• Title/Summary/Keyword: Evaluation approaches

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Improving Performance of Recommendation Systems Using Topic Modeling (사용자 관심 이슈 분석을 통한 추천시스템 성능 향상 방안)

  • Choi, Seongi;Hyun, Yoonjin;Kim, Namgyu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.21 no.3
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    • pp.101-116
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    • 2015
  • Recently, due to the development of smart devices and social media, vast amounts of information with the various forms were accumulated. Particularly, considerable research efforts are being directed towards analyzing unstructured big data to resolve various social problems. Accordingly, focus of data-driven decision-making is being moved from structured data analysis to unstructured one. Also, in the field of recommendation system, which is the typical area of data-driven decision-making, the need of using unstructured data has been steadily increased to improve system performance. Approaches to improve the performance of recommendation systems can be found in two aspects- improving algorithms and acquiring useful data with high quality. Traditionally, most efforts to improve the performance of recommendation system were made by the former approach, while the latter approach has not attracted much attention relatively. In this sense, efforts to utilize unstructured data from variable sources are very timely and necessary. Particularly, as the interests of users are directly connected with their needs, identifying the interests of the user through unstructured big data analysis can be a crew for improving performance of recommendation systems. In this sense, this study proposes the methodology of improving recommendation system by measuring interests of the user. Specially, this study proposes the method to quantify interests of the user by analyzing user's internet usage patterns, and to predict user's repurchase based upon the discovered preferences. There are two important modules in this study. The first module predicts repurchase probability of each category through analyzing users' purchase history. We include the first module to our research scope for comparing the accuracy of traditional purchase-based prediction model to our new model presented in the second module. This procedure extracts purchase history of users. The core part of our methodology is in the second module. This module extracts users' interests by analyzing news articles the users have read. The second module constructs a correspondence matrix between topics and news articles by performing topic modeling on real world news articles. And then, the module analyzes users' news access patterns and then constructs a correspondence matrix between articles and users. After that, by merging the results of the previous processes in the second module, we can obtain a correspondence matrix between users and topics. This matrix describes users' interests in a structured manner. Finally, by using the matrix, the second module builds a model for predicting repurchase probability of each category. In this paper, we also provide experimental results of our performance evaluation. The outline of data used our experiments is as follows. We acquired web transaction data of 5,000 panels from a company that is specialized to analyzing ranks of internet sites. At first we extracted 15,000 URLs of news articles published from July 2012 to June 2013 from the original data and we crawled main contents of the news articles. After that we selected 2,615 users who have read at least one of the extracted news articles. Among the 2,615 users, we discovered that the number of target users who purchase at least one items from our target shopping mall 'G' is 359. In the experiments, we analyzed purchase history and news access records of the 359 internet users. From the performance evaluation, we found that our prediction model using both users' interests and purchase history outperforms a prediction model using only users' purchase history from a view point of misclassification ratio. In detail, our model outperformed the traditional one in appliance, beauty, computer, culture, digital, fashion, and sports categories when artificial neural network based models were used. Similarly, our model outperformed the traditional one in beauty, computer, digital, fashion, food, and furniture categories when decision tree based models were used although the improvement is very small.

An Intelligent Decision Support System for Selecting Promising Technologies for R&D based on Time-series Patent Analysis (R&D 기술 선정을 위한 시계열 특허 분석 기반 지능형 의사결정지원시스템)

  • Lee, Choongseok;Lee, Suk Joo;Choi, Byounggu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.3
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    • pp.79-96
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    • 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.

Predicting the Direction of the Stock Index by Using a Domain-Specific Sentiment Dictionary (주가지수 방향성 예측을 위한 주제지향 감성사전 구축 방안)

  • Yu, Eunji;Kim, Yoosin;Kim, Namgyu;Jeong, Seung Ryul
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.19 no.1
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    • pp.95-110
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    • 2013
  • Recently, the amount of unstructured data being generated through a variety of social media has been increasing rapidly, resulting in the increasing need to collect, store, search for, analyze, and visualize this data. This kind of data cannot be handled appropriately by using the traditional methodologies usually used for analyzing structured data because of its vast volume and unstructured nature. In this situation, many attempts are being made to analyze unstructured data such as text files and log files through various commercial or noncommercial analytical tools. Among the various contemporary issues dealt with in the literature of unstructured text data analysis, the concepts and techniques of opinion mining have been attracting much attention from pioneer researchers and business practitioners. Opinion mining or sentiment analysis refers to a series of processes that analyze participants' opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions about selected products, services, organizations, social issues, and so on. In other words, many attempts based on various opinion mining techniques are being made to resolve complicated issues that could not have otherwise been solved by existing traditional approaches. One of the most representative attempts using the opinion mining technique may be the recent research that proposed an intelligent model for predicting the direction of the stock index. This model works mainly on the basis of opinions extracted from an overwhelming number of economic news repots. News content published on various media is obviously a traditional example of unstructured text data. Every day, a large volume of new content is created, digitalized, and subsequently distributed to us via online or offline channels. Many studies have revealed that we make better decisions on political, economic, and social issues by analyzing news and other related information. In this sense, we expect to predict the fluctuation of stock markets partly by analyzing the relationship between economic news reports and the pattern of stock prices. So far, in the literature on opinion mining, most studies including ours have utilized a sentiment dictionary to elicit sentiment polarity or sentiment value from a large number of documents. A sentiment dictionary consists of pairs of selected words and their sentiment values. Sentiment classifiers refer to the dictionary to formulate the sentiment polarity of words, sentences in a document, and the whole document. However, most traditional approaches have common limitations in that they do not consider the flexibility of sentiment polarity, that is, the sentiment polarity or sentiment value of a word is fixed and cannot be changed in a traditional sentiment dictionary. In the real world, however, the sentiment polarity of a word can vary depending on the time, situation, and purpose of the analysis. It can also be contradictory in nature. The flexibility of sentiment polarity motivated us to conduct this study. In this paper, we have stated that sentiment polarity should be assigned, not merely on the basis of the inherent meaning of a word but on the basis of its ad hoc meaning within a particular context. To implement our idea, we presented an intelligent investment decision-support model based on opinion mining that performs the scrapping and parsing of massive volumes of economic news on the web, tags sentiment words, classifies sentiment polarity of the news, and finally predicts the direction of the next day's stock index. In addition, we applied a domain-specific sentiment dictionary instead of a general purpose one to classify each piece of news as either positive or negative. For the purpose of performance evaluation, we performed intensive experiments and investigated the prediction accuracy of our model. For the experiments to predict the direction of the stock index, we gathered and analyzed 1,072 articles about stock markets published by "M" and "E" media between July 2011 and September 2011.

Performance Analysis of Frequent Pattern Mining with Multiple Minimum Supports (다중 최소 임계치 기반 빈발 패턴 마이닝의 성능분석)

  • Ryang, Heungmo;Yun, Unil
    • Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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    • v.14 no.6
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    • pp.1-8
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    • 2013
  • Data mining techniques are used to find important and meaningful information from huge databases, and pattern mining is one of the significant data mining techniques. Pattern mining is a method of discovering useful patterns from the huge databases. Frequent pattern mining which is one of the pattern mining extracts patterns having higher frequencies than a minimum support threshold from databases, and the patterns are called frequent patterns. Traditional frequent pattern mining is based on a single minimum support threshold for the whole database to perform mining frequent patterns. This single support model implicitly supposes that all of the items in the database have the same nature. In real world applications, however, each item in databases can have relative characteristics, and thus an appropriate pattern mining technique which reflects the characteristics is required. In the framework of frequent pattern mining, where the natures of items are not considered, it needs to set the single minimum support threshold to a too low value for mining patterns containing rare items. It leads to too many patterns including meaningless items though. In contrast, we cannot mine any pattern if a too high threshold is used. This dilemma is called the rare item problem. To solve this problem, the initial researches proposed approximate approaches which split data into several groups according to item frequencies or group related rare items. However, these methods cannot find all of the frequent patterns including rare frequent patterns due to being based on approximate techniques. Hence, pattern mining model with multiple minimum supports is proposed in order to solve the rare item problem. In the model, each item has a corresponding minimum support threshold, called MIS (Minimum Item Support), and it is calculated based on item frequencies in databases. The multiple minimum supports model finds all of the rare frequent patterns without generating meaningless patterns and losing significant patterns by applying the MIS. Meanwhile, candidate patterns are extracted during a process of mining frequent patterns, and the only single minimum support is compared with frequencies of the candidate patterns in the single minimum support model. Therefore, the characteristics of items consist of the candidate patterns are not reflected. In addition, the rare item problem occurs in the model. In order to address this issue in the multiple minimum supports model, the minimum MIS value among all of the values of items in a candidate pattern is used as a minimum support threshold with respect to the candidate pattern for considering its characteristics. For efficiently mining frequent patterns including rare frequent patterns by adopting the above concept, tree based algorithms of the multiple minimum supports model sort items in a tree according to MIS descending order in contrast to those of the single minimum support model, where the items are ordered in frequency descending order. In this paper, we study the characteristics of the frequent pattern mining based on multiple minimum supports and conduct performance evaluation with a general frequent pattern mining algorithm in terms of runtime, memory usage, and scalability. Experimental results show that the multiple minimum supports based algorithm outperforms the single minimum support based one and demands more memory usage for MIS information. Moreover, the compared algorithms have a good scalability in the results.

A Folksonomy Ranking Framework: A Semantic Graph-based Approach (폭소노미 사이트를 위한 랭킹 프레임워크 설계: 시맨틱 그래프기반 접근)

  • Park, Hyun-Jung;Rho, Sang-Kyu
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.21 no.2
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    • pp.89-116
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    • 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.

Recent Progress in Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Research -A Review of Papers Published in the Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering in 2000 and 2001- (공기조화, 냉동 분야의 최근 연구 동향 -2000년 및 2001년 학회지 논문에 대한 종합적 고찰 -)

  • 강신형;한화택;조금남;이승복;조형희;김민수
    • Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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    • v.14 no.12
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    • pp.1102-1139
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    • 2002
  • A review on the papers published in the Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigerating Engineering in 2000 and 2001 has been done. Focus has been put on current status of research in the aspect of heating, cooling, ventilation, sanitation and building environment. The conclusions are as follows. (1) Most of fundamental studies on fluid flow were related with heat transportation of facilities. Drop formation and rivulet flow on solid surfaces were interesting topics related with condensation augmentation. Research on micro environment considering flow, heat, humidity was also interesting for comfortable living environment. It can be extended considering biological aspects. Development of fans and blowers of high performance and low noise were continuing topics. Well developed CFD technologies were widely applied for developing facilities and their systems. (2) Most of papers related with heat transfer analysis and heat exchanger shows dealt with convection, evaporation, and channel flow for the design application of heat exchanger. The numerical heat transfer simulation studies have been peformed and reported to show heat transfer characteristics. Experimental as well as numerical studies on heat exchanger were reported, while not many papers are available for the system analysis including heat exchanger. (3) A review of the recent studies on heat pump system shows that performance analysis and control of heat pump have been peformed by various simulations and experiments. The research papers on multi-type heat pump system increased significantly. The studies on heat pipe have been examined experimently for change of working characteristics and strut lure. Research on the phase change has been carried out steadily and operation strategies of encapsulated ice storage tank are reported experimentally in several papers. (4) A review of recent studies on refrigeration/air conditioning system have focused on the system performance and efficiency for new alternative refrigerants. Evaporation and condensation heat transfer characteristics are investigated for tube shapes and new alternative refrigerants. Studies on components of refrigeration/air conditioning system are carried to examine efficiency for various compressors and performance of new expansion devices. In addition to thermophysical properties of refrigerant mixtures, studies on new refrigerants are also carried out, however research works on two-phase flow seemed to be insufficient. (5) A review of the recent studies on absorption cooling system indicates that heat and mass transfer phenomena have been investigated to improve absorber performance. Various experimental data have been presented and several simulation models have been proposed. A review of the recent studies on duct and ventilation shows that ventilation indices have been proposed to quantify the ventilation performance in buildings and tunnels. Main efforts have been focused on the applications of ventilation effectiveness in practice, either numerically using computational fluid dynamics or experimentally using tracer gas techniques. (6) Based on a review of recent studies on indoor thermal environment and building service systems, research issues have mainly focused on many innovative ideas such as underfloor air-conditioning system, personal environmental modules, radiant floor cooling and etc. Also, the new approaches for minimizing energy consumption as well as improving indoor environmental conditions through predictive control of HVAC systems, various activities of building energy management and cost-benefit analysis for economic evaluation were highlighted.

An Analysis on the Elements of Activating Happiness Education Suggested by Noddings Reflected in the Home Economics Part of Middle School Technology-Home Economics Textbook Volume 1 of 2009 Curriculum Revision (2009개정 중학교 기술.가정과 교과서 1권 가정생활영역에 나타난 Noddings의 행복 교육 활성화 요소 분석)

  • Lee, Yon Suk;Yoo, Se Jong
    • Journal of Korean Home Economics Education Association
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    • v.26 no.1
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    • pp.31-53
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    • 2014
  • The purpose of this study is to analyze how the elements of activating happiness education suggested by Noddings is reflected in the Home Economics part of Middle School Technology-Home Economics Textbook Volume 1 of 2009 Curriculum Revision. The introduction style of unit, sub-unit, and small chapter, the objectives, the body contents, the activity resources, the tables/diagrams/pictures, the supplementry and advancedl materials, and the wrap-up and evaluation of sub-unit and units of Home Economics part of Technology Home Economics textbook volume 1 were analyzed. Noddings suggested the elements for activating happiness education in five areas of personal life sector including 'home making', 'place and nature', 'parenting', 'chracter and spiriual experiences', and 'growth of interpersonal relationships' and two areas of public one including 'preperation for work' and 'community, democracy and voluntary activities'. The specific elements in seven sectors of activating happiness education were extracted using the content analysis. How the elements of those suggested by Noddings were reflected in the various parts of the textbook were analyzed in terms of the closeness of approaches, contents, and procedures between Noddings's and textbook. The major findings of this study were as follows: 1. The degree to which the elements of activating happiness education were reflected in the textbook differed by each unit. The elements of activating happiness education were reflected the most frequently in the unit of 'Understanding Adolescence' and the least frequently in the unit of 'Self-management of Adolescence'. 2. Although the elements of activating happiness education were generally reflected in all the elements of a textbook, these elements were relatively more reflected in the body contents and tables/diagrams/pictures.

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Estimation and evaluation of irrigation water need using net water consumption concept in Jeju Island (순물소모량 개념에 의한 제주도 농업용수 수요량 산정 및 평가)

  • Kim, Chul Gyum;Kim, Nam Won
    • Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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    • v.50 no.7
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    • pp.503-511
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    • 2017
  • In order to estimate the demand for water resources planning and operation, methodology for determining the size of water supply facilities has been mainly applied to agricultural water, unlike living and industrial water, which reflects actual usage trends. This inevitably leads to an overestimation of agricultural water and can lead to an imbalance in the supply and demand of each use in terms of the total water resources plan. In this study, the difference of approaches of concept of net consumption was examined in comparison with the existing methodology and the characteristics of agricultural water demand were analyzed by applying it to whole Jeju Island. SWAT model was applied to estimate the amount of evapotranspiration, which is a key factor in estimating demand, and watershed modeling was performed to reflect geographical features, weather, runoff and water use characteristics of Jeju Island. For the past period (1992~2013), demand of Jeju Island as a whole was analyzed as 427 mm per year, and it showed a relatively high demand around the eastern and western coastal regions. Annual demand and seasonal variation characteristics of 10 river basins with watershed area of $30km^2$ or more were also analyzed. In addition, by applying the cultivated area of each crop in 2020 in the future, it is estimated that the demand corresponding to the 10-year frequency drought is 54% of the amount demanded in the previous research. This is due to the difference in approach depending on the purpose of the demand calculation. From the viewpoint of water resource management and operation, additional demand is expected as much as the net consumption. However, from the actual supply perspective, it can be judged that a facility plan that meets the existing demand amount is necessary. In order to utilize the methodologies and results presented in this study in practice, it is necessary to make a reasonable discussion in terms of policy and institutional as well as engineering verification.

A PLS Path Modeling Approach on the Cause-and-Effect Relationships among BSC Critical Success Factors for IT Organizations (PLS 경로모형을 이용한 IT 조직의 BSC 성공요인간의 인과관계 분석)

  • Lee, Jung-Hoon;Shin, Taek-Soo;Lim, Jong-Ho
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.17 no.4
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    • pp.207-228
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    • 2007
  • Measuring Information Technology(IT) organizations' activities have been limited to mainly measure financial indicators for a long time. However, according to the multifarious functions of Information System, a number of researches have been done for the new trends on measurement methodologies that come with financial measurement as well as new measurement methods. Especially, the researches on IT Balanced Scorecard(BSC), concept from BSC measuring IT activities have been done as well in recent years. BSC provides more advantages than only integration of non-financial measures in a performance measurement system. The core of BSC rests on the cause-and-effect relationships between measures to allow prediction of value chain performance measures to allow prediction of value chain performance measures, communication, and realization of the corporate strategy and incentive controlled actions. More recently, BSC proponents have focused on the need to tie measures together into a causal chain of performance, and to test the validity of these hypothesized effects to guide the development of strategy. Kaplan and Norton[2001] argue that one of the primary benefits of the balanced scorecard is its use in gauging the success of strategy. Norreklit[2000] insist that the cause-and-effect chain is central to the balanced scorecard. The cause-and-effect chain is also central to the IT BSC. However, prior researches on relationship between information system and enterprise strategies as well as connection between various IT performance measurement indicators are not so much studied. Ittner et al.[2003] report that 77% of all surveyed companies with an implemented BSC place no or only little interest on soundly modeled cause-and-effect relationships despite of the importance of cause-and-effect chains as an integral part of BSC. This shortcoming can be explained with one theoretical and one practical reason[Blumenberg and Hinz, 2006]. From a theoretical point of view, causalities within the BSC method and their application are only vaguely described by Kaplan and Norton. From a practical consideration, modeling corporate causalities is a complex task due to tedious data acquisition and following reliability maintenance. However, cause-and effect relationships are an essential part of BSCs because they differentiate performance measurement systems like BSCs from simple key performance indicator(KPI) lists. KPI lists present an ad-hoc collection of measures to managers but do not allow for a comprehensive view on corporate performance. Instead, performance measurement system like BSCs tries to model the relationships of the underlying value chain in cause-and-effect relationships. Therefore, to overcome the deficiencies of causal modeling in IT BSC, sound and robust causal modeling approaches are required in theory as well as in practice for offering a solution. The propose of this study is to suggest critical success factors(CSFs) and KPIs for measuring performance for IT organizations and empirically validate the casual relationships between those CSFs. For this purpose, we define four perspectives of BSC for IT organizations according to Van Grembergen's study[2000] as follows. The Future Orientation perspective represents the human and technology resources needed by IT to deliver its services. The Operational Excellence perspective represents the IT processes employed to develop and deliver the applications. The User Orientation perspective represents the user evaluation of IT. The Business Contribution perspective captures the business value of the IT investments. Each of these perspectives has to be translated into corresponding metrics and measures that assess the current situations. This study suggests 12 CSFs for IT BSC based on the previous IT BSC's studies and COBIT 4.1. These CSFs consist of 51 KPIs. We defines the cause-and-effect relationships among BSC CSFs for IT Organizations as follows. The Future Orientation perspective will have positive effects on the Operational Excellence perspective. Then the Operational Excellence perspective will have positive effects on the User Orientation perspective. Finally, the User Orientation perspective will have positive effects on the Business Contribution perspective. This research tests the validity of these hypothesized casual effects and the sub-hypothesized causal relationships. For the purpose, we used the Partial Least Squares approach to Structural Equation Modeling(or PLS Path Modeling) for analyzing multiple IT BSC CSFs. The PLS path modeling has special abilities that make it more appropriate than other techniques, such as multiple regression and LISREL, when analyzing small sample sizes. Recently the use of PLS path modeling has been gaining interests and use among IS researchers in recent years because of its ability to model latent constructs under conditions of nonormality and with small to medium sample sizes(Chin et al., 2003). The empirical results of our study using PLS path modeling show that the casual effects in IT BSC significantly exist partially in our hypotheses.

Control of Microorganisms in School Refectories and Kitchens Using Ozone Water and Ozone Gas (오존수 및 오존가스를 이용한 학교급식에서의 미생물 제어)

  • Choi, Jin-Kyung;Shin, Il-Shik;Kim, Dae Uk;Kim, Hee-Yun
    • Korean Journal of Food Science and Technology
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    • v.47 no.5
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    • pp.586-592
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    • 2015
  • This study was performed to determine optimum approaches for control of microorganisms in school refectories and kitchens. A reduction of more than 5.0 log CFU/mL was noted for Escherichia coli O157:H7, Salmonella Typhimurium, Listeria monocytogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, and Streptococcus mutans after treatment with 5 ppm ozone water for 60 s. Treatment of different vegetables with ozone water for 5 min showed bactericidal effects with 2-4 log reduction of viable cell number; the bactericidal effects differed according to the kinds of vegetables. The viable cell number on kitchen apparatus and tableware was not detected by ozone water treatment for 60 s. In addition, the count of the bacteria floating in the air in refectories and kitchens decreased 2.0 log CFU/1,000 L air to 0-1 CFU/1,000 L air on treatment with 45 ppm ozone gas for 12 hr. Therefore, ozone water and ozone gas may be good candidates as antimicrobial agents that can be used to improve sanitary conditions in school refectories and kitchens.