Evaluating the actual price of a residential property is a critical issue in the real estate market. Real estate market practitioners gauge a property's price by considering features such as property type and residential area. Subsequently, they evaluate the property's intrinsic features, such as condition, sun exposure, scenic views, and ancillary amenities. Finally, extrinsic features such as the proximity of services and infrastructure are assessed. This paper proposes a new genetic approach for selecting residential properties that meet the purchase offer and the intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics desired by the client. Since the real estate market's changes can influence extrinsic features, the method introduces price fluctuations of properties. Extrinsic features are modelled as fuzzy partitions: each fuzzy set describes a qualitative aspect of the corresponding feature that, expressed in a linguistic term, has a human-like interpretation. Then, a deviation value (fluctuation) from the average price of the property is considered for each fuzzy set in the partition. All the property features, extrinsic and intrinsic, are encoded in the chromosome genes of the genetic algorithm. The fitness function calculates the distance between the unit price of the property and the purchase offer. Some case studies were conducted in various Italian municipalities, using the average price per square meter of residential properties the Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare (OMI) assigned. Depending on customer requirements and preferences, different OMI zones were selected using additional characteristics such as type, location, conservation, and proximity to various urban services. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach for all the case studies, showing how the optimal solution represents a good compromise between customer preferences and market offerings.

Abstract Precision agriculture is evolving toward a contemporary approach that involves multiple sensing techniques to monitor and enhance crop quality while minimizing losses and waste of no longer considered inexhaustible resources, such as soil and water supplies. To understand crop status, it is necessary to integrate data from heterogeneous sensors and employ advanced sensing devices that can assess crop and water status. This study presents a smart monitoring approach in agriculture, involving sensors that can be both stationary (such as soil moisture sensors) and mobile (such as sensor-equipped unmanned aerial vehicles). These sensors collect information from visual maps of crop production and water conditions, to comprehensively understand the crop area and spot any potential vegetation problems. A modular fuzzy control scheme has been designed to interpret spectral indices and vegetative parameters and, by applying fuzzy rules, return status maps about vegetation status. The rules are applied incrementally per a hierarchical design to correlate lower-level data (e.g., temperature, vegetation indices) with higher-level data (e.g., vapor pressure deficit) to robustly determine the vegetation status and the main parameters that have led to it. A case study was conducted, involving the collection of satellite images from artichoke crops in Salerno, Italy, to demonstrate the potential of incremental design and information integration in crop health monitoring. Subsequently, tests were conducted on vineyard regions of interest in Teano, Italy, to assess the efficacy of the framework in the assessment of plant status and water stress. Indeed, comparing the outcomes of our maps with those of cutting-edge machine learning (ML) semantic segmentation has indeed revealed a promising level of accuracy. Specifically, classification performance was compared to the output of conventional ML methods, demonstrating that our approach is consistent and achieves an accuracy of over 90% throughout various seasons of the year.

Emotion detection in the natural language text has drawn the attention of several scientific communities as well as commercial/marketing companies: analyzing human feelings expressed in the opinions and feedback of web users helps understand general moods and support market strategies for product advertising and market predictions. This paper proposes a framework for emotion-based classification from social streams, such as Twitter, according to Plutchik's wheel of emotions. An entropy-based weighted version of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm, called EwFCM, to classify the data collected from streams has been proposed, improved by a fuzzy entropy method for the FCM center cluster initialization. Experimental results show that the proposed framework provides high accuracy in the classification of tweets according to Plutchik's primary emotions; moreover, the framework also allows the detection of secondary emotions, which, as defined by Plutchik, are the combination of the primary emotions. Finally, a comparative analysis with a similar fuzzy clustering-based approach for emotion classification shows that EwFCM converges more quickly with better performance in terms of accuracy, precision, and runtime. Finally, a straightforward mapping between the computed clusters and the emotion-based classes allows the assessment of the classification quality, reporting coherent and consistent results.

With the explosion of social media, automatic analysis of sentiment and emotion from user-generated content has attracted the attention of many research areas and commercial-marketing domains targeted at studying the social behavior of web users and their public attitudes toward brands, social events, and political actions. Capturing the emotions expressed in the written language could be crucial to support the decision-making processes: the emotion resulting from a tweet or a review about an item could affect the way to advertise or to trade on the web and then to make predictions about future changes in popularity or market behavior. This paper presents an experience with the emotion-based classification of textual data from a social network by using an extended version of the fuzzy C-means algorithm called extension of fuzzy C-means. The algorithm shows interesting results due to its intrinsic fuzzy nature that reflects the human feeling expressed in the text, often composed of a mix of blurred emotions, and at the same time, the benefits of the extended version yield better classification results.

The huge growth of data on the Web and the requirement of semantic content analysis make the knowledge management and data mining very difficult activities. The knowledge elicitation, codification, and storage need not trivial techniques to improve formal information structuring on the Internet. Ontologies provide conceptualization and processing knowledge, sharing of consolidate understanding, reusing of domain knowledge codification for many Web applications. Manual construction of a domain-specific ontology is an intensive and time-consuming process, which requires an accurate domain expertise, because of structural and logical difficulties in the definition of concepts, as well as conceivable relationships. At the same time, the ontology visualization process requires similar endeavors to support ontology management, exploration, and browsing. This work describes an automatic method for ontology design from the content analysis of Web resources. The approach exploits a fuzzy extension of formal concept analysis model for structuring the elicited knowledge, viz. concepts and relations embedded in the resources content. Final result is an effective ontology visualization through a navigable, facet-based view of the built ontology across the extracted concepts and their own population. Furthermore, the approach proposes a simple labeling of ontology concepts through a sketched and intuitive process. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Internet has become a huge repository of information and knowledge, based on the sharing of the electronic documents. Last trends in knowledge management focus on the knowledge representation based on the document content. In fact, most accustomed approaches achieve the document understanding by analyzing the “portions of information'' in the document which describe the content, through techniques of text parsing and extraction. This paper presents an alternative approach that departs from the consolidated techniques of document management and focuses on the logical structure of a PDF document as a discriminating source of document knowledge. The main idea is based on the fact, when the reader looks at a paper, his first perception is related to the layout of the document. The analysis of layout, typesetting, paginating, and graphical arrangement of a document provides interesting information about its content understanding; in general, the documents that are in the same category present similar page layout, fonts, and figures arrangement. In this sense, this work presents an alternative way to deal with documents recognition and understanding, through the analysis of the layout of electronic PDF documents and their classification. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Web information may currently be acquired by activating search engines. However, our daily experience is not only that web pages are often either redundant or missing but also that there is a mismatch between information needs and the web's responses. If we wish to satisfy more complex requests, we need to extract part of the information and transform it into new interactive knowledge. This transformation may either be performed by hand or automatically. In this article we describe an experimental agent-based framework skilled to help the user both in managing achieved information and in personalizing web searching activity. The first process is supported by a query-formulation facility and by a friendly structured representation of the searching results. On the other hand, the system provides a proactive support to the searching on the web by suggesting pages, which are selected according to the user's behavior shown in his navigation activity. A basic role is played by an extension of a classical fuzzy-clustering algorithm that provides a prototype-based representation of the knowledge extracted from the web. These prototypes lead both the proactive suggestion of new pages, mined through web spidering, and the structured representation of the searching results. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 1101–1122, 2007.

Abstract The explosive growth of the Web and the consequent exigency of the Web personalization domain have gained a key position in the direction of customization of the Web information to the needs of specific users, taking advantage of the knowledge acquired from the analysis of the user's navigational behavior (usage data) in correlation with other information collected in the Web context, namely, structure, content, and user profile data. This work presents an agent‐based framework designed to help a user in achieving personalized navigation, by recommending related documents according to the user's responses in similar‐pages searching mode. Our agent‐based approach is grounded in the integration of different techniques and methodologies into a unique platform featuring user profiling, fuzzy multisets, proximity‐oriented fuzzy clustering, and knowledge‐based discovery technologies. Each of these methodologies serves to solve one facet of the general problem (discovering documents relevant to the user by searching the Web) and is treated by specialized agents that ultimately achieve the final functionality through cooperation and task distribution.