• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.625-633
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• 2021

This paper describes a scalable architecture for flexible hardware implementation of Montgomery modular multiplication. Our scalable modular multiplier architecture, which is based on a one-dimensional array of processing elements (PEs), performs word parallel operation and allows us to adjust computational performance and hardware complexity depending on the number of PEs used, N_PE. Based on the proposed architecture, we designed a scalable Montgomery modular multiplier (sMM) core supporting eight field sizes defined in SEC2. Synthesized with 180-nm CMOS cell library, our sMM core was implemented with 38,317 gate equivalents (GEs) and 139,390 GEs for N_PE=1 and N_PE=8, respectively. When operating with a 100 MHz clock, it was evaluated that 256-bit modular multiplications of 0.57 million times/sec for N_PE=1 and 3.5 million times/sec for N_PE=8 can be computed. Our sMM core has the advantage of enabling an optimized implementation by determining the number of PEs to be used in consideration of computational performance and hardware resources required in application fields, and it can be used as an IP (intellectual property) in scalable hardware design of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.1-17
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• 2017

The deep learning framework is software designed to help develop deep learning models. Some of its important functions include "automatic differentiation" and "utilization of GPU". The list of popular deep learning framework includes Caffe (BVLC) and Theano (University of Montreal). And recently, Microsoft's deep learning framework, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, was released as open-source license, following Google's Tensorflow a year earlier. The early deep learning frameworks have been developed mainly for research at universities. Beginning with the inception of Tensorflow, however, it seems that companies such as Microsoft and Facebook have started to join the competition of framework development. Given the trend, Google and other companies are expected to continue investing in the deep learning framework to bring forward the initiative in the artificial intelligence business. From this point of view, we think it is a good time to compare some of deep learning frameworks. So we compare three deep learning frameworks which can be used as a Python library. Those are Google's Tensorflow, Microsoft's CNTK, and Theano which is sort of a predecessor of the preceding two. The most common and important function of deep learning frameworks is the ability to perform automatic differentiation. Basically all the mathematical expressions of deep learning models can be represented as computational graphs, which consist of nodes and edges. Partial derivatives on each edge of a computational graph can then be obtained. With the partial derivatives, we can let software compute differentiation of any node with respect to any variable by utilizing chain rule of Calculus. First of all, the convenience of coding is in the order of CNTK, Tensorflow, and Theano. The criterion is simply based on the lengths of the codes and the learning curve and the ease of coding are not the main concern. According to the criteria, Theano was the most difficult to implement with, and CNTK and Tensorflow were somewhat easier. With Tensorflow, we need to define weight variables and biases explicitly. The reason that CNTK and Tensorflow are easier to implement with is that those frameworks provide us with more abstraction than Theano. We, however, need to mention that low-level coding is not always bad. It gives us flexibility of coding. With the low-level coding such as in Theano, we can implement and test any new deep learning models or any new search methods that we can think of. The assessment of the execution speed of each framework is that there is not meaningful difference. According to the experiment, execution speeds of Theano and Tensorflow are very similar, although the experiment was limited to a CNN model. In the case of CNTK, the experimental environment was not maintained as the same. The code written in CNTK has to be run in PC environment without GPU where codes execute as much as 50 times slower than with GPU. But we concluded that the difference of execution speed was within the range of variation caused by the different hardware setup. In this study, we compared three types of deep learning framework: Theano, Tensorflow, and CNTK. According to Wikipedia, there are 12 available deep learning frameworks. And 15 different attributes differentiate each framework. Some of the important attributes would include interface language (Python, C ++, Java, etc.) and the availability of libraries on various deep learning models such as CNN, RNN, DBN, and etc. And if a user implements a large scale deep learning model, it will also be important to support multiple GPU or multiple servers. Also, if you are learning the deep learning model, it would also be important if there are enough examples and references.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.147-175
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• 2005

Efforts to identify the public's perception of social welfare as an academic discipline have never been conducted in Korea since the establishment of social welfare department in 1947 at Ewha Womans University. Such efforts are very meaningful in identifying directions and tasks to strengthen Korean social welfare as well as in clarifying and promoting our understanding concerning status of the academic discipline. This study attempts to explore and describe the degree of the public's perception in Korea with analyzing data surveyed in 2004 by our interdisciplinary research team. This study develops and uses a questionnaire having a Likert scale format that is composed of 8 points and measures the public's perception in the following dimensions: (1) personal interests on academic discipline; (2) contribution of academic discipline; (3) prospect of academic discipline; (4) importance of academic discipline; (5) expertise of academic discipline; and (6) personal knowledge on academic discipline. To avoid social desirability and promote objectivity with comparative measurement, this study selects ten representative academic disciplines as follows: medicine; physics; biology; social welfare; economics; psychology; sociology; political science; library science; and communication & journalism. This study attempts to identify (1) the degree of the public's perception on ten academic disciplines; (2) the position of social welfare by comparing it with each academic discipline and by comparing mean of social welfare with overall mean of six social science disciplines in the six dimensions; (3) the differences in the public's perceptions of social welfare on six dimensions by the respondents' status factor(high school students, college and graduate students, and citizens) and gender factor by using MANCOVA, and (4) the differences in the public's perceptions of social welfare on six dimensions by major factor(social welfare, social science majors, and natural science majors) and gender factor of college and graduate school students by using MANCOVA. The results of data analysis are as follows: (1) while the 3,319 respondents gave relatively high rating on natural sciences in the dimensions of contribution and expertise, they did the same on social sciences in the dimensions of personal interests and personal knowledge; (2) in overall comparisons, while the 3,319 respondents gave relatively high rating on social welfare in the dimensions of contribution, prospect and importance, they gave the lowest rating on the expertise of social welfare; (3) in the comparisons with social science disciplines, while the 3,319 respondents gave relatively high rating on social welfare in the dimensions of contribution, prospect and importance, they gave the lowest rating on the expertise of social welfare; (4) when analyzing all the respondents, there were differences in the vector of personal interests, contribution, prospect, importance, expertise, and personal knowledge by status factor, gender factor, and interaction effect factor; and (5) when analyzing only the respondents in college and graduate schools, there were differences in the vector of personal interests, contribution, prospect, importance, expertise, and personal knowledge by only major factor and gender factor. The results provide empirical backgrounds for discussing current image, status and major characteristics of social welfare as a discipline in Korea. Indeed, this study provides new meaningful and thoughtful guide for further investigation on the topic. In addition, contributing to clarifying and broadening our understandings about the public's perception on social welfare in Korea, this study discusses the tasks for dealing with expertise issue that is the most vulnerable issue of Korean social welfare discipline and research directions to strengthen and promote social welfare discipline in Korea.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.53-77
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• 2012

This study analyses the difference of contents and tones of arguments among three Korean major newspapers, the Kyunghyang Shinmoon, the HanKyoreh, and the Dong-A Ilbo. It is commonly accepted that newspapers in Korea explicitly deliver their own tone of arguments when they talk about some sensitive issues and topics. It could be controversial if readers of newspapers read the news without being aware of the type of tones of arguments because the contents and the tones of arguments can affect readers easily. Thus it is very desirable to have a new tool that can inform the readers of what tone of argument a newspaper has. This study presents the results of clustering and classification techniques as part of text mining analysis. We focus on six main subjects such as Culture, Politics, International, Editorial-opinion, Eco-business and National issues in newspapers, and attempt to identify differences and similarities among the newspapers. The basic unit of text mining analysis is a paragraph of news articles. This study uses a keyword-network analysis tool and visualizes relationships among keywords to make it easier to see the differences. Newspaper articles were gathered from KINDS, the Korean integrated news database system. KINDS preserves news articles of the Kyunghyang Shinmun, the HanKyoreh and the Dong-A Ilbo and these are open to the public. This study used these three Korean major newspapers from KINDS. About 3,030 articles from 2008 to 2012 were used. International, national issues and politics sections were gathered with some specific issues. The International section was collected with the keyword of 'Nuclear weapon of North Korea.' The National issues section was collected with the keyword of '4-major-river.' The Politics section was collected with the keyword of 'Tonghap-Jinbo Dang.' All of the articles from April 2012 to May 2012 of Eco-business, Culture and Editorial-opinion sections were also collected. All of the collected data were handled and edited into paragraphs. We got rid of stop-words using the Lucene Korean Module. We calculated keyword co-occurrence counts from the paired co-occurrence list of keywords in a paragraph. We made a co-occurrence matrix from the list. Once the co-occurrence matrix was built, we used the Cosine coefficient matrix as input for PFNet(Pathfinder Network). In order to analyze these three newspapers and find out the significant keywords in each paper, we analyzed the list of 10 highest frequency keywords and keyword-networks of 20 highest ranking frequency keywords to closely examine the relationships and show the detailed network map among keywords. We used NodeXL software to visualize the PFNet. After drawing all the networks, we compared the results with the classification results. Classification was firstly handled to identify how the tone of argument of a newspaper is different from others. Then, to analyze tones of arguments, all the paragraphs were divided into two types of tones, Positive tone and Negative tone. To identify and classify all of the tones of paragraphs and articles we had collected, supervised learning technique was used. The Na$\ddot{i}$ve Bayesian classifier algorithm provided in the MALLET package was used to classify all the paragraphs in articles. After classification, Precision, Recall and F-value were used to evaluate the results of classification. Based on the results of this study, three subjects such as Culture, Eco-business and Politics showed some differences in contents and tones of arguments among these three newspapers. In addition, for the National issues, tones of arguments on 4-major-rivers project were different from each other. It seems three newspapers have their own specific tone of argument in those sections. And keyword-networks showed different shapes with each other in the same period in the same section. It means that frequently appeared keywords in articles are different and their contents are comprised with different keywords. And the Positive-Negative classification showed the possibility of classifying newspapers' tones of arguments compared to others. These results indicate that the approach in this study is promising to be extended as a new tool to identify the different tones of arguments of newspapers.

• Journal of the korean academy of Pediatric Dentistry
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.331-339
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• 2015

The first priority of sedation for incorporative children in pediatric dentistry is a safety. Therefore, evidence-based practices in health care are needed for preventing medical accidents. In accordance with the rise of the evidence based medicine, the interest in Evidence-Based Dentistry is increasing in the field of dentistry. However, systematic research about Evidence-Based sedation in Korea has rarely been done. As such, the purpose of this systematic review is to critically analyze the available scientific literature regarding dental sedation and to seek the next developmental strategies about evidence based pediatric dental sedation. A broad search of the 5 databases of the systematic reviews manual of the National Evidence-based Healthcare Collaborating Agency in Korea were referenced: 1) Core search database- KMbase, KISS; 2) Academic information and portal; 3) the National Assembly Library; 4) DBpia, and 5) RISS. Of a total 470 themes limited to the search term of "dental sedation", in accordance with the PRISMA statement for reporting systematic reviews of health sciences interventions, a literature selection process, which includes the removal of overlapping down the flow chart, was performed. Of the remaining 31 articles, two authors read through articles independently and added or removed articles using the exclusion criteria. Finally, twenty published papers of acceptable quality were identified and reviewed. This systemic review of Korean pediatric dental sedation practices for the last twenty-five years was based on the objective criteria defined in the GRADE process and identified consistent evidence. The results were evidence of moderate quality. Therefore, more systemically well-designed clinical studies are needed about the safe use of a sedative medicines (drugs).

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.227-252
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• 2018

The evolution of instant communication has mirrored the development of the Internet and messenger applications are among the most representative manifestations of instant communication technologies. In messenger applications, senders use emoticons to supplement the emotions conveyed in the text of their messages. The fact that communication via messenger applications is not face-to-face makes it difficult for senders to communicate their emotions to message recipients. Emoticons have long been used as symbols that indicate the moods of speakers. However, at present, emoticon-use is evolving into a means of conveying the psychological states of consumers who want to express individual characteristics and personality quirks while communicating their emotions to others. The fact that companies like KakaoTalk, Line, Apple, etc. have begun conducting emoticon business and sales of related content are expected to gradually increase testifies to the significance of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, despite the development of emoticons themselves and the growth of the emoticon market, no suitable emoticon recommendation system has yet been developed. Even KakaoTalk, a messenger application that commands more than 90% of domestic market share in South Korea, just grouped in to popularity, most recent, or brief category. This means consumers face the inconvenience of constantly scrolling around to locate the emoticons they want. The creation of an emoticon recommendation system would improve consumer convenience and satisfaction and increase the sales revenue of companies the sell emoticons. To recommend appropriate emoticons, it is necessary to quantify the emotions that the consumer sees and emotions. Such quantification will enable us to analyze the characteristics and emotions felt by consumers who used similar emoticons, which, in turn, will facilitate our emoticon recommendations for consumers. One way to quantify emoticons use is metadata-ization. Metadata-ization is a means of structuring or organizing unstructured and semi-structured data to extract meaning. By structuring unstructured emoticon data through metadata-ization, we can easily classify emoticons based on the emotions consumers want to express. To determine emoticons' precise emotions, we had to consider sub-detail expressions-not only the seven common emotional adjectives but also the metaphorical expressions that appear only in South Korean proved by previous studies related to emotion focusing on the emoticon's characteristics. We therefore collected the sub-detail expressions of emotion based on the "Shape", "Color" and "Adumbration". Moreover, to design a highly accurate recommendation system, we considered both emotion-technical indexes and emoticon-emotional indexes. We then identified 14 features of emoticon-technical indexes and selected 36 emotional adjectives. The 36 emotional adjectives consisted of contrasting adjectives, which we reduced to 18, and we measured the 18 emotional adjectives using 40 emoticon sets randomly selected from the top-ranked emoticons in the KakaoTalk shop. We surveyed 277 consumers in their mid-twenties who had experience purchasing emoticons; we recruited them online and asked them to evaluate five different emoticon sets. After data acquisition, we conducted a factor analysis of emoticon-emotional factors. We extracted four factors that we named "Comic", Softness", "Modernity" and "Transparency". We analyzed both the relationship between indexes and consumer attitude and the relationship between emoticon-technical indexes and emoticon-emotional factors. Through this process, we confirmed that the emoticon-technical indexes did not directly affect consumer attitudes but had a mediating effect on consumer attitudes through emoticon-emotional factors. The results of the analysis revealed the mechanism consumers use to evaluate emoticons; the results also showed that consumers' emoticon-technical indexes affected emoticon-emotional factors and that the emoticon-emotional factors affected consumer satisfaction. We therefore designed the emoticon recommendation system using only four emoticon-emotional factors; we created a recommendation method to calculate the Euclidean distance from each factors' emotion. In an attempt to increase the accuracy of the emoticon recommendation system, we compared the emotional patterns of selected emoticons with the recommended emoticons. The emotional patterns corresponded in principle. We verified the emoticon recommendation system by testing prediction accuracy; the predictions were 81.02% accurate in the first result, 76.64% accurate in the second, and 81.63% accurate in the third. This study developed a methodology that can be used in various fields academically and practically. We expect that the novel emoticon recommendation system we designed will increase emoticon sales for companies who conduct business in this domain and make consumer experiences more convenient. In addition, this study served as an important first step in the development of an intelligent emoticon recommendation system. The emotional factors proposed in this study could be collected in an emotional library that could serve as an emotion index for evaluation when new emoticons are released. Moreover, by combining the accumulated emotional library with company sales data, sales information, and consumer data, companies could develop hybrid recommendation systems that would bolster convenience for consumers and serve as intellectual assets that companies could strategically deploy.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.103-122
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• 2011

Recently, numerous documents have been made available electronically. Internet search engines and digital libraries commonly return query results containing hundreds or even thousands of documents. In this situation, it is virtually impossible for users to examine complete documents to determine whether they might be useful for them. For this reason, some on-line documents are accompanied by a list of keywords specified by the authors in an effort to guide the users by facilitating the filtering process. In this way, a set of keywords is often considered a condensed version of the whole document and therefore plays an important role for document retrieval, Web page retrieval, document clustering, summarization, text mining, and so on. Since many academic journals ask the authors to provide a list of five or six keywords on the first page of an article, keywords are most familiar in the context of journal articles. However, many other types of documents could not benefit from the use of keywords, including Web pages, email messages, news reports, magazine articles, and business papers. Although the potential benefit is large, the implementation itself is the obstacle; manually assigning keywords to all documents is a daunting task, or even impractical in that it is extremely tedious and time-consuming requiring a certain level of domain knowledge. Therefore, it is highly desirable to automate the keyword generation process. There are mainly two approaches to achieving this aim: keyword assignment approach and keyword extraction approach. Both approaches use machine learning methods and require, for training purposes, a set of documents with keywords already attached. In the former approach, there is a given set of vocabulary, and the aim is to match them to the texts. In other words, the keywords assignment approach seeks to select the words from a controlled vocabulary that best describes a document. Although this approach is domain dependent and is not easy to transfer and expand, it can generate implicit keywords that do not appear in a document. On the other hand, in the latter approach, the aim is to extract keywords with respect to their relevance in the text without prior vocabulary. In this approach, automatic keyword generation is treated as a classification task, and keywords are commonly extracted based on supervised learning techniques. Thus, keyword extraction algorithms classify candidate keywords in a document into positive or negative examples. Several systems such as Extractor and Kea were developed using keyword extraction approach. Most indicative words in a document are selected as keywords for that document and as a result, keywords extraction is limited to terms that appear in the document. Therefore, keywords extraction cannot generate implicit keywords that are not included in a document. According to the experiment results of Turney, about 64% to 90% of keywords assigned by the authors can be found in the full text of an article. Inversely, it also means that 10% to 36% of the keywords assigned by the authors do not appear in the article, which cannot be generated through keyword extraction algorithms. Our preliminary experiment result also shows that 37% of keywords assigned by the authors are not included in the full text. This is the reason why we have decided to adopt the keyword assignment approach. In this paper, we propose a new approach for automatic keyword assignment namely IVSM(Inverse Vector Space Model). The model is based on a vector space model. which is a conventional information retrieval model that represents documents and queries by vectors in a multidimensional space. IVSM generates an appropriate keyword set for a specific document by measuring the distance between the document and the keyword sets. The keyword assignment process of IVSM is as follows: (1) calculating the vector length of each keyword set based on each keyword weight; (2) preprocessing and parsing a target document that does not have keywords; (3) calculating the vector length of the target document based on the term frequency; (4) measuring the cosine similarity between each keyword set and the target document; and (5) generating keywords that have high similarity scores. Two keyword generation systems were implemented applying IVSM: IVSM system for Web-based community service and stand-alone IVSM system. Firstly, the IVSM system is implemented in a community service for sharing knowledge and opinions on current trends such as fashion, movies, social problems, and health information. The stand-alone IVSM system is dedicated to generating keywords for academic papers, and, indeed, it has been tested through a number of academic papers including those published by the Korean Association of Shipping and Logistics, the Korea Research Academy of Distribution Information, the Korea Logistics Society, the Korea Logistics Research Association, and the Korea Port Economic Association. We measured the performance of IVSM by the number of matches between the IVSM-generated keywords and the author-assigned keywords. According to our experiment, the precisions of IVSM applied to Web-based community service and academic journals were 0.75 and 0.71, respectively. The performance of both systems is much better than that of baseline systems that generate keywords based on simple probability. Also, IVSM shows comparable performance to Extractor that is a representative system of keyword extraction approach developed by Turney. As electronic documents increase, we expect that IVSM proposed in this paper can be applied to many electronic documents in Web-based community and digital library.

• Journal of Korean Society of Archives and Records Management
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.69-94
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• 2001

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the current status of the records management science education in Japan, and to examine the implications of the rapid growth of this filed while noting some of its significant issues and problems. The goal of records management science education is to improve the quality of information services and to assure an adequate supply of information professionals. Because records management science programs prepare students for a professional career, their curricula must encompass elements of both education and practical training. This is often expressed as a contrast between theory and practice. The confluence of the social, economic and technological realities of the environment where the learning takes place affects both. This paper reviews the historical background and current trends of records management science education in Japan. It also analyzes the various types of curriculum and the teaching staff of these institutions, with focus on the status of the undergraduate program at Surugadai University, the first comprehensive, university level program in Japan. The Faculty of Cultural Information Resources, Surugadai University, a new school toward an integrated information disciplines, was opened in 1994, to explore the theory and practice of the management diverse cultural information resources. Its purpose was to stimulate and promote research in additional fields of information science by offering professional training in archival science, records management, and museum curatorship, as well as librarianship. In 1999, the school introduced a master program, the first in Japan. The Faculty has two departments and each of them has two courses; Department of Sensory Information Resources Management; -Sound and Audiovisual Information Management, -Landscape and Tourism Information Management, Department of Knowledge Information Resources Management; -Library and Information Management, -Records and Archives Management The structure of the entire curriculum is also organized in stages from the time of entrance through basic instruction and onwards. Orientation subjects which a student takes immediately upon entering university is an introduction to specialized education, in which he learns the basic methods of university education and study, During his first and second years, he arranges Basic and Core courses as essential steps towards specialization at university. For this purpose, the courses offer a wide variety of study topics. The number of courses offered, including these, amounts to approximately 150. While from his third year onwards, he begins specific courses that apply to his major field, and in a gradual accumulation of seminar classes and practical training, puts his knowledge grained to practical use. Courses pertaining to these departments are offered to students beginning their second year. However, there is no impenetrable wall between the two departments, and there are only minor differences with regard requirements for graduation. Students may select third or fourth year seminars regardless of the department to which they belong. To be awarded a B.A. in Cultural Information Resources, the student is required to earn 34 credits in Basic Courses(such as, Social History of Cultural Information, Cultural Anthropology, History of Science, Behavioral Sciences, Communication, etc.), 16 credits in Foreign Languages(including 10 in English), 14 credits on Information Processing(including both theory and practice), and 60 credits in the courses for his or her major. Finally, several of the issues and problems currently facing records management science education in Japan are briefly summarized below; -Integration and Incorporation of related areas and similar programs, -Curriculum Improvement, -Insufficient of Textbooks, -Lack of qualified Teachers, -Problems of the employment of Graduates. As we moved toward more sophisticated, integrated, multimedia information services, information professionals will need to work more closely with colleagues in other specialties. It will become essential to the survival of the information professions for librarians to work with archivists, record managers and museum curators. Managing the changes in our increasingly information-intensive society demands strong coalitions among everyone in cultural Institutions. To provide our future colleagues with these competencies will require building and strengthening partnerships within and across the information professions and across national borders.

• Korean Journal of Heritage: History & Science
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.152-173
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• 2021

The Large Banner was introduced during the Japanese Invasions of Korea with a new military system. It was a flag that controlled the movement of soldiers in military training. In addition, it was used in other ways, such as a symbol when receiving a king in a military camp, a flag raised on the front of a royal procession, at the reception and dispatch of envoys, and at a local official's procession. The Large Banner was recognized as a symbol of military dignity and training rites. The Large Banner was analyzed in the present study in the context of two different types of decorations. Type I includes chungdogi, gakgi and moongi. Type II includes grand, medium, and small obangi, geumgogi and pyomigi. Each type is decorated differently for each purpose. The size of the flag is estimated to be a square of over 4 ja long in length. Flame edges were attached to one side and run up and down The Large Banner used the Five Direction Colors based on the traditional principles of Yin-Yang and Five Elements. The pattern of the Large Banner is largely distinguished by four. The pattern of large obangi consists of divine beasts symbolizing the Five Directions and a Taoism amulet letter. The pattern of medium obangi features spiritual generals that escort the Five Directions. The pattern of small obangi has the Eight Trigrams. The pattern of moongi consists of a tiger with wings that keeps a tight watch on the army's doors. As for historical sources of coloring for Large Banner production, the color-written copy named Gije, from the collection of the Osaka Prefect Library, was confirmed as the style of the Yongho Camp in the mid to late 18th century, and it was also used for this essay and visualization work. We used Cloud-patterned Satin Damask as the background material for Large Banner production, to reveal the dignity of the military. The size of the 4 ja flag was determined to be 170 cm long and 145 cm wide, and the 5 ja flag was 200 cm long and 175 cm wide. The conversion formula used for this work was Youngjochuck (1 ja =30cm). In addition, the order of hierarchy in the Flag of the King was discovered within all flags of the late Joseon Dynasty. In the above historical study, the two types of Large Banner were visualized. The visualization considered the size of the flag, the decoration of the flagpole, and the patterns described in this essay to restore them to their original shape laid out the 18th century relics on the background. By presenting color, size, material patterns, and auxiliary items together, it was possible not only to produce 3D content, but also to produce real products.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.21-39
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• 2013

As the utilization of information technology and the turbulence of technological change increase in organizations, the adoption of IT outsourcing also grows to manage IT resource more effectively and efficiently. In this new way of IT management technique, service level management(SLM) process becomes critical to derive success from the outsourcing in the view of end users in organization. Even though much of the research on service level management or agreement have been done during last decades, the performance of the service level management process have not been evaluated in terms of final objectives of the management efforts or success from the view of end-users. This study explores the relationship between SLM maturity and IT outsourcing success from the users' point of view by a analytical case study in four client organizations under an IT outsourcing vendor, which is a member company of a major Korean conglomerate. For setting up a model for the analysis, previous researches on service level management process maturity and information systems success are reviewed. In particular, information systems success from users' point of view are reviewed based the DeLone and McLean's study, which is argued and accepted as a comprehensively tested model of information systems success currently. The model proposed in this study argues that SLM process maturity influences information systems success, which is evaluated in terms of information quality, systems quality, service quality, and net effect proposed by DeLone and McLean. SLM process maturity can be measured in planning process, implementation process and operation and evaluation process. Instruments for measuring the factors in the proposed constructs of information systems success and SL management process maturity were collected from previous researches and evaluated for securing reliability and validity, utilizing appropriate statistical methods and pilot tests before exploring the case study. Four cases from four different companies under one vendor company were utilized for the analysis. All of the cases had been contracted in SLA(Service Level Agreement) and had implemented ITIL(IT Infrastructure Library), Six Sigma and BSC(Balanced Scored Card) methods since last several years, which means that all the client organizations pursued concerted efforts to acquire quality services from IT outsourcing from the organization and users' point of view. For comparing the differences among the four organizations in IT out-sourcing sucess, T-test and non-parametric analysis have been applied on the data set collected from the organization using survey instruments. The process maturities of planning and implementation phases of SLM are found not to influence on any dimensions of information systems success from users' point of view. It was found that the SLM maturity in the phase of operations and evaluation could influence systems quality only from users' view. This result seems to be quite against the arguments in IT outsourcing practices in the fields, which emphasize usually the importance of planning and implementation processes upfront in IT outsourcing projects. According to after-the-fact observation by an expert in an organization participating in the study, their needs and motivations for outsourcing contracts had been quite familiar already to the vendors as long-term partners under a same conglomerate, so that the maturity in the phases of planning and implementation seems not to be differentiating factors for the success of IT outsourcing. This study will be the foundation for the future research in the area of IT outsourcing management and success, in particular in the service level management. And also, it could guide managers in practice in IT outsourcing management to focus on service level management process in operation and evaluation stage especially for long-term outsourcing contracts under very unique context like Korean IT outsourcing projects. This study has some limitations in generalization because the sample size is small and the context itself is confined in an unique environment. For future exploration, survey based research could be designed and implemented.