• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.79-96
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• 2008

One of the roles of the Semantic Web services is to execute dynamic intra-organizational services including the integration and interoperation of business processes. Since different organizations design their processes differently, the retrieval of similar semantic business processes is necessary in order to support inter-organizational collaborations. Most approaches for finding services that have certain features and support certain business processes have relied on some type of logical reasoning and exact matching. This paper presents our approach of using imprecise matching for expanding results from an exact matching engine to query the OWL(Web Ontology Language) MIT Process Handbook. MIT Process Handbook is an electronic repository of best-practice business processes. The Handbook is intended to help people: (1) redesigning organizational processes, (2) inventing new processes, and (3) sharing ideas about organizational practices. In order to use the MIT Process Handbook for process retrieval experiments, we had to export it into an OWL-based format. We model the Process Handbook meta-model in OWL and export the processes in the Handbook as instances of the meta-model. Next, we need to find a sizable number of queries and their corresponding correct answers in the Process Handbook. Many previous studies devised artificial dataset composed of randomly generated numbers without real meaning and used subjective ratings for correct answers and similarity values between processes. To generate a semantic-preserving test data set, we create 20 variants for each target process that are syntactically different but semantically equivalent using mutation operators. These variants represent the correct answers of the target process. We devise diverse similarity algorithms based on values of process attributes and structures of business processes. We use simple similarity algorithms for text retrieval such as TF-IDF and Levenshtein edit distance to devise our approaches, and utilize tree edit distance measure because semantic processes are appeared to have a graph structure. Also, we design similarity algorithms considering similarity of process structure such as part process, goal, and exception. Since we can identify relationships between semantic process and its subcomponents, this information can be utilized for calculating similarities between processes. Dice's coefficient and Jaccard similarity measures are utilized to calculate portion of overlaps between processes in diverse ways. We perform retrieval experiments to compare the performance of the devised similarity algorithms. We measure the retrieval performance in terms of precision, recall and F measure? the harmonic mean of precision and recall. The tree edit distance shows the poorest performance in terms of all measures. TF-IDF and the method incorporating TF-IDF measure and Levenshtein edit distance show better performances than other devised methods. These two measures are focused on similarity between name and descriptions of process. In addition, we calculate rank correlation coefficient, Kendall's tau b, between the number of process mutations and ranking of similarity values among the mutation sets. In this experiment, similarity measures based on process structure, such as Dice's, Jaccard, and derivatives of these measures, show greater coefficient than measures based on values of process attributes. However, the Lev-TFIDF-JaccardAll measure considering process structure and attributes' values together shows reasonably better performances in these two experiments. For retrieving semantic process, we can think that it's better to consider diverse aspects of process similarity such as process structure and values of process attributes. We generate semantic process data and its dataset for retrieval experiment from MIT Process Handbook repository. We suggest imprecise query algorithms that expand retrieval results from exact matching engine such as SPARQL, and compare the retrieval performances of the similarity algorithms. For the limitations and future work, we need to perform experiments with other dataset from other domain. And, since there are many similarity values from diverse measures, we may find better ways to identify relevant processes by applying these values simultaneously.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.35-51
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• 2012

Cloud computing is internet-based computing where computing resources are offered over the Internet as scalable and on-demand services. In particular, in case a number of various cloud services emerge in accordance with development of internet and mobile technology, to select and provide services with which service users satisfy is one of the important issues. Most of previous works show the limitation in the degree of user satisfaction because they are based on so called concept similarity in relation to user requirements or are lack of versatility of user preferences. This paper presents cloud service selection reasoning which can be applied to the general cloud service environments including a variety of computing resource services, not limited to web services. In relation to the service environments, there are two kinds of services: atomic service and composite service. An atomic service consists of service attributes which represent the characteristics of service such as functionality, performance, or specification. A composite service can be created by composition of atomic services and other composite services. Therefore, a composite service inherits attributes of component services. On the other hand, the main participants in providing with cloud services are service users, service suppliers, and service operators. Service suppliers can register services autonomously or in accordance with the strategic collaboration with service operators. Service users submit request queries including service name and requirements to the service management system. The service management system consists of a query processor for processing user queries, a registration manager for service registration, and a selection engine for service selection reasoning. In order to enhance the degree of user satisfaction, our reasoning stands on basis of the degree of conformance to user requirements of service attributes in terms of functionality, performance, and specification of service attributes, instead of concept similarity as in ontology-based reasoning. For this we introduce so called a service attribute graph (SAG) which is generated by considering the inclusion relationship among instances of a service attribute from several perspectives like functionality, performance, and specification. Hence, SAG is a directed graph which shows the inclusion relationships among attribute instances. Since the degree of conformance is very close to the inclusion relationship, we can say the acceptability of services depends on the closeness of inclusion relationship among corresponding attribute instances. That is, the high closeness implies the high acceptability because the degree of closeness reflects the degree of conformance among attributes instances. The degree of closeness is proportional to the path length between two vertex in SAG. The shorter path length means more close inclusion relationship than longer path length, which implies the higher degree of conformance. In addition to acceptability, in this paper, other user preferences such as priority for attributes and mandatary options are reflected for the variety of user requirements. Furthermore, to consider various types of attribute like character, number, and boolean also helps to support the variety of user requirements. Finally, according to service value to price cloud services are rated and recommended to users. One of the significances of this paper is the first try to present a graph-based selection reasoning unlike other works, while considering various user preferences in relation with service attributes.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.159-172
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• 2010

The recommender system is one of the possible solutions to assist customers in finding the items they would like to purchase. To date, a variety of recommendation techniques have been developed. One of the most successful recommendation techniques is Collaborative Filtering (CF) that has been used in a number of different applications such as recommending Web pages, movies, music, articles and products. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. Broadly, there are memory-based CF algorithms, model-based CF algorithms, and hybrid CF algorithms which combine CF with content-based techniques or other recommender systems. While many researchers have focused their efforts in improving CF performance, the theoretical justification of CF algorithms is lacking. That is, we do not know many things about how CF is done. Furthermore, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting the performances of CF algorithms in advance is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose an efficient approach to predict the performance of CF. Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are applied to develop our prediction model. CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. SNA facilitates an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in data for CF recommendations. An ANN model is developed through an analysis of network topology, such as network density, inclusiveness, clustering coefficient, network centralization, and Krackhardt's efficiency. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Inclusiveness refers to the number of nodes which are included within the various connected parts of the social network. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. Krackhardt's efficiency characterizes how dense the social network is beyond that barely needed to keep the social group even indirectly connected to one another. We use these social network measures as input variables of the ANN model. As an output variable, we use the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the ANN model, sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well-known department stores in Korea, was used. Total 396 experimental samples were gathered, and we used 40%, 40%, and 20% of them, for training, test, and validation, respectively. The 5-fold cross validation was also conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. The input variable measuring process consists of following three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used Net Miner 3 and UCINET 6.0 for SNA, and Clementine 11.1 for ANN modeling. The experiments reported that the ANN model has 92.61% estimated accuracy and 0.0049 RMSE. Thus, we can know that our prediction model helps decide whether CF is useful for a given application with certain data characteristics.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.213-225
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• 2010

Data mining has empowered the managers who are charge of the tasks in their company to present personalized and differentiated marketing programs to their customers with the rapid growth of information technology. Most studies on customer' response have focused on predicting whether they would respond or not for their marketing promotion as marketing managers have been eager to identify who would respond to their marketing promotion. So many studies utilizing data mining have tried to resolve the binary decision problems such as bankruptcy prediction, network intrusion detection, and fraud detection in credit card usages. The prediction of customer's response has been studied with similar methods mentioned above because the prediction of customer's response is a kind of dichotomous decision problem. In addition, a number of competitive data mining techniques such as neural networks, SVM(support vector machine), decision trees, logit, and genetic algorithms have been applied to the prediction of customer's response for marketing promotion. The marketing managers also have tried to classify their customers with quantitative measures such as recency, frequency, and monetary acquired from their transaction database. The measures mean that their customers came to purchase in recent or old days, how frequent in a period, and how much they spent once. Using segmented customers we proposed an approach that could enable to differentiate customers in the same rating among the segmented customers. Our approach employed support vector regression to forecast the purchase amount of customers for each customer rating. Our study used the sample that included 41,924 customers extracted from DMEF04 Data Set, who purchased at least once in the last two years. We classified customers from first rating to fifth rating based on the purchase amount after giving a marketing promotion. Here, we divided customers into first rating who has a large amount of purchase and fifth rating who are non-respondents for the promotion. Our proposed model forecasted the purchase amount of the customers in the same rating and the marketing managers could make a differentiated and personalized marketing program for each customer even though they were belong to the same rating. In addition, we proposed more efficient learning method by separating the learning samples. We employed two learning methods to compare the performance of proposed learning method with general learning method for SVRs. LMW (Learning Method using Whole data for purchasing customers) is a general learning method for forecasting the purchase amount of customers. And we proposed a method, LMS (Learning Method using Separated data for classification purchasing customers), that makes four different SVR models for each class of customers. To evaluate the performance of models, we calculated MAE (Mean Absolute Error) and MAPE (Mean Absolute Percent Error) for each model to predict the purchase amount of customers. In LMW, the overall performance was 0.670 MAPE and the best performance showed 0.327 MAPE. Generally, the performances of the proposed LMS model were analyzed as more superior compared to the performance of the LMW model. In LMS, we found that the best performance was 0.275 MAPE. The performance of LMS was higher than LMW in each class of customers. After comparing the performance of our proposed method LMS to LMW, our proposed model had more significant performance for forecasting the purchase amount of customers in each class. In addition, our approach will be useful for marketing managers when they need to customers for their promotion. Even if customers were belonging to same class, marketing managers could offer customers a differentiated and personalized marketing promotion.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.67-84
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• 2010

In terms of business, forecasting is a work of what is expected to happen in the future to make managerial decisions and plans. Therefore, the accurate forecasting is very important for major managerial decision making and is the basis for making various strategies of business. But it is very difficult to make an unbiased and consistent estimate because of uncertainty and complexity in the future business environment. That is why we should use scientific forecasting model to support business decision making, and make an effort to minimize the model's forecasting error which is difference between observation and estimator. Nevertheless, minimizing the error is not an easy task. Case-based reasoning is a problem solving method that utilizes the past similar case to solve the current problem. To build the successful case-based reasoning models, retrieving the case not only the most similar case but also the most relevant case is very important. To retrieve the similar and relevant case from past cases, the measurement of similarities between cases is an important key factor. Especially, if the cases contain symbolic data, it is more difficult to measure the distances. The purpose of this study is to improve the forecasting accuracy of case-based reasoning approach using fuzzy relation and composition. Especially, two methods are adopted to measure the similarity between cases containing symbolic data. One is to deduct the similarity matrix following binary logic(the judgment of sameness between two symbolic data), the other is to deduct the similarity matrix following fuzzy relation and composition. This study is conducted in the following order; data gathering and preprocessing, model building and analysis, validation analysis, conclusion. First, in the progress of data gathering and preprocessing we collect data set including categorical dependent variables. Also, the data set gathered is cross-section data and independent variables of the data set include several qualitative variables expressed symbolic data. The research data consists of many financial ratios and the corresponding bond ratings of Korean companies. The ratings we employ in this study cover all bonds rated by one of the bond rating agencies in Korea. Our total sample includes 1,816 companies whose commercial papers have been rated in the period 1997~2000. Credit grades are defined as outputs and classified into 5 rating categories(A1, A2, A3, B, C) according to credit levels. Second, in the progress of model building and analysis we deduct the similarity matrix following binary logic and fuzzy composition to measure the similarity between cases containing symbolic data. In this process, the used types of fuzzy composition are max-min, max-product, max-average. And then, the analysis is carried out by case-based reasoning approach with the deducted similarity matrix. Third, in the progress of validation analysis we verify the validation of model through McNemar test based on hit ratio. Finally, we draw a conclusion from the study. As a result, the similarity measuring method using fuzzy relation and composition shows good forecasting performance compared to the similarity measuring method using binary logic for similarity measurement between two symbolic data. But the results of the analysis are not statistically significant in forecasting performance among the types of fuzzy composition. The contributions of this study are as follows. We propose another methodology that fuzzy relation and fuzzy composition could be applied for the similarity measurement between two symbolic data. That is the most important factor to build case-based reasoning model.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.45-55
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• 2013

Thereby using smartphone and mobile device be more popular the more people utilize mobile device in many area such as education, news, financial. In January, 2007 Apple release i-phone it touch off rapid increasing in user of smartphone and it create new market and these broaden its utilization area. Smartphone use WiFi or 3G mobile radio communication network and it has a feature that can access to internet whenever and anywhere. Also using smartphone application people can search arrival time of public transportation in real time and application is used in mobile banking and stock trading. Computer's function is replaced by smartphone so it involves important user's information such as financial and personal pictures, videos. Present smartphone security systems are not only too simple but the unlocking methods are spreading out covertly. I-phone is secured by using combination of number and character but USA's IT magazine Engadget reveal that it is easily unlocked by using combination with some part of number pad and buttons Android operation system is using pattern system and it is known as using 9 point dot so user can utilize various variable but according to Jonathan smith professor of University of Pennsylvania Android security system is easily unlocked by tracing fingerprint which remains on the smartphone screen. So both of Android and I-phone OS are vulnerable at security threat. Compared with problem of password and pattern finger recognition has advantage in security and possibility of loss. The reason why current using finger recognition smart phone, and device are not so popular is that there are many problem: not providing reasonable price, breaching human rights. In addition, finger recognition sensor is not providing reasonable price to customers but through continuous development of the smartphone and device, it will be more miniaturized and its price will fall. So once utilization of finger recognition is actively used in smartphone and if its utilization area broaden to financial transaction. Utilization of biometrics in smart device will be debated briskly. So in this thesis we will propose fingerprint numbering system which is combined fingerprint and password to fortify existing fingerprint recognition. Consisted by 4 number of password has this kind of problem so we will replace existing 4number password and pattern system and consolidate with fingerprint recognition and password reinforce security. In original fingerprint recognition system there is only 10 numbers of cases but if numbering to fingerprint we can consist of a password as a new method. Using proposed method user enter fingerprint as invested number to the finger. So attacker will have difficulty to collect all kind of fingerprint to forge and infer user's password. After fingerprint numbering, system can use the method of recognization of entering several fingerprint at the same time or enter fingerprint in regular sequence. In this thesis we adapt entering fingerprint in regular sequence and if in this system allow duplication when entering fingerprint. In case of allowing duplication a number of possible combinations is $\sum_{I=1}^{10}\;{_{10}P_i}$ and its total cases of number is 9,864,100. So by this method user retain security the other hand attacker will have a number of difficulties to conjecture and it is needed to obtain user's fingerprint thus this system will enhance user's security. This system is method not accept only one fingerprint but accept multiple finger in regular sequence. In this thesis we introduce the method in the environment of smartphone by using multiple numbered fingerprint enter to authorize user. Present smartphone authorization using pattern and password and fingerprint are exposed to high risk so if proposed system overcome delay time when user enter their finger to recognition device and relate to other biometric method it will have more concrete security. The problem should be solved after this research is reducing fingerprint's numbering time and hardware development should be preceded. If in the future using fingerprint public certification becomes popular. The fingerprint recognition in the smartphone will become important security issue so this thesis will utilize to fortify fingerprint recognition research.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.19-36
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• 2015

Social media is an emerging issue in content services and in current business environment. YouTube is the most representative social media service in the world. YouTube is different from other conventional content services in its open user participation and contents creation methods. To promote a content in YouTube, it is important to understand the diffusion phenomena of contents and the network structural characteristics. Most previous studies analyzed impact factors of contents diffusion from the view point of general behavioral factors. Currently some researchers use network structure factors. However, these two approaches have been used separately. However this study tries to analyze the general impact factors on the view count and content based network structures all together. In addition, when building a content based network, this study forms the network structure by analyzing user comments on 22,370 contents of YouTube not based on the individual user based network. From this study, we re-proved statistically the causal relations between view count and not only general factors but also network factors. Moreover by analyzing this integrated research model, we found that these factors affect the view count of YouTube according to the following order; Uploader Followers, Video Age, Betweenness Centrality, Comments, Closeness Centrality, Clustering Coefficient and Rating. However Degree Centrality and Eigenvector Centrality affect the view count negatively. From this research some strategic points for the utilizing of contents diffusion are as followings. First, it is needed to manage general factors such as the number of uploader followers or subscribers, the video age, the number of comments, average rating points, and etc. The impact of average rating points is not so much important as we thought before. However, it is needed to increase the number of uploader followers strategically and sustain the contents in the service as long as possible. Second, we need to pay attention to the impacts of betweenness centrality and closeness centrality among other network factors. Users seems to search the related subject or similar contents after watching a content. It is needed to shorten the distance between other popular contents in the service. Namely, this study showed that it is beneficial for increasing view counts by decreasing the number of search attempts and increasing similarity with many other contents. This is consistent with the result of the clustering coefficient impact analysis. Third, it is important to notice the negative impact of degree centrality and eigenvector centrality on the view count. If the number of connections with other contents is too much increased it means there are many similar contents and eventually it might distribute the view counts. Moreover, too high eigenvector centrality means that there are connections with popular contents around the content, and it might lose the view count because of the impact of the popular contents. It would be better to avoid connections with too powerful popular contents. From this study we analyzed the phenomenon and verified diffusion factors of Youtube contents by using an integrated model consisting of general factors and network structure factors. From the viewpoints of social contribution, this study might provide useful information to music or movie industry or other contents vendors for their effective contents services. This research provides basic schemes that can be applied strategically in online contents marketing. One of the limitations of this study is that this study formed a contents based network for the network structure analysis. It might be an indirect method to see the content network structure. We can use more various methods to establish direct content network. Further researches include more detailed researches like an analysis according to the types of contents or domains or characteristics of the contents or users, and etc.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.23-38
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• 2012

There is a large difference between purchasing patterns in an online shopping mall and in an offline market. This difference may be caused mainly by the difference in accessibility of online and offline markets. It means that an interval between the initial purchasing decision and its realization appears to be relatively short in an online shopping mall, because a customer can make an order immediately. Because of the short interval between a purchasing decision and its realization, an online shopping mall transaction usually contains fewer items than that of an offline market. In an offline market, customers usually keep some items in mind and buy them all at once a few days after deciding to buy them, instead of buying each item individually and immediately. On the contrary, more than 70% of online shopping mall transactions contain only one item. This statistic implies that traditional data mining techniques cannot be directly applied to online market analysis, because hardly any association rules can survive with an acceptable level of Support because of too many Null Transactions. Most market basket analyses on online shopping mall transactions, therefore, have been performed by expanding the co-occurrence criteria of traditional association rule mining. While the traditional co-occurrence criteria defines items purchased in one transaction as concurrently purchased items, the expanded co-occurrence criteria regards items purchased by a customer during some predefined period (e.g., a day) as concurrently purchased items. In studies using expanded co-occurrence criteria, however, the criteria has been defined arbitrarily by researchers without any theoretical grounds or agreement. The lack of clear grounds of adopting a certain co-occurrence criteria degrades the reliability of the analytical results. Moreover, it is hard to derive new meaningful findings by combining the outcomes of previous individual studies. In this paper, we attempt to compare expanded co-occurrence criteria and propose a guideline for selecting an appropriate one. First of all, we compare the accuracy of association rules discovered according to various co-occurrence criteria. By doing this experiment we expect that we can provide a guideline for selecting appropriate co-occurrence criteria that corresponds to the purpose of the analysis. Additionally, we will perform similar experiments with several groups of customers that are segmented by each customer's average duration between orders. By this experiment, we attempt to discover the relationship between the optimal co-occurrence criteria and the customer's average duration between orders. Finally, by a series of experiments, we expect that we can provide basic guidelines for developing customized recommendation systems. Our experiments use a real dataset acquired from one of the largest internet shopping malls in Korea. We use 66,278 transactions of 3,847 customers conducted during the last two years. Overall results show that the accuracy of association rules of frequent shoppers (whose average duration between orders is relatively short) is higher than that of causal shoppers. In addition we discover that with frequent shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears very high when the co-occurrence criteria of the training set corresponds to the validation set (i.e., target set). It implies that the co-occurrence criteria of frequent shoppers should be set according to the application purpose period. For example, an analyzer should use a day as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to offer a coupon valid only for a day to potential customers who will use the coupon. On the contrary, an analyzer should use a month as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to publish a coupon book that can be used for a month. In the case of causal shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears to not be affected by the period of the application purposes. The accuracy of the causal shoppers' association rules becomes higher when the longer co-occurrence criterion has been adopted. It implies that an analyzer has to set the co-occurrence criterion for as long as possible, regardless of the application purpose period.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.157-175
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• 2012

It is difficult to evaluate the performance of process innovation of e-procurement which has large scale and complex processes. The existing evaluation methods for measuring the effects of process innovation have been mainly done with statistically quantitative methods by analyzing operational data or with qualitative methods by conducting surveys and interviews. However, these methods have some limitations to evaluate the effects because the performance evaluation of e-procurement process innovation should consider the interactions among participants who are active either directly or indirectly through the processes. This study considers the e-procurement process as a complex system and develops a simulation model based on MAS(Multi-Agent System) to evaluate the effects of e-procurement process innovation. Multi-agent based simulation allows observing interaction patterns of objects in virtual world through relationship among objects and their behavioral mechanism. Agent-based simulation is suitable especially for complex business problems. In this study, we used Netlogo Version 4.1.3 as a MAS simulation tool which was developed in Northwestern University. To do this, we developed a interaction model of agents in MAS environment. We defined process agents and task agents, and assigned their behavioral characteristics. The developed simulation model was applied to G2B system (KONEPS: Korea ON-line E-Procurement System) of Public Procurement Service (PPS) in Korea and used to evaluate the innovation effects of the G2B system. KONEPS is a successfully established e-procurement system started in the year 2002. KONEPS is a representative e-Procurement system which integrates characteristics of e-commerce into government for business procurement activities. KONEPS deserves the international recognition considering the annual transaction volume of 56 billion dollars, daily exchanges of electronic documents, users consisted of 121,000 suppliers and 37,000 public organizations, and the 4.5 billion dollars of cost saving. For the simulation, we analyzed the e-procurement of process of KONEPS into eight sub processes such as 'process 1: search products and acquisition of proposal', 'process 2 : review the methods of contracts and item features', 'process 3 : a notice of bid', 'process 4 : registration and confirmation of qualification', 'process 5 : bidding', 'process 6 : a screening test', 'process 7 : contracts', and 'process 8 : invoice and payment'. For the parameter settings of the agents behavior, we collected some data from the transactional database of PPS and some information by conducting a survey. The used data for the simulation are 'participants (government organizations, local government organizations and public institutions)', 'the number of bidding per year', 'the number of total contracts', 'the number of shopping mall transactions', 'the rate of contracts between bidding and shopping mall', 'the successful bidding ratio', and the estimated time for each process. The comparison was done for the difference of time consumption between 'before the innovation (As-was)' and 'after the innovation (As-is).' The results showed that there were productivity improvements in every eight sub processes. The decrease ratio of 'average number of task processing' was 92.7% and the decrease ratio of 'average time of task processing' was 95.4% in entire processes when we use G2B system comparing to the conventional method. Also, this study found that the process innovation effect will be enhanced if the task process related to the 'contract' can be improved. This study shows the usability and possibility of using MAS in process innovation evaluation and its modeling.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.61-83
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• 2012

A knowledge map describes the network of related knowledge into the form of a diagram, and therefore underpins the structure of knowledge categorizing and archiving by defining the relationship of the referential navigation between knowledge. The referential navigation between knowledge means the relationship of cross-referencing exhibited when a piece of knowledge is utilized by a user. To understand the contents of the knowledge, a user usually requires additionally information or knowledge related with each other in the relation of cause and effect. This relation can be expanded as the effective connection between knowledge increases, and finally forms the network of knowledge. A network display of knowledge using nodes and links to arrange and to represent the relationship between concepts can provide a more complex knowledge structure than a hierarchical display. Moreover, it can facilitate a user to infer through the links shown on the network. For this reason, building a knowledge map based on the ontology technology has been emphasized to formally as well as objectively describe the knowledge and its relationships. As the necessity to build a knowledge map based on the structure of the ontology has been emphasized, not a few researches have been proposed to fulfill the needs. However, most of those researches to apply the ontology to build the knowledge map just focused on formally expressing knowledge and its relationships with other knowledge to promote the possibility of knowledge reuse. Although many types of knowledge maps based on the structure of the ontology were proposed, no researches have tried to design and implement the referential navigation-enabled knowledge map. This paper addresses a methodology to build the ontology-based knowledge map enabling the referential navigation between knowledge. The ontology-based knowledge map resulted from the proposed methodology can not only express the referential navigation between knowledge but also infer additional relationships among knowledge based on the referential relationships. The most highlighted benefits that can be delivered by applying the ontology technology to the knowledge map include; formal expression about knowledge and its relationships with others, automatic identification of the knowledge network based on the function of self-inference on the referential relationships, and automatic expansion of the knowledge-base designed to categorize and store knowledge according to the network between knowledge. To enable the referential navigation between knowledge included in the knowledge map, and therefore to form the knowledge map in the format of a network, the ontology must describe knowledge according to the relation with the process and task. A process is composed of component tasks, while a task is activated after any required knowledge is inputted. Since the relation of cause and effect between knowledge can be inherently determined by the sequence of tasks, the referential relationship between knowledge can be circuitously implemented if the knowledge is modeled to be one of input or output of each task. To describe the knowledge with respect to related process and task, the Protege-OWL, an editor that enables users to build ontologies for the Semantic Web, is used. An OWL ontology-based knowledge map includes descriptions of classes (process, task, and knowledge), properties (relationships between process and task, task and knowledge), and their instances. Given such an ontology, the OWL formal semantics specifies how to derive its logical consequences, i.e. facts not literally present in the ontology, but entailed by the semantics. Therefore a knowledge network can be automatically formulated based on the defined relationships, and the referential navigation between knowledge is enabled. To verify the validity of the proposed concepts, two real business process-oriented knowledge maps are exemplified: the knowledge map of the process of 'Business Trip Application' and 'Purchase Management'. By applying the 'DL-Query' provided by the Protege-OWL as a plug-in module, the performance of the implemented ontology-based knowledge map has been examined. Two kinds of queries to check whether the knowledge is networked with respect to the referential relations as well as the ontology-based knowledge network can infer further facts that are not literally described were tested. The test results show that not only the referential navigation between knowledge has been correctly realized, but also the additional inference has been accurately performed.