» Masters Papers
2002
- Author Parmelee, Mary
- Title Design For Change: Ontology-Driven Knowledgebase Applications
For Dynamic Biological Domains
- Abstract Post-genomic biology is producing a plethora of rapidly
changing complex data. Yet extracting useful information from this data
is limited by current knowledge management methodologies. Biological knowledge
management is complicated by ambiguous nomenclature, cultural differences
between biologists and computer scientists, and conventional database technology
that was not designed to support rapidly changing complex domains. A recent
trend in ontology-driven database design has emerged to address this challenge.
While ontologies provide effective knowledge models, attempts to transform
ontologies into knowledgebases have revealed an impedance mismatch or ontology
transformation gap. A unique methodology called Ultra-Structure Theory (UT)
may provide an ontology transform solution that supports large scale, dynamic
biological domains by expressing the complexity in data rather than programming
code. This thesis aims to survey ontology and database theory and methodologies,
and describe how UT integrates and extends them to provide a flexible, semantically
expressive knowledgebase solution using standard relational database technology.
2002
- Author Bauers, Anne
- Title Interaction Techniques for Large Digital Images: A Comparative Study
- Abstract Digital images are examined on computer screens in a variety
of contexts, including radiology, cartography, art, and satellite imaging.
Frequently these digital images are larger than computer screens, and computer
software programs use different paradigms for allowing users to zoom in
and out of the image and to navigate around it. With recent advances in
CPU and Internet connection speed, users may view large images that are
not stored locally at a rapid rate. However, there has been no systematic
investigation of what image-viewing paradigms are most effective for viewing
images at these faster speeds. This paper reports on a study designed to
research the types of methods that best allow users to access and view large
images at both fast and slow speeds. Five different viewing techniques are
described and examined. The researchers found that techniques that enable
both intuitive and systematic searching tend to perform best at a fast speed,
while techniques that minimize the number of interactions with the image
are most effective at a slow speed. Additionally, based on an informal survey,
users prefer by a large margin the Point-Zoom technique, which allows them
to interact freely with the image and move around it easily.
2003
- Author Yang, Jian
- Title Extending eprints archives to improve access to scholarly materials.
- Abstract This study is centered on the current crisis of the scholarly
publishing system and its possible solution --- Open Archive Initiative
(OAI). Cost, access, peer review and archiving are four major issues facing
the current scholarly publishing system. Rapid increase in the price of
journals and publications, limited access by the researchers to those publications,
an inefficient peer review system, and difficulties archiving print media
all pose a threat a threat for the free flow of the scholarly information.
The Open Archive Initiative is trying to address the above issues by exploring
and setting up standards for digital archiving systems. In this study, we
implemented EPrints system which is one of the most influential open source
software applications that is capable of creating OAI-compliant archives.
We extended EPrints system to support scholarly interaction including claim,
concept and reviews.
2004
- Author Chen, Patrick
- Title Closing the Information Gap: PIRE, a portable, open source information retrieval tool
- Abstract In the world of Database Management, there are many tiers
of complexity and financial expenditure that any one organization may choose
to commit to the storage and manipulation of data. While Standards such
as SQL have helped standardize the storage and retrieval of information,
the ability of the user to access and manipulate data is an area of a great
deal of customization and expense depending on the industry. As a result,
while it can be relatively inexpensive to set up storage for a database,
it can be very expensive and time consuming to create an user interface
for the use of said data. This project seeks to create an open-source and
easily configurable web interface for simple object-based research. With
this tool, users should be able to quickly create a unique map for any individual
database which will enable the script to provide easy and exhaustive research.
2004
- Author Lewis, Kali C.
- Title TRANS-CONTIG: Transcription factors and their corresponding contigs, a web database
- Abstract This study uses data created by the author at the NCBI, National Center for Biotechnology, to create a database for the purpose of investigating bioinformatics problems. At the NCBI, researchers have been studying snippets of DNA previously thought to be insignificant DNA. However, these snippets have been conserved throughout evolution and may be significantly important. The Transfac project at NCBI took data from the TRANSFAC database and matched it with its corresponding contigs. For this project, the author used this data and created, TRANS-CONTIG, a searchable web database. The database provides searching capabilities to the user and links directly to related NIH databases.
2004
- Author Speck, Robert C.
- Title The effect of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing on Independent Record Labels.
- Abstract This study describes a web-based questionnaire survey
of the effects of peer-to-peer file sharing on independent record labels
in the United States and Canada. The owners and managers of such labels
were contacted via email and asked to participate anonymously in the survey.
The survey encouraged them to describe their labels, estimate the financial
impact file sharing has had on their labels, and share their opinions of
file sharing. A total of 883 label owners and managers were contacted. Ninety-seven
responded. The data was evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. The
survey results indicate that approximately two-thirds of the respondents
favored file sharing and reported that it either benefited or at least did
not harm their businesses. However, a consistent proportion of the respondents
either opposed file sharing or had no opinion of it at all. Finally, most
of those respondents who included comments with the survey expressed opposition
to file sharing.
2004
- Author Ni, Mao
- Title Automatic extraction of author self contributed metadata for Electronic Theses and Dissertations.
- Abstract This paper discusses the design and implement of an automatic
way to extract the metadata from PDF files in the process of the submission
to the Electronic and Theses Dissertations (ETDs). During the submission,
each ETDs system requires some metadata about the theses to facilitate the
metadata search after it is archived. Those metadata, like creator, title,
data, abstract, subject and publisher, comply with the Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative. In most of all existing ETDs repositories, students are required
to manually type in these metadata, which discourages studentsˇ¦ submission,
especially when resubmissions are needed due to the errors found in the
theses, because they have to type all the metadata again each time they
submit the theses. By standardizing a method for capturing the metadata
from the original documents, our project aims to enable digital repository,
which hosts the ETDs collection, to automatically extract the metadata from
the theses, making the submissions much easier and more convenient for the
students.
2005
- Author Barnett, Clifton A.
- Title XHTML as an Emerging Innovation for the World Wide Web
- Abstract XHTML is an innovative metadata standard that blends the
traditional World Wide Web markup language HTML with the less well-known
markup language XML. It is currently only used in a small percentage of
documents on the Web. The purpose of this paper is take a look at what sort
of penetration XHTML has achieved to date, and make a preliminary effort
at mapping the diffusion process of this innovation. To this end, I developed
three categories of web page to examine, online shops, personal homepages,
and university academic library homepages. I then proceeded to collect the
URLs and document types (HTML or XHTML) of seventy-five web pages for each
category. I also examined archived data to determine the approximate implementation
date for those pages that had adopted XHTML. Using this data, I drew some
preliminary conclusions about the state of diffusion in which XHTML is currently,
as well as identifying which areas will require further study in future
works.
2005
- Author Barbe, Stephen R.
- Title UNC Departmental Profiles Project: Designing an Online Database Retrieval and Reporting System for the UNC Department of Institutional Research and Assessment
- Abstract The project was initiated at the request of the management
of the Department of Institutional Research and Assessment. IR&A is responsible
for collecting, summarizing and statistically analyzing a vast amount of
university data which is currently stored in a large SAS database and accessed
through a SAS application. The management of IR&A felt that the current
system had grown too unwieldy and sought an alternative solution for making
this data accessible to their user population. This paper describes the
phases of the project, from the initial gathering of functional requirements
and design of a project plan to the design and construction of a new relational
database to store and the design and development of a dynamic Web-based
front end for accessing and manipulating the data.
2005
- Author Fox, Jackson R.
- Title A Survey of Electronic Note-Taking Behavior in Information and Library Science Students
- Abstract A survey of graduate students in the School of Information
and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was
conducted to evaluate the adoption of digital technology for note-taking
in classrooms. Previous work has demonstrated that note-taking is an effective
tool for information processing. Furthermore, digital tools could increase
the utility of notes by allowing students to better organize information,
retrieve information, and integrate external information sources. Results
of the survey indicate that while students recognize digital notes as possessing
positive attributes, adoption of digital note-taking is hampered by immature
software and hardware tools.