Reconnecting the interrupted landscape : a cultural landscape approach to Australian open-cut coal mining landscapes

In the late 20th century, a value-shift began to influence political thinking, recognising the need for environmentally, socially and culturally sustainable resource development. This shift entailed moves away from thinking of nature and culture as separate entities - The former existing merely to serve the latter. Cultural landscape theory recognises 'nature' as at once both 'natural', and as a 'cultural' construct. As such it may offer a framework through which to progress in the quest for 'sustainable development'. This 2005 Masters thesis makes a contribution to that quest by asking whether contemporary developments in cultural landscape theory can contribute to rehabilitation strategies for Australian open-cut coal mining landscapes, an examplar resource development landscape. A thematic historial overview of landscape values and resource development in Australis post-1788, and a review of cultural landscape theory literature contribute to the formation of the theoretical framework: "reconnecting the interrupted landscape". The author then explores a possible application of this framework within the Australian open-cut coal mining landscape.

Overview of the INEX 2010 XML mining track : clustering and classification of XML documents

The XML Document Mining track was launched for exploring two main ideas: (1) identifying key problems and new challenges of the emerging field of mining semi-structured documents, and (2) studying and assessing the potential of Machine Learning (ML) techniques for dealing with generic ML tasks in the structured domain, i.e., classification and clustering of semi-structured documents. This track has run for six editions during INEX 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. The first five editions have been summarized in previous editions and we focus here on the 2010 edition. INEX 2010 included two tasks in the XML Mining track: (1) unsupervised clustering task and (2) semi-supervised classification task where documents are organized in a graph. The clustering task requires the participants to group the documents into clusters without any knowledge of category labels using an unsupervised learning algorithm. On the other hand, the classification task requires the participants to label the documents in the dataset into known categories using a supervised learning algorithm and a training set. This report gives the details of clustering and classification tasks.

Using data mining on road asset management data in analysing road crashes

Road safety is a major concern worldwide. Road safety will improve as road conditions and their effects on crashes are continually investigated. This paper proposes to use the capability of data mining to include the greater set of road variables for all available crashes with skid resistance values across the Queensland state main road network in order to understand the relationships among crash, traffic and road variables. This paper presents a data mining based methodology for the road asset management data to find out the various road properties that contribute unduly to crashes. The models demonstrate high levels of accuracy in predicting crashes in roads when various road properties are included. This paper presents the findings of these models to show the relationships among skid resistance, crashes, crash characteristics and other road characteristics such as seal type, seal age, road type, texture depth, lane count, pavement width, rutting, speed limit, traffic rates intersections, traffic signage and road design and so on.

Road crash proneness prediction using data mining

Developing safe and sustainable road systems is a common goal in all countries. Applications to assist with road asset management and crash minimization are sought universally. This paper presents a data mining methodology using decision trees for modeling the crash proneness of road segments using available road and crash attributes. The models quantify the concept of crash proneness and demonstrate that road segments with only a few crashes have more in common with non-crash roads than roads with higher crash counts. This paper also examines ways of dealing with highly unbalanced data sets encountered in the study.

Identifying differences in wet and dry road crashes using data mining

It is commonly accepted that wet roads have higher risk of crash than dry roads; however, providing evidence to support this assumption presents some difficulty. This paper presents a data mining case study in which predictive data mining is applied to model the skid resistance and crash relationship to search for discernable differences in the probability of wet and dry road segments having crashes based on skid resistance. The models identify an increased probability of wet road segments having crashes for mid-range skid resistance values.

Using data mining to predict road crash count with a focus on skid resistance values

Road crashes cost world and Australian society a significant proportion of GDP, affecting productivity and causing significant suffering for communities and individuals. This paper presents a case study that generates data mining models that contribute to understanding of road crashes by allowing examination of the role of skid resistance (F60) and other road attributes in road crashes. Predictive data mining algorithms, primarily regression trees, were used to produce road segment crash count models from the road and traffic attributes of crash scenarios. The rules derived from the regression trees provide evidence of the significance of road attributes in contributing to crash, with a focus on the evaluation of skid resistance.

Mining users’ opinions based on item folksonomy and taxonomy for personalized recommender systems

Item folksonomy or tag information is a kind of typical and prevalent web 2.0 information. Item folksonmy contains rich opinion information of users on item classifications and descriptions. It can be used as another important information source to conduct opinion mining. On the other hand, each item is associated with taxonomy information that reflects the viewpoints of experts. In this paper, we propose to mine for users’ opinions on items based on item taxonomy developed by experts and folksonomy contributed by users. In addition, we explore how to make personalized item recommendations based on users’ opinions. The experiments conducted on real word datasets collected from Amazon.com and CiteULike demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

Social Impact of Mining Survey : Aggregate Results Queensland Communities

This is the final report from a study into the social impact of mining in Queensland.

A pattern mining approach for information filtering systems

It is a big challenge to clearly identify the boundary between positive and negative streams for information filtering systems. Several attempts have used negative feedback to solve this challenge; however, there are two issues for using negative relevance feedback to improve the effectiveness of information filtering. The first one is how to select constructive negative samples in order to reduce the space of negative documents. The second issue is how to decide noisy extracted features that should be updated based on the selected negative samples. This paper proposes a pattern mining based approach to select some offenders from the negative documents, where an offender can be used to reduce the side effects of noisy features. It also classifies extracted features (i.e., terms) into three categories: positive specific terms, general terms, and negative specific terms. In this way, multiple revising strategies can be used to update extracted features. An iterative learning algorithm is also proposed to implement this approach on the RCV1 data collection, and substantial experiments show that the proposed approach achieves encouraging performance and the performance is also consistent for adaptive filtering as well.

Automatic domain ontology extraction for context-sensitive opinion mining

Automated analysis of the sentiments presented in online consumer feedbacks can facilitate both organizations’ business strategy development and individual consumers’ comparison shopping. Nevertheless, existing opinion mining methods either adopt a context-free sentiment classification approach or rely on a large number of manually annotated training examples to perform context sensitive sentiment classification. Guided by the design science research methodology, we illustrate the design, development, and evaluation of a novel fuzzy domain ontology based contextsensitive opinion mining system. Our novel ontology extraction mechanism underpinned by a variant of Kullback-Leibler divergence can automatically acquire contextual sentiment knowledge across various product domains to improve the sentiment analysis processes. Evaluated based on a benchmark dataset and real consumer reviews collected from Amazon.com, our system shows remarkable performance improvement over the context-free baseline.

Effective pattern discovery for text mining

Many data mining techniques have been proposed for mining useful patterns in text documents. However, how to effectively use and update discovered patterns is still an open research issue, especially in the domain of text mining. Since most existing text mining methods adopted term-based approaches, they all suffer from the problems of polysemy and synonymy. Over the years, people have often held the hypothesis that pattern (or phrase) based approaches should perform better than the term-based ones, but many experiments did not support this hypothesis. This paper presents an innovative technique, effective pattern discovery which includes the processes of pattern deploying and pattern evolving, to improve the effectiveness of using and updating discovered patterns for finding relevant and interesting information. Substantial experiments on RCV1 data collection and TREC topics demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves encouraging performance.

Mining positive and negative patterns for relevance feature discovery

It is a big challenge to guarantee the quality of discovered relevance features in text documents for describing user preferences because of the large number of terms, patterns, and noise. Most existing popular text mining and classification methods have adopted term-based approaches. However, they have all suffered from the problems of polysemy and synonymy. Over the years, people have often held the hypothesis that pattern-based methods should perform better than term-based ones in describing user preferences, but many experiments do not support this hypothesis. The innovative technique presented in paper makes a breakthrough for this difficulty. This technique discovers both positive and negative patterns in text documents as higher level features in order to accurately weight low-level features (terms) based on their specificity and their distributions in the higher level features. Substantial experiments using this technique on Reuters Corpus Volume 1 and TREC topics show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms both the state-of-the-art term-based methods underpinned by Okapi BM25, Rocchio or Support Vector Machine and pattern based methods on precision, recall and F measures.

Rough sets based reasoning and pattern mining for a two-stage information filtering system

This paper presents a novel two-stage information filtering model which combines the merits of term-based and pattern- based approaches to effectively filter sheer volume of information. In particular, the first filtering stage is supported by a novel rough analysis model which efficiently removes a large number of irrelevant documents, thereby addressing the overload problem. The second filtering stage is empowered by a semantically rich pattern taxonomy mining model which effectively fetches incoming documents according to the specific information needs of a user, thereby addressing the mismatch problem. The experiments have been conducted to compare the proposed two-stage filtering (T-SM) model with other possible "term-based + pattern-based" or "term-based + term-based" IF models. The results based on the RCV1 corpus show that the T-SM model significantly outperforms other types of "two-stage" IF models.

Image-based safety assessment : automated spatial safety risk identification of earthmoving and surface mining activities

This paper presents an automated image‐based safety assessment method for earthmoving and surface mining activities. The literature review revealed the possible causes of accidents on earthmoving operations, investigated the spatial risk factors of these types of accident, and identified spatial data needs for automated safety assessment based on current safety regulations. Image‐based data collection devices and algorithms for safety assessment were then evaluated. Analysis methods and rules for monitoring safety violations were also discussed. The experimental results showed that the safety assessment method collected spatial data using stereo vision cameras, applied object identification and tracking algorithms, and finally utilized identified and tracked object information for safety decision making.