One of the most critical steps to integrating heterogeneous e-Business applications using different XML schemas is schema matching, which is known to be costly and error-prone. Many automatic schema matching approaches have been proposed, but the challenge is still daunting because of the complexity of schemas and immaturity of technologies in…

This work describes the design and construction of an open source, entity resolution system that enables users to assign and maintain persistent identifiers for master data items. Two key features of this system that are not available in current ER systems and that make persistent identification possible are (1) The capture and management of…

New products continue to launch quickly but many of them are converged products. The "new product" is not a completely new thing to consumers and the basic features stay the same. As a result, the added functions or fancy design can't explain why consumers adopt the new media. Past studies have examined perceptions of innovations or user…

In current Peer-to-Peer networks, distributed and semantic free indexing is widely used by systems adopting "Distributed Hash Table" ("DHT") mechanisms. Although such systems typically solve a. user query rather fast in a deterministic way, they only support a very narrow search scheme, namely the exact hash key match. Furthermore, DHT systems put…

Amid the rapid growth of information today is the increasing challenge for people to survive and navigate its magnitude. Dynamics and heterogeneity of large information spaces such as the Web challenge information retrieval in these environments. Collection of information in advance and centralization of IR operations are hardly possible because…

In the current millennium, extensive use of computers and the internet caused an exponential increase in information. Few research areas are as important as information extraction, which primarily involves extracting concepts and the relations between them from free text. Limitations in the size of training data, lack of lexicons and lack of…

Along with the greater productivity that CAD automation provides nowadays, the product data of engineering applications needs to be shared and managed efficiently to gain a competitive edge for the engineering product design. However, exchanging and sharing the heterogeneous product data is still challenging. This dissertation first presents a…

Quantum error-correcting codes have been the cornerstone of research in quantum information science (QIS) for more than a decade. Without their conception, quantum computers would be a footnote in the history of science. When researchers embraced the idea that we live in a world where the effects of a noisy environment cannot completely be…

The granting of credit is a necessary risk of doing business. If companies only accepted cash, sales would be negatively impacted. In a perfect world, all consumers would pay their bills when they become due. However, the fact is that some consumers do default on debt. Companies are willing to accept default risk because the value of defaults does…

Quickly accessing the contents of a video is challenging for users, particularly for unstructured video, which contains no intentional shot boundaries, no chapters, and no apparent edited format. We approach this problem in the domain of lecture videos though the use of machine learning, to gather semantic information about the videos; and through…

Coreference resolution (CR) and entity relation detection (ERD) aim at finding predefined relations between pairs of entities in text. CR focuses on resolving identity relations while ERD focuses on detecting non-identity relations. Both CR and ERD are important as they can potentially improve other natural language processing (NLP) related tasks…

In the quest for database usability, several applications enable users to design custom forms using a graphical interface, and forward engineer the forms into new databases. The path-breaking aspect of such applications is that users are completely shielded from the technicalities of database creation. Despite this innovation, the process of…

This dissertation deals with a multiterminal source model for secret key generation by multiple network terminals with prior and privileged access to a set of correlated signals complemented by public discussion among themselves. Emphasis is placed on a characterization of secret key capacity, i.e., the largest rate of an achievable secret key,…

The Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm, defines services as software artifacts whose implementations are separated from their specifications. Application developers rely on services to simplify the design, reduce the development time and cost. Within the SOC paradigm, different Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have been developed.…

The project of ubiquitous computing aims to embed computation into everyday spaces. As a practice that is heavily concerned with space and place, its stance towards mobility is sometimes conflicted--treating mobility by turns as a disruption or as an opportunity--and almost always conceiving of it as free and empowered. Conducted in industrial and…