• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.21 no.2
• /
• pp.89-116
• /
• 2011

In collaborative tagging systems such as Delicious.com and Flickr.com, users assign keywords or tags to their uploaded resources, such as bookmarks and pictures, for their future use or sharing purposes. The collection of resources and tags generated by a user is called a personomy, and the collection of all personomies constitutes the folksonomy. The most significant need of the folksonomy users Is to efficiently find useful resources or experts on specific topics. An excellent ranking algorithm would assign higher ranking to more useful resources or experts. What resources are considered useful In a folksonomic system? Does a standard superior to frequency or freshness exist? The resource recommended by more users with mere expertise should be worthy of attention. This ranking paradigm can be implemented through a graph-based ranking algorithm. Two well-known representatives of such a paradigm are Page Rank by Google and HITS(Hypertext Induced Topic Selection) by Kleinberg. Both Page Rank and HITS assign a higher evaluation score to pages linked to more higher-scored pages. HITS differs from PageRank in that it utilizes two kinds of scores: authority and hub scores. The ranking objects of these pages are limited to Web pages, whereas the ranking objects of a folksonomic system are somewhat heterogeneous(i.e., users, resources, and tags). Therefore, uniform application of the voting notion of PageRank and HITS based on the links to a folksonomy would be unreasonable, In a folksonomic system, each link corresponding to a property can have an opposite direction, depending on whether the property is an active or a passive voice. The current research stems from the Idea that a graph-based ranking algorithm could be applied to the folksonomic system using the concept of mutual Interactions between entitles, rather than the voting notion of PageRank or HITS. The concept of mutual interactions, proposed for ranking the Semantic Web resources, enables the calculation of importance scores of various resources unaffected by link directions. The weights of a property representing the mutual interaction between classes are assigned depending on the relative significance of the property to the resource importance of each class. This class-oriented approach is based on the fact that, in the Semantic Web, there are many heterogeneous classes; thus, applying a different appraisal standard for each class is more reasonable. This is similar to the evaluation method of humans, where different items are assigned specific weights, which are then summed up to determine the weighted average. We can check for missing properties more easily with this approach than with other predicate-oriented approaches. A user of a tagging system usually assigns more than one tags to the same resource, and there can be more than one tags with the same subjectivity and objectivity. In the case that many users assign similar tags to the same resource, grading the users differently depending on the assignment order becomes necessary. This idea comes from the studies in psychology wherein expertise involves the ability to select the most relevant information for achieving a goal. An expert should be someone who not only has a large collection of documents annotated with a particular tag, but also tends to add documents of high quality to his/her collections. Such documents are identified by the number, as well as the expertise, of users who have the same documents in their collections. In other words, there is a relationship of mutual reinforcement between the expertise of a user and the quality of a document. In addition, there is a need to rank entities related more closely to a certain entity. Considering the property of social media that ensures the popularity of a topic is temporary, recent data should have more weight than old data. We propose a comprehensive folksonomy ranking framework in which all these considerations are dealt with and that can be easily customized to each folksonomy site for ranking purposes. To examine the validity of our ranking algorithm and show the mechanism of adjusting property, time, and expertise weights, we first use a dataset designed for analyzing the effect of each ranking factor independently. We then show the ranking results of a real folksonomy site, with the ranking factors combined. Because the ground truth of a given dataset is not known when it comes to ranking, we inject simulated data whose ranking results can be predicted into the real dataset and compare the ranking results of our algorithm with that of a previous HITS-based algorithm. Our semantic ranking algorithm based on the concept of mutual interaction seems to be preferable to the HITS-based algorithm as a flexible folksonomy ranking framework. Some concrete points of difference are as follows. First, with the time concept applied to the property weights, our algorithm shows superior performance in lowering the scores of older data and raising the scores of newer data. Second, applying the time concept to the expertise weights, as well as to the property weights, our algorithm controls the conflicting influence of expertise weights and enhances overall consistency of time-valued ranking. The expertise weights of the previous study can act as an obstacle to the time-valued ranking because the number of followers increases as time goes on. Third, many new properties and classes can be included in our framework. The previous HITS-based algorithm, based on the voting notion, loses ground in the situation where the domain consists of more than two classes, or where other important properties, such as "sent through twitter" or "registered as a friend," are added to the domain. Forth, there is a big difference in the calculation time and memory use between the two kinds of algorithms. While the matrix multiplication of two matrices, has to be executed twice for the previous HITS-based algorithm, this is unnecessary with our algorithm. In our ranking framework, various folksonomy ranking policies can be expressed with the ranking factors combined and our approach can work, even if the folksonomy site is not implemented with Semantic Web languages. Above all, the time weight proposed in this paper will be applicable to various domains, including social media, where time value is considered important.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.79-96
• /
• 2012

As the pace of competition dramatically accelerates and the complexity of change grows, a variety of research have been conducted to improve firms' short-term performance and to enhance firms' long-term survival. In particular, researchers and practitioners have paid their attention to identify promising technologies that lead competitive advantage to a firm. Discovery of promising technology depends on how a firm evaluates the value of technologies, thus many evaluating methods have been proposed. Experts' opinion based approaches have been widely accepted to predict the value of technologies. Whereas this approach provides in-depth analysis and ensures validity of analysis results, it is usually cost-and time-ineffective and is limited to qualitative evaluation. Considerable studies attempt to forecast the value of technology by using patent information to overcome the limitation of experts' opinion based approach. Patent based technology evaluation has served as a valuable assessment approach of the technological forecasting because it contains a full and practical description of technology with uniform structure. Furthermore, it provides information that is not divulged in any other sources. Although patent information based approach has contributed to our understanding of prediction of promising technologies, it has some limitations because prediction has been made based on the past patent information, and the interpretations of patent analyses are not consistent. In order to fill this gap, this study proposes a technology forecasting methodology by integrating patent information approach and artificial intelligence method. The methodology consists of three modules : evaluation of technologies promising, implementation of technologies value prediction model, and recommendation of promising technologies. In the first module, technologies promising is evaluated from three different and complementary dimensions; impact, fusion, and diffusion perspectives. The impact of technologies refers to their influence on future technologies development and improvement, and is also clearly associated with their monetary value. The fusion of technologies denotes the extent to which a technology fuses different technologies, and represents the breadth of search underlying the technology. The fusion of technologies can be calculated based on technology or patent, thus this study measures two types of fusion index; fusion index per technology and fusion index per patent. Finally, the diffusion of technologies denotes their degree of applicability across scientific and technological fields. In the same vein, diffusion index per technology and diffusion index per patent are considered respectively. In the second module, technologies value prediction model is implemented using artificial intelligence method. This studies use the values of five indexes (i.e., impact index, fusion index per technology, fusion index per patent, diffusion index per technology and diffusion index per patent) at different time (e.g., t-n, t-n-1, t-n-2, ${\cdots}$) as input variables. The out variables are values of five indexes at time t, which is used for learning. The learning method adopted in this study is backpropagation algorithm. In the third module, this study recommends final promising technologies based on analytic hierarchy process. AHP provides relative importance of each index, leading to final promising index for technology. Applicability of the proposed methodology is tested by using U.S. patents in international patent class G06F (i.e., electronic digital data processing) from 2000 to 2008. The results show that mean absolute error value for prediction produced by the proposed methodology is lower than the value produced by multiple regression analysis in cases of fusion indexes. However, mean absolute error value of the proposed methodology is slightly higher than the value of multiple regression analysis. These unexpected results may be explained, in part, by small number of patents. Since this study only uses patent data in class G06F, number of sample patent data is relatively small, leading to incomplete learning to satisfy complex artificial intelligence structure. In addition, fusion index per technology and impact index are found to be important criteria to predict promising technology. This study attempts to extend the existing knowledge by proposing a new methodology for prediction technology value by integrating patent information analysis and artificial intelligence network. It helps managers who want to technology develop planning and policy maker who want to implement technology policy by providing quantitative prediction methodology. In addition, this study could help other researchers by proving a deeper understanding of the complex technological forecasting field.