• Title/Summary/Keyword: Intelligent Framework

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Export Control System based on Case Based Reasoning: Design and Evaluation (사례 기반 지능형 수출통제 시스템 : 설계와 평가)

  • Hong, Woneui;Kim, Uihyun;Cho, Sinhee;Kim, Sansung;Yi, Mun Yong;Shin, Donghoon
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.20 no.3
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    • pp.109-131
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    • 2014
  • As the demand of nuclear power plant equipment is continuously growing worldwide, the importance of handling nuclear strategic materials is also increasing. While the number of cases submitted for the exports of nuclear-power commodity and technology is dramatically increasing, preadjudication (or prescreening to be simple) of strategic materials has been done so far by experts of a long-time experience and extensive field knowledge. However, there is severe shortage of experts in this domain, not to mention that it takes a long time to develop an expert. Because human experts must manually evaluate all the documents submitted for export permission, the current practice of nuclear material export is neither time-efficient nor cost-effective. Toward alleviating the problem of relying on costly human experts only, our research proposes a new system designed to help field experts make their decisions more effectively and efficiently. The proposed system is built upon case-based reasoning, which in essence extracts key features from the existing cases, compares the features with the features of a new case, and derives a solution for the new case by referencing similar cases and their solutions. Our research proposes a framework of case-based reasoning system, designs a case-based reasoning system for the control of nuclear material exports, and evaluates the performance of alternative keyword extraction methods (full automatic, full manual, and semi-automatic). A keyword extraction method is an essential component of the case-based reasoning system as it is used to extract key features of the cases. The full automatic method was conducted using TF-IDF, which is a widely used de facto standard method for representative keyword extraction in text mining. TF (Term Frequency) is based on the frequency count of the term within a document, showing how important the term is within a document while IDF (Inverted Document Frequency) is based on the infrequency of the term within a document set, showing how uniquely the term represents the document. The results show that the semi-automatic approach, which is based on the collaboration of machine and human, is the most effective solution regardless of whether the human is a field expert or a student who majors in nuclear engineering. Moreover, we propose a new approach of computing nuclear document similarity along with a new framework of document analysis. The proposed algorithm of nuclear document similarity considers both document-to-document similarity (${\alpha}$) and document-to-nuclear system similarity (${\beta}$), in order to derive the final score (${\gamma}$) for the decision of whether the presented case is of strategic material or not. The final score (${\gamma}$) represents a document similarity between the past cases and the new case. The score is induced by not only exploiting conventional TF-IDF, but utilizing a nuclear system similarity score, which takes the context of nuclear system domain into account. Finally, the system retrieves top-3 documents stored in the case base that are considered as the most similar cases with regard to the new case, and provides them with the degree of credibility. With this final score and the credibility score, it becomes easier for a user to see which documents in the case base are more worthy of looking up so that the user can make a proper decision with relatively lower cost. The evaluation of the system has been conducted by developing a prototype and testing with field data. The system workflows and outcomes have been verified by the field experts. This research is expected to contribute the growth of knowledge service industry by proposing a new system that can effectively reduce the burden of relying on costly human experts for the export control of nuclear materials and that can be considered as a meaningful example of knowledge service application.

Open Digital Textbook for Smart Education (스마트교육을 위한 오픈 디지털교과서)

  • Koo, Young-Il;Park, Choong-Shik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.19 no.2
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    • pp.177-189
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    • 2013
  • In Smart Education, the roles of digital textbook is very important as face-to-face media to learners. The standardization of digital textbook will promote the industrialization of digital textbook for contents providers and distributers as well as learner and instructors. In this study, the following three objectives-oriented digital textbooks are looking for ways to standardize. (1) digital textbooks should undertake the role of the media for blended learning which supports on-off classes, should be operating on common EPUB viewer without special dedicated viewer, should utilize the existing framework of the e-learning learning contents and learning management. The reason to consider the EPUB as the standard for digital textbooks is that digital textbooks don't need to specify antoher standard for the form of books, and can take advantage od industrial base with EPUB standards-rich content and distribution structure (2) digital textbooks should provide a low-cost open market service that are currently available as the standard open software (3) To provide appropriate learning feedback information to students, digital textbooks should provide a foundation which accumulates and manages all the learning activity information according to standard infrastructure for educational Big Data processing. In this study, the digital textbook in a smart education environment was referred to open digital textbook. The components of open digital textbooks service framework are (1) digital textbook terminals such as smart pad, smart TVs, smart phones, PC, etc., (2) digital textbooks platform to show and perform digital contents on digital textbook terminals, (3) learning contents repository, which exist on the cloud, maintains accredited learning, (4) App Store providing and distributing secondary learning contents and learning tools by learning contents developing companies, and (5) LMS as a learning support/management tool which on-site class teacher use for creating classroom instruction materials. In addition, locating all of the hardware and software implement a smart education service within the cloud must have take advantage of the cloud computing for efficient management and reducing expense. The open digital textbooks of smart education is consdered as providing e-book style interface of LMS to learners. In open digital textbooks, the representation of text, image, audio, video, equations, etc. is basic function. But painting, writing, problem solving, etc are beyond the capabilities of a simple e-book. The Communication of teacher-to-student, learner-to-learnert, tems-to-team is required by using the open digital textbook. To represent student demographics, portfolio information, and class information, the standard used in e-learning is desirable. To process learner tracking information about the activities of the learner for LMS(Learning Management System), open digital textbook must have the recording function and the commnincating function with LMS. DRM is a function for protecting various copyright. Currently DRMs of e-boook are controlled by the corresponding book viewer. If open digital textbook admitt DRM that is used in a variety of different DRM standards of various e-book viewer, the implementation of redundant features can be avoided. Security/privacy functions are required to protect information about the study or instruction from a third party UDL (Universal Design for Learning) is learning support function for those with disabilities have difficulty in learning courses. The open digital textbook, which is based on E-book standard EPUB 3.0, must (1) record the learning activity log information, and (2) communicate with the server to support the learning activity. While the recording function and the communication function, which is not determined on current standards, is implemented as a JavaScript and is utilized in the current EPUB 3.0 viewer, ths strategy of proposing such recording and communication functions as the next generation of e-book standard, or special standard (EPUB 3.0 for education) is needed. Future research in this study will implement open source program with the proposed open digital textbook standard and present a new educational services including Big Data analysis.

Multi-day Trip Planning System with Collaborative Recommendation (협업적 추천 기반의 여행 계획 시스템)

  • Aprilia, Priska;Oh, Kyeong-Jin;Hong, Myung-Duk;Ga, Myeong-Hyeon;Jo, Geun-Sik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.22 no.1
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    • pp.159-185
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    • 2016
  • Planning a multi-day trip is a complex, yet time-consuming task. It usually starts with selecting a list of points of interest (POIs) worth visiting and then arranging them into an itinerary, taking into consideration various constraints and preferences. When choosing POIs to visit, one might ask friends to suggest them, search for information on the Web, or seek advice from travel agents; however, those options have their limitations. First, the knowledge of friends is limited to the places they have visited. Second, the tourism information on the internet may be vast, but at the same time, might cause one to invest a lot of time reading and filtering the information. Lastly, travel agents might be biased towards providers of certain travel products when suggesting itineraries. In recent years, many researchers have tried to deal with the huge amount of tourism information available on the internet. They explored the wisdom of the crowd through overwhelming images shared by people on social media sites. Furthermore, trip planning problems are usually formulated as 'Tourist Trip Design Problems', and are solved using various search algorithms with heuristics. Various recommendation systems with various techniques have been set up to cope with the overwhelming tourism information available on the internet. Prediction models of recommendation systems are typically built using a large dataset. However, sometimes such a dataset is not always available. For other models, especially those that require input from people, human computation has emerged as a powerful and inexpensive approach. This study proposes CYTRIP (Crowdsource Your TRIP), a multi-day trip itinerary planning system that draws on the collective intelligence of contributors in recommending POIs. In order to enable the crowd to collaboratively recommend POIs to users, CYTRIP provides a shared workspace. In the shared workspace, the crowd can recommend as many POIs to as many requesters as they can, and they can also vote on the POIs recommended by other people when they find them interesting. In CYTRIP, anyone can make a contribution by recommending POIs to requesters based on requesters' specified preferences. CYTRIP takes input on the recommended POIs to build a multi-day trip itinerary taking into account the user's preferences, the various time constraints, and the locations. The input then becomes a multi-day trip planning problem that is formulated in Planning Domain Definition Language 3 (PDDL3). A sequence of actions formulated in a domain file is used to achieve the goals in the planning problem, which are the recommended POIs to be visited. The multi-day trip planning problem is a highly constrained problem. Sometimes, it is not feasible to visit all the recommended POIs with the limited resources available, such as the time the user can spend. In order to cope with an unachievable goal that can result in no solution for the other goals, CYTRIP selects a set of feasible POIs prior to the planning process. The planning problem is created for the selected POIs and fed into the planner. The solution returned by the planner is then parsed into a multi-day trip itinerary and displayed to the user on a map. The proposed system is implemented as a web-based application built using PHP on a CodeIgniter Web Framework. In order to evaluate the proposed system, an online experiment was conducted. From the online experiment, results show that with the help of the contributors, CYTRIP can plan and generate a multi-day trip itinerary that is tailored to the users' preferences and bound by their constraints, such as location or time constraints. The contributors also find that CYTRIP is a useful tool for collecting POIs from the crowd and planning a multi-day trip.

A Control Method for designing Object Interactions in 3D Game (3차원 게임에서 객체들의 상호 작용을 디자인하기 위한 제어 기법)

  • 김기현;김상욱
    • Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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    • v.9 no.3
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    • pp.322-331
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    • 2003
  • As the complexity of a 3D game is increased by various factors of the game scenario, it has a problem for controlling the interrelation of the game objects. Therefore, a game system has a necessity of the coordination of the responses of the game objects. Also, it is necessary to control the behaviors of animations of the game objects in terms of the game scenario. To produce realistic game simulations, a system has to include a structure for designing the interactions among the game objects. This paper presents a method that designs the dynamic control mechanism for the interaction of the game objects in the game scenario. For the method, we suggest a game agent system as a framework that is based on intelligent agents who can make decisions using specific rules. Game agent systems are used in order to manage environment data, to simulate the game objects, to control interactions among game objects, and to support visual authoring interface that ran define a various interrelations of the game objects. These techniques can process the autonomy level of the game objects and the associated collision avoidance method, etc. Also, it is possible to make the coherent decision-making ability of the game objects about a change of the scene. In this paper, the rule-based behavior control was designed to guide the simulation of the game objects. The rules are pre-defined by the user using visual interface for designing their interaction. The Agent State Decision Network, which is composed of the visual elements, is able to pass the information and infers the current state of the game objects. All of such methods can monitor and check a variation of motion state between game objects in real time. Finally, we present a validation of the control method together with a simple case-study example. In this paper, we design and implement the supervised classification systems for high resolution satellite images. The systems support various interfaces and statistical data of training samples so that we can select the most effective training data. In addition, the efficient extension of new classification algorithms and satellite image formats are applied easily through the modularized systems. The classifiers are considered the characteristics of spectral bands from the selected training data. They provide various supervised classification algorithms which include Parallelepiped, Minimum distance, Mahalanobis distance, Maximum likelihood and Fuzzy theory. We used IKONOS images for the input and verified the systems for the classification of high resolution satellite images.

Development of Agent-based Platform for Coordinated Scheduling in Global Supply Chain (글로벌 공급사슬에서 경쟁협력 스케줄링을 위한 에이전트 기반 플랫폼 구축)

  • Lee, Jung-Seung;Choi, Seong-Woo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.17 no.4
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    • pp.213-226
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    • 2011
  • In global supply chain, the scheduling problems of large products such as ships, airplanes, space shuttles, assembled constructions, and/or automobiles are complicated by nature. New scheduling systems are often developed in order to reduce inherent computational complexity. As a result, a problem can be decomposed into small sub-problems, problems that contain independently small scheduling systems integrating into the initial problem. As one of the authors experienced, DAS (Daewoo Shipbuilding Scheduling System) has adopted a two-layered hierarchical architecture. In the hierarchical architecture, individual scheduling systems composed of a high-level dock scheduler, DAS-ERECT and low-level assembly plant schedulers, DAS-PBS, DAS-3DS, DAS-NPS, and DAS-A7 try to search the best schedules under their own constraints. Moreover, the steep growth of communication technology and logistics enables it to introduce distributed multi-nation production plants by which different parts are produced by designated plants. Therefore vertical and lateral coordination among decomposed scheduling systems is necessary. No standard coordination mechanism of multiple scheduling systems exists, even though there are various scheduling systems existing in the area of scheduling research. Previous research regarding the coordination mechanism has mainly focused on external conversation without capacity model. Prior research has heavily focuses on agent-based coordination in the area of agent research. Yet, no scheduling domain has been developed. Previous research regarding the agent-based scheduling has paid its ample attention to internal coordination of scheduling process, a process that has not been efficient. In this study, we suggest a general framework for agent-based coordination of multiple scheduling systems in global supply chain. The purpose of this study was to design a standard coordination mechanism. To do so, we first define an individual scheduling agent responsible for their own plants and a meta-level coordination agent involved with each individual scheduling agent. We then suggest variables and values describing the individual scheduling agent and meta-level coordination agent. These variables and values are represented by Backus-Naur Form. Second, we suggest scheduling agent communication protocols for each scheduling agent topology classified into the system architectures, existence or nonexistence of coordinator, and directions of coordination. If there was a coordinating agent, an individual scheduling agent could communicate with another individual agent indirectly through the coordinator. On the other hand, if there was not any coordinating agent existing, an individual scheduling agent should communicate with another individual agent directly. To apply agent communication language specifically to the scheduling coordination domain, we had to additionally define an inner language, a language that suitably expresses scheduling coordination. A scheduling agent communication language is devised for the communication among agents independent of domain. We adopt three message layers which are ACL layer, scheduling coordination layer, and industry-specific layer. The ACL layer is a domain independent outer language layer. The scheduling coordination layer has terms necessary for scheduling coordination. The industry-specific layer expresses the industry specification. Third, in order to improve the efficiency of communication among scheduling agents and avoid possible infinite loops, we suggest a look-ahead load balancing model which supports to monitor participating agents and to analyze the status of the agents. To build the look-ahead load balancing model, the status of participating agents should be monitored. Most of all, the amount of sharing information should be considered. If complete information is collected, updating and maintenance cost of sharing information will be increasing although the frequency of communication will be decreasing. Therefore the level of detail and updating period of sharing information should be decided contingently. By means of this standard coordination mechanism, we can easily model coordination processes of multiple scheduling systems into supply chain. Finally, we apply this mechanism to shipbuilding domain and develop a prototype system which consists of a dock-scheduling agent, four assembly- plant-scheduling agents, and a meta-level coordination agent. A series of experiments using the real world data are used to empirically examine this mechanism. The results of this study show that the effect of agent-based platform on coordinated scheduling is evident in terms of the number of tardy jobs, tardiness, and makespan.

Measuring the Economic Impact of Item Descriptions on Sales Performance (온라인 상품 판매 성과에 영향을 미치는 상품 소개글 효과 측정 기법)

  • Lee, Dongwon;Park, Sung-Hyuk;Moon, Songchun
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.1-17
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    • 2012
  • Personalized smart devices such as smartphones and smart pads are widely used. Unlike traditional feature phones, theses smart devices allow users to choose a variety of functions, which support not only daily experiences but also business operations. Actually, there exist a huge number of applications accessible by smart device users in online and mobile application markets. Users can choose apps that fit their own tastes and needs, which is impossible for conventional phone users. With the increase in app demand, the tastes and needs of app users are becoming more diverse. To meet these requirements, numerous apps with diverse functions are being released on the market, which leads to fierce competition. Unlike offline markets, online markets have a limitation in that purchasing decisions should be made without experiencing the items. Therefore, online customers rely more on item-related information that can be seen on the item page in which online markets commonly provide details about each item. Customers can feel confident about the quality of an item through the online information and decide whether to purchase it. The same is true of online app markets. To win the sales competition against other apps that perform similar functions, app developers need to focus on writing app descriptions to attract the attention of customers. If we can measure the effect of app descriptions on sales without regard to the app's price and quality, app descriptions that facilitate the sale of apps can be identified. This study intends to provide such a quantitative result for app developers who want to promote the sales of their apps. For this purpose, we collected app details including the descriptions written in Korean from one of the largest app markets in Korea, and then extracted keywords from the descriptions. Next, the impact of the keywords on sales performance was measured through our econometric model. Through this analysis, we were able to analyze the impact of each keyword itself, apart from that of the design or quality. The keywords, comprised of the attribute and evaluation of each app, are extracted by a morpheme analyzer. Our model with the keywords as its input variables was established to analyze their impact on sales performance. A regression analysis was conducted for each category in which apps are included. This analysis was required because we found the keywords, which are emphasized in app descriptions, different category-by-category. The analysis conducted not only for free apps but also for paid apps showed which keywords have more impact on sales performance for each type of app. In the analysis of paid apps in the education category, keywords such as 'search+easy' and 'words+abundant' showed higher effectiveness. In the same category, free apps whose keywords emphasize the quality of apps showed higher sales performance. One interesting fact is that keywords describing not only the app but also the need for the app have asignificant impact. Language learning apps, regardless of whether they are sold free or paid, showed higher sales performance by including the keywords 'foreign language study+important'. This result shows that motivation for the purchase affected sales. While item reviews are widely researched in online markets, item descriptions are not very actively studied. In the case of the mobile app markets, newly introduced apps may not have many item reviews because of the low quantity sold. In such cases, item descriptions can be regarded more important when customers make a decision about purchasing items. This study is the first trial to quantitatively analyze the relationship between an item description and its impact on sales performance. The results show that our research framework successfully provides a list of the most effective sales key terms with the estimates of their effectiveness. Although this study is performed for a specified type of item (i.e., mobile apps), our model can be applied to almost all of the items traded in online markets.

The Behavior Analysis of Exhibition Visitors using Data Mining Technique at the KIDS & EDU EXPO for Children (유아교육 박람회에서 데이터마이닝 기법을 이용한 전시 관람 행동 패턴 분석)

  • Jung, Min-Kyu;Kim, Hyea-Kyeong;Choi, Il-Young;Lee, Kyoung-Jun;Kim, Jae-Kyeong
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.17 no.2
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    • pp.77-96
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    • 2011
  • An exhibition is defined as market events for specific duration to present exhibitors' main products to business or private visitors, and it plays a key role as effective marketing channels. As the importance of exhibition is getting more and more, domestic exhibition industry has achieved such a great quantitative growth. But, In contrast to the quantitative growth of domestic exhibition industry, the qualitative growth of Exhibition has not achieved competent growth. In order to improve the quality of exhibition, we need to understand the preference or behavior characteristics of visitors and to increase the level of visitors' attention and satisfaction through the understanding of visitors. So, in this paper, we used the observation survey method which is a kind of field research to understand visitors and collect the real data for the analysis of behavior pattern. And this research proposed the following methodology framework consisting of three steps. First step is to select a suitable exhibition to apply for our method. Second step is to implement the observation survey method. And we collect the real data for further analysis. In this paper, we conducted the observation survey method to obtain the real data of the KIDS & EDU EXPO for Children in SETEC. Our methodology was conducted on 160 visitors and 78 booths from November 4th to 6th in 2010. And, the last step is to analyze the record data through observation. In this step, we analyze the feature of exhibition using Demographic Characteristics collected by observation survey method at first. And then we analyze the individual booth features by the records of visited booth. Through the analysis of individual booth features, we can figure out what kind of events attract the attention of visitors and what kind of marketing activities affect the behavior pattern of visitors. But, since previous research considered only individual features influenced by exhibition, the research about the correlation among features is not performed much. So, in this research, additional analysis is carried out to supplement the existing research with data mining techniques. And we analyze the relation among booths using data mining techniques to know behavior patterns of visitors. Among data mining techniques, we make use of two data mining techniques, such as clustering analysis and ARM(Association Rule Mining) analysis. In clustering analysis, we use K-means algorithm to figure out the correlation among booths. Through data mining techniques, we figure out that there are two important features to affect visitors' behavior patterns in exhibition. One is the geographical features of booths. The other is the exhibit contents of booths. Those features are considered when the organizer of exhibition plans next exhibition. Therefore, the results of our analysis are expected to provide guideline to understanding visitors and some valuable insights for the exhibition from the earlier phases of exhibition planning. Also, this research would be a good way to increase the quality of visitor satisfaction. Visitors' movement paths, booth location, and distances between each booth are considered to plan next exhibition in advance. This research was conducted at the KIDS & EDU EXPO for Children in SETEC(Seoul Trade Exhibition & Convention), but it has some constraints to be applied directly to other exhibitions. Also, the results were derived from a limited number of data samples. In order to obtain more accurate and reliable results, it is necessary to conduct more experiments based on larger data samples and exhibitions on a variety of genres.

Participation Level in Online Knowledge Sharing: Behavioral Approach on Wikipedia (온라인 지식공유의 참여정도: 위키피디아에 대한 행태적 접근)

  • Park, Hyun Jung;Lee, Hong Joo;Kim, Jong Woo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.19 no.4
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    • pp.97-121
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    • 2013
  • With the growing importance of knowledge for sustainable competitive advantages and innovation in a volatile environment, many researches on knowledge sharing have been conducted. However, previous researches have mostly relied on the questionnaire survey which has inherent perceptive errors of respondents. The current research has drawn the relationship among primary participant behaviors towards the participation level in knowledge sharing, basically from online user behaviors on Wikipedia, a representative community for online knowledge collaboration. Without users' participation in knowledge sharing, knowledge collaboration for creating knowledge cannot be successful. By the way, the editing patterns of Wikipedia users are diverse, resulting in different revisiting periods for the same number of edits, and thus varying results of shared knowledge. Therefore, we illuminated the participation level of knowledge sharing from two different angles of number of edits and revisiting period. The behavioral dimensions affecting the level of participation in knowledge sharing includes the article talk for public discussion and user talk for private messaging, and community registration, which are observable on Wiki platform. Public discussion is being progressed on article talk pages arranged for exchanging ideas about each article topic. An article talk page is often divided into several sections which mainly address specific type of issues raised during the article development procedure. From the diverse opinions about the relatively trivial things such as what text, link, or images should be added or removed and how they should be restructured to the profound professional insights are shared, negotiated, and improved over the course of discussion. Wikipedia also provides personal user talk pages as a private messaging tool. On these pages, diverse personal messages such as casual greetings, stories about activities on Wikipedia, and ordinary affairs of life are exchanged. If anyone wants to communicate with another person, he or she visits the person's user talk page and leaves a message. Wikipedia articles are assessed according to seven quality grades, of which the featured article level is the highest. The dataset includes participants' behavioral data related with 2,978 articles, which have reached the featured article level, with editing histories of articles, their article talk histories, and user talk histories extracted from user talk pages for each article. The time period for analysis is from the initiation of articles until their promotion to the featured article level. The number of edits represents the total number of participation in the editing of an article, and the revisiting period is the time difference between the first and last edits. At first, the participation levels of each user category classified according to behavioral dimensions have been analyzed and compared. And then, robust regressions have been conducted on the relationships among independent variables reflecting the degree of behavioral characteristics and the dependent variable representing the participation level. Especially, through adopting a motivational theory adequate for online environment in setting up research hypotheses, this work suggests a theoretical framework for the participation level of online knowledge sharing. Consequently, this work reached the following practical behavioral results besides some theoretical implications. First, both public discussion and private messaging positively affect the participation level in knowledge sharing. Second, public discussion exerts greater influence than private messaging on the participation level. Third, a synergy effect of public discussion and private messaging on the number of edits was found, whereas a pretty weak negative interaction effect of them on the revisiting period was observed. Fourth, community registration has a significant impact on the revisiting period, whereas being insignificant on the number of edits. Fifth, when it comes to the relation generated from private messaging, the frequency or depth of relation is shown to be more critical than the scope of relation for the participation level.

Determinants of Mobile Application Use: A Study Focused on the Correlation between Application Categories (모바일 앱 사용에 영향을 미치는 요인에 관한 연구: 앱 카테고리 간 상관관계를 중심으로)

  • Park, Sangkyu;Lee, Dongwon
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.22 no.4
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    • pp.157-176
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    • 2016
  • For a long time, mobile phone had a sole function of communication. Recently however, abrupt innovations in technology allowed extension of the sphere in mobile phone activities. Development of technology enabled realization of almost computer-like environment even on a very small device. Such advancement yielded several forms of new high-tech devices such as smartphone and tablet PC, which quickly proliferated. Simultaneously with the diffusion of the mobile devices, mobile applications for those devices also prospered and soon became deeply penetrated in consumers' daily lives. Numerous mobile applications have been released in app stores yielding trillions of cumulative downloads. However, a big majority of the applications are disregarded from consumers. Even after the applications are purchased, they do not survive long in consumers' mobile devices and are soon abandoned. Nevertheless, it is imperative for both app developers and app-store operators to understand consumer behaviors and to develop marketing strategies aiming to make sustainable business by first increasing sales of mobile applications and by also designing surviving strategy for applications. Therefore, this research analyzes consumers' mobile application usage behavior in a frame of substitution/supplementary of application categories and several explanatory variables. Considering that consumers of mobile devices use multiple apps simultaneously, this research adopts multivariate probit models to explain mobile application usage behavior and to derive correlation between categories of applications for observing substitution/supplementary of application use. The research adopts several explanatory variables including sociodemographic data, user experiences of purchased applications that reflect future purchasing behavior of paid applications as well as consumer attitudes toward marketing efforts, variables representing consumer attitudes toward rating of the app and those representing consumer attitudes toward app-store promotion efforts (i.e., top developer badge and editor's choice badge). Results of this study can be explained in hedonic and utilitarian framework. Consumers who use hedonic applications, such as those of game and entertainment-related, are of young age with low education level. However, consumers who are old and have received higher education level prefer utilitarian application category such as life, information etc. There are disputable arguments over whether the users of SNS are hedonic or utilitarian. In our results, consumers who are younger and those with higher education level prefer using SNS category applications, which is in a middle of utilitarian and hedonic results. Also, applications that are directly related to tangible assets, such as banking, stock and mobile shopping, are only negatively related to experience of purchasing of paid app, meaning that consumers who put weights on tangible assets do not prefer buying paid application. Regarding categories, most correlations among categories are significantly positive. This is because someone who spend more time on mobile devices tends to use more applications. Game and entertainment category shows significant and positive correlation; however, there exists significantly negative correlation between game and information, as well as game and e-commerce categories of applications. Meanwhile, categories of game and SNS as well as game and finance have shown no significant correlations. This result clearly shows that mobile application usage behavior is quite clearly distinguishable - that the purpose of using mobile devices are polarized into utilitarian and hedonic purpose. This research proves several arguments that can only be explained by second-hand real data, not by survey data, and offers behavioral explanations of mobile application usage in consumers' perspectives. This research also shows substitution/supplementary patterns of consumer application usage, which then explain consumers' mobile application usage behaviors. However, this research has limitations in some points. Classification of categories itself is disputable, for classification is diverged among several studies. Therefore, there is a possibility of change in results depending on the classification. Lastly, although the data are collected in an individual application level, we reduce its observation into an individual level. Further research will be done to resolve these limitations.

The Brand Personality Effect: Communicating Brand Personality on Twitter and its Influence on Online Community Engagement (브랜드 개성 효과: 트위터 상의 브랜드 개성 전달이 온라인 커뮤니티 참여에 미치는 영향)

  • Cruz, Ruth Angelie B.;Lee, Hong Joo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.20 no.1
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    • pp.67-101
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    • 2014
  • The use of new technology greatly shapes the marketing strategies used by companies to engage their consumers. Among these new technologies, social media is used to reach out to the organization's audience online. One of the most popular social media channels to date is the microblogging platform Twitter. With 500 million tweets sent on average daily, the microblogging platform is definitely a rich source of data for researchers, and a lucrative marketing medium for companies. Nonetheless, one of the challenges for companies in developing an effective Twitter campaign is the limited theoretical and empirical evidence on the proper organizational usage of Twitter despite its potential advantages for a firm's external communications. The current study aims to provide empirical evidence on how firms can utilize Twitter effectively in their marketing communications using the association between brand personality and brand engagement that several branding researchers propose. The study extends Aaker's previous empirical work on brand personality by applying the Brand Personality Scale to explore whether Twitter brand communities convey distinctive brand personalities online and its influence on the communities' level or intensity of consumer engagement and sentiment quality. Moreover, the moderating effect of the product involvement construct in consumer engagement is also measured. By collecting data for a period of eight weeks using the publicly available Twitter application programming interface (API) from 23 accounts of Twitter-verified business-to-consumer (B2C) brands, we analyze the validity of the paper's hypothesis by using computerized content analysis and opinion mining. The study is the first to compare Twitter marketing across organizations using the brand personality concept. It demonstrates a potential basis for Twitter strategies and discusses the benefits of these strategies, thus providing a framework of analysis for Twitter practice and strategic direction for companies developing their use of Twitter to communicate with their followers on this social media platform. This study has four specific research objectives. The first objective is to examine the applicability of brand personality dimensions used in marketing research to online brand communities on Twitter. The second is to establish a connection between the congruence of offline and online brand personalities in building a successful social media brand community. Third, we test the moderating effect of product involvement in the effect of brand personality on brand community engagement. Lastly, we investigate the sentiment quality of consumer messages to the firms that succeed in communicating their brands' personalities on Twitter.