Future Internet, Volume 6, Issue 3 (September 2014) – 9 articles , Pages 414-596

In this paper we posit that current investigative techniques—particularly as deployed by law enforcement, are becoming unsuitable for most types of crime investigation. The growth in cybercrime and the complexities of the types of the cybercrime coupled with the limitations in time and resources, both computational and human, in addressing cybercrime put an increasing strain on the ability of digital investigators to apply the processes of digital forensics and digital investigations to obtain timely results. In order to combat the problems, there is a need to enhance the use of the resources available and move beyond the capabilities and constraints of the forensic tools that are in current use. We argue that more intelligent techniques are necessary and should be used proactively. The paper makes the case for the need for such tools and techniques, and investigates and discusses the opportunities afforded by applying principles and procedures of artificial intelligence to digital forensics intelligence and to intelligent forensics and suggests that by applying new techniques to digital investigations there is the opportunity to address the challenges of the larger and more complex domains in which cybercrimes are taking place. Full article

Based on existing literature, this article makes a case for open (government) data as supporting political efficiency, socio-economic innovation and administrative efficiency, but also finds a lack of measurable impact. It attributes the lack of impact to shortcomings regarding data access (must be efficient) and data usefulness (must be effective). To address these shortcomings, seven key activities that add value to data are identified and are combined into the 7R Data Value Framework, which is an applied methodology for linked data to systematically address both technical and social shortcomings. The 7R Data Value Framework is then applied to the international Fusepool project that develops a set of integrated software components to ease the publishing of open data based on linked data and associated best practices. Real-life applications for the Dutch Parliament and the Libraries of Free University of Berlin are presented, followed by a concluding discussion. Full article

Societies have rapidly morphed into complex entities that are creating accessibility, yet, at the same time, they are developing new forms of neogeographic-poverty related to information uptake. Those that have managed to partake in the opportunities provided by the web have new vistas to survive in, in contrast to the new poor who have limited or no access to information. New forms of data in spatial format are accessible to all, however few realize the implications of such a transitional change in wellbeing: Whether entire societies or individuals. The different generations taking up the information access can face different levels of accessibility that may be limited by access to online data, knowledge of usage of tools and the understanding of the results, all within the limits on the spaces they are familiar with. This paper reviews a conceptual process underlining the initial steps of a long-term project in the Maltese Islands that seeks to create an online series of tools that bring the concept of “physical place” to the different generations through the management of a major project, the creation of a 3D virtuality, employing scanning processes, GIS, conversion aspects, and a small block-based Minecraft engine. Full article

The World Wide Web is the largest information repository available today. However, this information is very volatile and Web archiving is essential to preserve it for the future. Existing approaches to Web archiving are based on simple definitions of the scope of Web pages to crawl and are limited to basic interactions with Web servers. The aim of the ARCOMEM project is to overcome these limitations and to provide flexible, adaptive and intelligent content acquisition, relying on social media to create topical Web archives. In this article, we focus on ARCOMEM’s crawling architecture. We introduce the overall architecture and we describe its modules, such as the online analysis module, which computes a priority for the Web pages to be crawled, and the Application-Aware Helper which takes into account the type of Web sites and applications to extract structure from crawled content. We also describe a large-scale distributed crawler that has been developed, as well as the modifications we have implemented to adapt Heritrix, an open source crawler, to the needs of the project. Our experimental results from real crawls show that ARCOMEM’s crawling architecture is effective in acquiring focused information about a topic and leveraging the information from social media. Full article

Open data initiatives are characterized, in several countries, by a great extension of the number of data sets made available for access by public administrations, constituencies, businesses and other actors, such as journalists, international institutions and academics, to mention a few. However, most of the open data sets rely on selection criteria, based on a technology-driven perspective, rather than a focus on the potential public and social value of data to be published. Several experiences and reports confirm this issue, such as those of the Open Data Census. However, there are also relevant best practices. The goal of this paper is to investigate the different dimensions of a framework suitable to support public administrations, as well as constituencies, in assessing and benchmarking the social value of open data initiatives. The framework is tested on three initiatives, referring to three different countries, Italy, the United Kingdom and Tunisia. The countries have been selected to provide a focus on European and Mediterranean countries, considering also the difference in legal frameworks (civic law vs. common law countries). Full article

The international Human Rights regime acknowledges a certain number of rights. That number, albeit increasing since its inception, does not seem able to keep up with the pace of modern technology. Human rights today are not only exercised in the tangible world; they are also exercised on a daily basis in a world of ubiquitous computing–as such they can be easily breached with a mere click of a button. To make matters worse, these rights are controlled largely by multinational corporations that have little regard for their value. In this paper we will attempt to explore the difficulties the global human rights regime faces today, the challenge that is its enforcement, and whether it has come to a standstill in an age where connections grow faster than the rule of law. Full article

In this paper, we describe a set of reusable text processing components for extracting opinionated information from social media, rating it for interestingness, and for detecting opinion events. We have developed applications in GATE to extract named entities, terms and events and to detect opinions about them, which are then used as the starting point for opinion event detection. The opinions are then aggregated over larger sections of text, to give some overall sentiment about topics and documents, and also some degree of information about interestingness based on opinion diversity. We go beyond traditional opinion mining techniques in a number of ways: by focusing on specific opinion-target extraction related to key terms and events, by examining and dealing with a number of specific linguistic phenomena, by analysing and visualising opinion dynamics over time, and by aggregating the opinions in different ways for a more flexible view of the information contained in the documents. Full article

The web and the social web play an increasingly important role as an information source for Members of Parliament and their assistants, journalists, political analysts and researchers. It provides important and crucial background information, like reactions to political events and comments made by the general public. The case study presented in this paper is driven by two European parliaments (the Greek and the Austrian parliament) and targets an effective exploration of political web archives. In this paper, we describe semantic technologies deployed to ease the exploration of the archived web and social web content and present evaluation results. Full article

As governments develop open data strategies, such efforts reflect the advent of the Internet, the digitization of government, and the emergence of meta-data as a wider socio-economic and societal transformational. Within this context the purpose of this article is twofold. First, we seek to both situate and examine the evolution and effectiveness of open data strategies in the Canadian public sector, with a particular focus on municipal governments that have led this movement. Secondly, we delve more deeply into—if and how, open data can facilitate more open and innovative forms of governance enjoining an outward-oriented public sector (across all government levels) with an empowered and participative society. This latter vantage point includes four main and inter-related dimensions: (i) conceptualizing public value and public engagement; (ii) media relations—across traditional intermediaries and channels and new social media; (iii) political culture and the politics of privacy in an increasingly data-centric world; and (iv) federated architectures and the alignment of localized, sub-national, and national strategies and governance mechanisms. This article demonstrates how each of these dimensions includes important determinants of not only open data’s immediate impacts but also its catalytic ability to forge wider and collective innovation and more holistic governance renewal. Full article