of research is ecological marketing in the function of sustainable development.

Knowledge-Based Approach to Detect Potentially Risky Websites

Nowadays, fraudulent and malicious websites are emerging as a harmful and very common problem on the Internet. It causes huge money losses and irreparable damage for both companies and particulars. To face this situation, governments have approved multiple law projects. This way, the legality on the Internet is being enforced and sanctions to those offenders who develop illegal or malicious activities are being imposed. However, governments still need a way to simplify the classification of websites into risky or non-risky, since most of this work is manual. This paper presents the DOmains Classifier based on RIsky Websites ( DOCRIW ) framework to detect domains that contain possible fraud or malicious content. It is based on two main components. The first component is a previously built knowledge base containing information from risky websites. The second one complements the system with a binary classifier able to label a website (as risky or not) considering just its domain. The system makes use of web information sources and includes host-based variables. It also applies similarity measures, supervised learning algorithms and optimization methods to enhance its performance. The presented work is experimental, rendering promising outcomes.

Refining Big Data

Refining big data is a new multipurpose way to find, collect, and analyze information obtained from the web and off-line information sources about any research subject. It gives the opportunity to investigate (with an assumed level of statistical significance) the past and current status of information on a subject, and it can even predict the future. The refining of big data makes it possible to quantitatively investigate a wide spectrum of raw information on significant human issues—social, scientific, political, business, and others. Refining creates a space for new, rich sources of information and opens innovative ways for research. The article describes a procedure for refining big data and gives examples of its use.

ClaimEval: Integrated and Flexible Framework for Claim Evaluation Using Credibility of Sources

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become a rapidly growing platform consisting of numerous sources which provide supporting or contradictory information about claims (e.g., "Chicken meat is healthy"). In order to decide whether a claim is true or false, one needs to analyze content of different sources of information on the Web, measure credibility of information sources, and aggregate all these information. This is a tedious process and the Web search engines address only part of the overall problem, viz., producing only a list of relevant sources. In this paper, we present ClaimEval, a novel and integrated approach which given a set of claims to validate, extracts a set of pro and con arguments from the Web information sources, and jointly estimates credibility of sources and correctness of claims. ClaimEval uses Probabilistic Soft Logic (PSL), resulting in a flexible and principled framework which makes it easy to state and incorporate different forms of prior-knowledge. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate ClaimEval’s capability in determining validity of a set of claims, resulting in improved accuracy compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Method to Reduce Complexity and Response Time in a Web Search

Living in times of technological changes that alter our daily activities, involving tasks such as reading the newspaper, following the weather, scheduling a trip, are usually executed after perusal of the gigantic repository of information, commonly known as the World Wide Web. However some problems are still associated with the information found in such a vast amount of information: heterogeneity, availability, distribution, quality and quantity of irrelevant information. Recent work has suggested different ways of grouping similar information sources, trying to give solutions to these problems. However, some domains are more complex than others. For example, a person looking for tourist information, is generally overwhelmed by visiting various websites. This paper proposes the implementation of a method to retrieve and group web information sources, depending on the services they offer; thereby allowing the user to get accurate answers; thus reducing the time and complexity in the search.

An Approach for Indexing Web Data Sources

Web information sources such as forums, blogs, and news articles are becoming increasingly large and diverse. Even if advances in technology are helping to improve techniques for dealing with the large amounts of the generated data, such data sources are heterogeneous in structure (semi structured or unstructured sources) and nature (texts or images). Implementation of software solutions is then necessary to prepare data and access these sources in a homogenous way. In this paper we present an approach for indexing heterogeneous data sources. Our objective is to offer techniques for efficient indexing of web sources by storing only the necessary information. We propose automatic indexing for semi structured or unstructured sources (e.g., xml files, html files) and annotation for other sources (e.g., images, videos that exist within a page). We present our algorithms of indexing and propose the use of MapReduce model to build a scalable inverted index. Experiments on a real-world corpus show that our approach achieves a good performance.

Website Translation and Destination Image Marketing

This study compares the image representations of Reunion Island on the Internet when using original websites in French and their English version. It analyzes the text content of web pages obtained from a list of web information sources providing both French and English versions. Textual data analysis and correspondence analysis based on the most frequent keywords is conducted using the software package Alceste. Results show that the image of Reunion Island is very different between language versions. These differences can be explained by the poor quality of the language translation even though the websites studied were retrieved from the top list of tourism websites providing information on Reunion Island as a destination. This study has strategic implications, as it demonstrates a failure to implement effective and consistent destination marketing by tourism organizations that will confuse the consumer. We make recommendations for future research and practice in terms of improved strategic, tactical, and operational integration.

Architecture for Checking Trustworthiness of Websites

Today information retrieval from Internet is becoming a commonplace phenomenon. Since, information is readily available and accessible to everyone. Whenever any user types a query in search engine, they would get answers within few micro seconds. However, the results which they get may or may not be accurate because different websites may give different information about the same entity. So, the biggest question is, which website should the user trust? There are many characteristics using that users can determine trustworthiness in content provided by Web information sources. In the proposed system, the filtering of website trustworthiness is based on five major areas as Authority, Related resources, Popularity, Age and Recommendation. The proposed system defines eighteen factors which are categorized under the mentioned five major areas. The website trustworthiness is calculated based on these eighteen factors of each URL and it is stored thereby increasing the performance in retrieving the trustworthy websites. The objective of the proposed system is to provide more trustworthy websites as top results which would save considerable amount of searching time. General Terms Trustworthy, URLs, Information Retrieval, Links, Factors, Webpage, Algorithm

A Survey of Web Information Extraction Tools

access to huge amount of information sources on the internet has been limited to browsing and searching due to the heterogeneity and the lack of structure of the web information sources. This has resulted in the need for automated Web Information Extraction (IE) tools that analyze the Web pages and harvest useful information from noisy content for any further analysis. The goal of this survey is to provide a comprehensive review of the major Web IE tools that used for Web text and based on Document Object Model for representing the web pages. This paper compares them in three dimensions: (1) the source of content extraction, (2) the techniques used, and (3) the features of the tools, moreover the advantages and disadvantages for each tool. Based on this survey, we can decide which suitable Web IE tool will be integrated in our future work in Web Text Mining.

MidWire: Middleware for Web Information Reuse

Nowadays the World Wide Web (Web) is the ultimate source of information. Everyone, regardless of their backgrounds or computer experience rely on it to get the information they need. However, most of the information needed may not be readily accessible in the huge row repository of data on the Web. This paper introduces the concept of middleware for retrieving web information. MidWire (MIDdleware for Web Information REuse) is developed to facilitate the use of public Web information by other user applications. The Web provides huge online and updated information related to different aspects of businesses and environments such as stock prices, currency exchange rates, interest rates, and weather information. All this information can be reused for other applications through the proposed middleware. MidWire deals with different types of Web information sources to provide the user applications’ input. It also provides different advanced services such as caching and notification. This paper covers the challenges, the architecture, the services, and evaluation of MidWire.

A Mashup Application to Support Complex Decision Making for Retail Consumers

Purchase processes often require complex decision making and consumers frequently use Web information sources to support these decisions. However, increasing amounts of information can make finding appropriate information problematic. This information overload, coupled with decision complexity, can increase time required to make a decision and reduce decision quality. This creates a need for tools that support these decision-making processes. Online tools that bring together data and partial solutions are one option to improve decision making in complex, multi-criteria environments. An experiment using a prototype mashup application indicates that these types of applications may significantly decrease time spent and improve overall quality of complex retail decisions.

A Signal-Representation-Based Parser to Extract Text-Based Information from the Web

Most of the dramatically increased amount of information available on the World Wide Web is provided via HTML and formatted for human browsing rather than for software programs. This situation calls for a tool that automatically extracts information from semistructured Web information sources, increasing the usefulness of value-added Web services. We present a <u>si</u>gnal-<u>r</u>epresentation-b<u>a</u>sed <u>p</u>arser (SIRAP) that breaks Web pages up into logically coherent groups - groups of information related to an entity, for example. Templates for records with different tag structures are generated incrementally by a Histogram-Based Correlation Coefficient (HBCC) algorithm, then records on a Web page are detected efficiently using templates generated by matching. Hundreds of Web pages from 17 state-of-the-art search engines were used to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.

Querying structured information sources on the Web

To provide access to heterogeneous data distributed over the Web, we propose a solution that merges the expressiveness of information integration systems with the flexibility found in dataspace-aware search engines. Our approach requires neither a mediated schema nor source mappings. In the absence of a mediated schema, the user formulates structured queries based on what she expects to find. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by providing a query interface for integrating hundreds of (real) structured Web information sources. We also discuss experimental results which indicate that our query rewriting algorithm is both effective and scalable.

Uncovering the dark Web: A case study of Jihad on the Web

AbstractWhile the Web has become a worldwide platform for communication, terrorists share their ideology and communicate with members on the “Dark Web”—the reverse side of the Web used by terrorists. Currently, the problems of information overload and difficulty to obtain a comprehensive picture of terrorist activities hinder effective and efficient analysis of terrorist information on the Web. To improve understanding of terrorist activities, we have developed a novel methodology for collecting and analyzing Dark Web information. The methodology incorporates information collection, analysis, and visualization techniques, and exploits various Web information sources. We applied it to collecting and analyzing information of 39 Jihad Web sites and developed visualization of their site contents, relationships, and activity levels. An expert evaluation showed that the methodology is very useful and promising, having a high potential to assist in investigation and understanding of terrorist activities by producing results that could potentially help guide both policymaking and intelligence research.

An Application of Meta Search Agent System Based on Semantized Tags for Enhanced Web Searching

Web searching techniques have been investigated and implemented in many aspects. Particularly, in case of personalization, more important issue is how to manipulate the results retrieved from search engines for better user understandability and satisfaction. Such manipulation processes are i) ranking the results in accordance with user relevance, and ii) exchanging the results between users who have similar tastes. Thus, our work has been mainly focusing on relevance-based ranking mechanism as well as sharing schemes for the results retrieved from heterogeneous web information sources. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model for meta search agent systems with three main functionalities, i.e., i) URL filtering method for preprocessing, ii) tag-based information conceptualization scheme for ranking, and iii) ontology-based standardization scheme for sharing. It means that the proposed meta search agent model exploits semantized tags to formalize and share heterogeneous information obtained from multiple search engines and to finally maintain the shared information. Within the tag-based information space, a conceptual distance between retrieval interest and search results can be efficiently computed. By conducting some experimentations, we have shown the semantized tag model can conceptualize the retrieved results, and make them sharable. We also compare performance of the proposed system with hyperlink-based methodologies.

The health information specialist

PurposeThis paper discusses the need for health information specialists who can promote patient empowerment by tailoring the information patients receive as they cope with illness. The objectives of this study are to distinguish the various stages of coping with illness, examine the informational needs of patients during these stages, explore how web information contributes to patient empowerment, and describe the potential role of the health information specialist.Design/methodology/approachIn order to meet the study's objectives, a qualitative research method was used in which 110 in‐depth interviews were conducted with patients who told their story of coping throughout the course of illness. By distinguishing and understanding the different stages of coping with illness, we came to distinguish the distinct informational needs during the coping process, and understand how web information contributes to patient empowerment.FindingsThe process of coping with illness has four stages. In each stage, the patient's informational needs differ, as does his ability to absorb and process information. Health systems do not provide information to match the coping stage of the patient. Patients turn to professional (hospitals, universities) and unprofessional (forums, blogs) internet sites in their search for medical knowledge. The current study, integrated with other studies that show patients' difficulties using the internet, emphasizes the importance of the information specialist in the patient empowerment process.Originality/valueThe study will aid policy makers in the process of empowering patients by demonstrating patients' dynamic informational needs when coping with illness. This study proposes a role for the information specialists that will enable them to expand into the health domain. This role is the health information specialist, a professional who will, among other things, learn how health systems work, identify types of web information sources, assess medical site quality, recognize patients' coping stages, and adapt information to individual characteristics.

A high performance integrated web data warehousing

Over the years, we have seen a significant number of integration techniques for data warehouses to support web integrated data. However, the existing works focus extensively on the design concept. In this paper, we focus on the performance of a web database application such as an integrated web data warehousing using a well-defined and uniform structure to deal with web information sources including semi-structured data such as XML data, and documents such as HTML in a web data warehouse system. By using a case study, our implementation of the prototype is a web manipulation concept for both incoming sources and result outputs. Thus, the system not only can be operated through the web, it can also handle the integration of web data sources and structured data sources. Our main contribution is the performance evaluation of an integrated web data warehouse application which includes two tasks. Task one is to perform a verification of the correctness of integrated data based on the result set that is retrieved from the web integrated data warehouse system using complex and OLAP queries. The result set is checked against the result set that is retrieved from the existing independent data source systems. Task two is to measure the performance of OLAP or complex query by investigating source operation functions used by these queries to retrieve the data. The information of source operation functions used by each query is obtained using the TKPROF utility.

Destination image representation on the web: Content analysis of Macau travel related websites

This study attempted to identify the image representations of Macau on the Internet by analyzing the contents of a variety of web information sources—Macau official tourism website, tour operators and travel agents’ websites, online travel magazine and guide websites, and online travel “blogs.” Both qualitative (text mining and expert judgment) and quantitative approaches (correspondence analysis) were used to content-analyze the narrative and visual information on the sampled websites. The results showed that the image of Macau projected online varies by the different online information sources. These variations could largely be explained by the different communication objectives and targeted audiences of the different web information sources. This study underscores the importance of understanding the multiplicity of destination image representations on the web and the challenges of managing and delivering the desired image of a destination online.