Leading ICT technologies in the Information Explosion

Millions of humans have been disseminating information through WWW and this amount is explosively increasing. However, a person’s ability to digest this information is limited. Therefore, smart information and communication technologies are required to help them effectively and efficiently use this information. This special issue includes some of the more recent advances in ICT technologies that support people in acquiring information and gaining knowledge from the vast amount of disseminated information from the information explosion, and provides a forum for discussing the research directions in this field. This special issue consists of a survey paper, three research papers, and two technical notes that have undergone one or more cycles of anonymous peer reviews and revisions. The first paper, “Researches on image retrieval and use in information explosion era”, by Masashi Inoue, surveys the researches on image retrieval and its utilization from four aspects, i.e., information access and organization technology, computing infrastructure for large-scale image access, human-system interaction, and social issues around image media. The second paper, “Utilization of external knowledge for personal name disambiguation”, by Quang Minh Vu, Atsuhiro Takasu, and Jun Adachi, presents a name disambiguation method for identifying people appearing on Web pages. It discriminates people having the same name using text around the person’s name on a Web page. For this purpose, it introduces a recent statistical text model based on latent topics to extract features for the person name disambiguation problem. The third paper, “Building web page collections efficiently exploiting local surrounding pages”, by Yuxin Wang and Keizo Oyama, presents a web page collection framework. This paper focuses on a high-quality page classification method for the framework. To perform high-quality classification, it uses a two-phase classi-