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![]() iBusiness, 2012, 4, 222-227 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ib.2012.43028 Published Online September 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ib) Managing Social Security Data in the Web 2.0 Era Li Luo1, Hongyan Yang2, Xuhui Li3 1College of Literature, Law & Economics, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China; 2School of Political Sci- ence & Public Administration, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China; 3State Key Lab of Software Engineering, Wuhan University, Wu- han, China. Email: moli0913@163.com, yhyhyang@163.com, lixuhui@whu.edu.cn Received May 23rd, 2012; revised June 23rd, 2012; accepted July 23rd, 2012 ABSTRACT Social security data management is an important topic both in application of information management and in social se- curity management. In the Web 2.0 era, more and more human information and healthcare information is released to the Internet through various approaches. This abundance makes managing social security data go beyond managing con- ventional social security database records. How to organize the conventional records together with the related informa- tion gathered from the Web is an interesting prob lem to solve to provide more convenient and powerful social security information service. In this paper, we introdu ce our initial work on building a Web-oriented social security information system named i-SSIS. I-SSIS is a database system which adopts a new object-role data model named INM model and deploys INM database system as its core. With the assistance of auxiliary tools to carry out social security information extraction, analyzing and query, i-SSIS can properly provide social security-related information gathered from the Web. We introduce the basic ideas of designing i-SSIS and describe the architecture and major components of the system. Keywords: Human Resource Management; Social Security; Data Management; Information System 1. Introduction Managing social security data has a long history in data management, especially in e-Government. In the early days of data management [1], US government has de- signed a well-defined database to manage social security data and dwelled on the major issues of building such a system. Although social security data management in- volved many practical prob lems at that time, it was still a typical application of database system or, more precisely, management information system where a well-designed database played a central role and the key technical prob- lems were to organize the data and to design the queries for common applications. When the Web 2.0 era comes, lots of things in infor- mation management are changed. There is an abundance of data in all fields, and the approaches of providing, sharing and utilizing the data has varied a lot. In the field of social security data management, the technical key point is migrating from organizing data and queries to gathering and utilizing data. That is, although the central component here is still the social security records, a lot of information in the Web related to people and other so cial security issues is available and can be utilized together with the social security records. More knowledge can be discovered in the combination of them, and be further used for governments and organizations in making deci- sion. For example, as an important portion of social se- curity data, health care information was usually managed in the same way as other kinds of data. However, in practical applications, it is fairly common for people to know the associations among the specific group of peo- ple, the diseases, the therapies and the expenses. The in- formation here involves not only the pure social security records, but also the data about people’s career back- ground, the clinical information, and so on. The extra in- formation was hard to get in the pre-Internet era, how- ever, it is not difficult to gather and analyze in the Web 2.0 era since lots of people are sharing their personal information in blogs and various kinds of medical infor- mation can be explored and gathered from the Web, e.g., Wiki. Managing social security data now seems going beyond managing social security records. It is becoming a task of integrating and utilizing various kinds of data involved in human and social security and providing va- rious information services for the people who concerns issues related to social security. In this task the Web plays an important role. To accomplish the task mentioned above, data man- agement approaches and tools need to be improved and enhanced. However, up to now, there is still a lack of study considering the challenges brought about by the Copyright © 2012 SciRes. IB ![]() Managing Social Security Data in the Web 2.0 Era 223 new task, and seldom researchers in the fields of data management and social security propose a feasible and practical way of establishing a scheme to provid e the so- cial security information service which embodies the fea- tures of the Web 2.0 era. In this paper, we propose a framework of a new social security information system for the Web 2.0 era. In this system named i-SSIS standing for Internet-oriented So- cial Security Information System, data management of social security is no longer based on a conventional da- tabase. We deploy a new database system that can man- age the human resource information and other informa- tion related to social security. Based on this novel system, many new value-added information services for social security can be developed, and among them the social security search service is what we are devoting to build. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Sec- tion 2 the related works about social security data man- agement and utilization is briefly discussed. Section 3 illustrates a scenario indicating how the information sources in the Web affect the social security. In Section 4, the architecture of i-SSIS is illustrated and the major components are introduced. In Section 5, the ongoing work on searching service of social security information is introduced. Section 6 concludes the paper. 2. Related Works Research on social security data management and utiliza- tion can trace back to the late of 1970s [1,2] and keep progress with the development of the studies in both so- cial security and information technology. Nowadays, go- vernment departments and companies involving the af- fairs of social security all have their databases and infor- mation systems of social security. Various kinds of stud- ies in the information technology fields have been work- ed on social security data. Some studies on social security data mining try to ana- lyze the social security data to find patterns of social se- curity related affairs, such as debt [3,4] and health care [5]. Some studies concentrate on protecting social secu- rity data [6] since they are often confidential and should be accessed only for specific use. Although social data are usually stored and managed by conventional database system, there is a new tendency of developing information management for social secu- rity data to cater for curren t technolog y of data utilizatio n such as data mining. For example, studies are working on developing data warehouse for healthcare data for effi- cient mining [7]. Another relevant field with rapid development is hu- man resource management [8] where people are building more comprehensive and efficient information system to collect and manage various kinds of human resource in- formation. Inspired by these trends in social security data man- agement and utilization, we propose a new information system to combine the human resource information and conventional security data and thus can be used for vari- ous kinds of people, e.g., managers, researchers and offi- cials, to access and utilize the data with specified au- thorizations and privileges. This system named i-SSIS is oriented to Web 2.0 resources from which we can gather the information of people directly and link the relevant data to form a rich information network. By integrating social security data with the human resource information gather from the Web, various kinds of data analysis can be carried out to provide rich social security information services. 3. A Scenario In conventional social security data management, the da- tabase stores the basic information of each person, such as the career and education background, healthcare re- cords, salary and pension records, etc. These records can provide important information for administrators or re- searchers to make some basic statistics and decisions. However, if we want to know more about the relation- ships between certain information involved in social se- curity, conventio nal records are often not enough. For example, a researcher in social security field wants to investigate the situation of commercial medical insur- ance in certain groups of people in China. He firstly chooses the teachers and clerks in universities and col- leges as the object of study. These people are often cov- ered by public medical care; however, the public medical care is often not enough for them due to the lack of fi- nance, and thus many teachers choose various kinds of commercial medical insurance as a complementary in- surance. This situation makes them as a good study ob- ject of investigation. In conventional social security records, the informa- tion about the people and the health care is quite plain. Usually only the disease name, the fee and the security id are recorded. However, for a deep investigation, the re- searcher especially wants to know the career environ- ment or, more specifically, the research background of the teachers in universities would affect their health and how they would choose the commercial medical insur- ance accordingly. The information required to accom- plish such an investigation is scarcely stored in conven- tional social security database. Therefore, he needs to explore various kinds of information about the teachers manually. Fortunately, most of information involved can be found from the Web. For example, he can find the education and research background of the teachers in their homepages, the research and the health information from their blogs. He can also find the diseases and thera- pies from the Web, and all kinds of medical insurance Copyright © 2012 SciRes. IB ![]() Managing Social Security Data in the Web 2.0 Era Copyright © 2012 SciRes. IB 224 4.1. Modelling Social Security Data with INM information from the Websites of insurance companies. Now the problem is that it is a big burden for him to gather, sort and analyze the information from the Web since he is not an expert in computer engineering. There- fore, he needs help from a technician in the computer field, or he can resort to i-SSIS to find the information. INM is an object-role model which can expressively specify the attributes, roles and relationships of entities in the real world. It supports role-relationship class and class inheritance which can effectively present the com- plex networked semantics of entities. It can present the information of real-world entities by associating each of them to a single object with a unique oid. I-SSIS is an information system which gathers infor- mation related to social security from the Web and pro- vides typical information services to end users in the so- cial security field. Like a search engine, i-SSIS uses the data crawled from the Web, and then an alyze it to extract social security information, human resource information, etc. It deploys certain data model to organize the ex- tracted information and uses a database system to store and query the information. Therefore, the social security data in the Web can be conveniently managed and util- ized under i-SSIS. In INM, an object is represented as a tree. The root of the tree is a list of object names associated with the ob- ject and each sub-tree corresponds to a property. An INM instance database is a set of classified objects. Figure 1 illustrates a sample of INM instances which contains information about the uni versit y WHU, the course ADB, and several people Bob, Amy, Ada, Ann. The object WHU has two relationship hierarchies with roots Faculty and Student. The relationship Faculty is specialized into Prof with value Bob and Lecturer with value Amy. The relationship Student is specialized into UnderGrad with value Ada and GradStudent which is further specialized into M.Sc with value Ann and PhD with value Amy. 4. Architecture of I-SSIS I-SSIS is a database system which gathers, organizes and manages the social security data from the Web. The da- tabase system is built upon a database management sys- tem INM-DBMS as its backbone and uses certain auxil- iary tools to provide various functions. The reason we chose INM-DBMS to manage social security data is that INM-DBMS adopts a novel data model named Informa- tion Network Model (INM) [9,11] which can easily asso- ciate the data about an entity and thus is appropriate and convenient to describe and manage the data of people gathered from the Web. In this section, we firstly intro- duce utilizing the basic features of INM to model social security data and then describe the architecture of i-SSIS. I-SSIS is built upon an INM instance database which is designed deliberately for social security data manage- ment. In i-SSIS the entities can be classified as 4 categ o- ries of objects: Person, Role, Organization and Insurance. A Person object represents a person entity in real world, including the attributes which is concerned in the social security such as birthday, identity (or social security) number, living place, etc. A Role object represents a role which a person acts in certain circumstance and an Or- ganization object represents an organization, e.g., a com- pany, an institution or an association, in which a Person Figure 1. A sample of INM instances. ![]() Managing Social Security Data in the Web 2.0 Era 225 plays a certain role. For example, a person Bob is a fac- ulty member in a university; meanwhile he is also an athlete in his spare time and belongs to a sport associa- tion. As INM indicates, the role can have related attrib- utes which the related person pertains. Therefore, the objects Person, Role and Organization can work together to establish a full background of the people to be con- cerned. An Insuran ce object represents a kind of social security insurance such as pension or healthcare. 4.2. Architecture of I-SSIS As a system to gather and manage social security data, i-SSIS has a 3-layer architecture to undertake the func- tionalities of gathering, managing and serving in each layer respectively, as Figure 2 shows. Under i-SSIS is the raw data in the Web, which is crawled and processed by the modules in the Data Col- lection Layer. The crawlers in i-SSIS fetch the pages from the Web sites to gather data involving human re- source and social security information. The crawlers are embedded with some inner analyzers to filter the unnec- essary information during crawling, which means that only the documents involving social security information such as the person, the organization, the role and the in- surance are collected. Then the raw data would be proc- essed through three procedures to become the entities managed by the database syste m. Firstly, the information of i-SSIS entities, e.g., people and organizations, is ex- tracted with information preprocessing tools such as natural language processing tools. In this procedure, Web documents are initially summarized with a statistics tool to find its theme and then are processed by information Figure 2. Architecture of i-SSIS. extraction tool to get the rough information about i-SSIS entities. For example, when the blog of a person Bob is processed, the biography, the affiliation, the occupation and the important social relations are extracted to con- struct his basic information. Secondly, various informa- tion of each entity is id entified and conden sed to generate entity objects in i-SSIS, as the data collection result of entities. As previously mentioned, in INM the entity is presented as a single object. However, it is common in information extraction that a single entity, e.g., a person, is described in different document fragments from dif- ferent aspects. Therefore, in this layer, data mining tools and other analyzing tools are used to combine the infor- mation about distinct entities and formulate it into a pre- defined schema of i-SSIS entities. Thirdly, the entity and relationship data collected from the Web are integrated with the conventional social security data. The latter is collected from social security databases through common interfaces or extraction tools of deep Web. By combining the data on entities, the integrated data warehouse can provide a consistent and comprehensive description to the entities involved in social security. After the three procedures, the Web-oriented social security data is fi- nally gathered and provided to the Data Management layer. Processing the raw data to get social security related information is fundamental in build ing a practical i-SSIS. The research and implementation of the tools in this stage is being undertaken, and we have already built a prototype which can semi-automatically gather and pro- cess the information of the people in education organiza- tions such as universities because of the abundance of Web documents about the people and organizations in this field. The crawlers gather the documents from the universities, the research institutes, the homepages and the sample social security databases. With the raw data, the i-SSIS entities, i.e., the people, the organizations, the social security records, etc., are recognized and fused to reflect the entities in real world. However, since the in- formation extraction and analyzing tools are quite diffi- cult to be customized to fit for the p ractical work. Lots of work has to be undertaken manually. We are improving the tools to make data collection more efficient. In the Data Management Layer, i-SSIS directly de- ploys INM-DBMS to store, manage and query the social security data provided by the under layer. The informa- tion in i-SSIS usually lies in the four categories of INM objects as described in the last section, and their storage, query and index are managed by INM-DBMS. To make the database efficient to social secu rity d ata manag ement, the INM-DBMS module in i-SSIS is especially custom- ized to speed up the common data manipulations. On one hand, the data storage is optimized to cluster the data about entities if possible, because there are often query Copyright © 2012 SciRes. IB ![]() Managing Social Security Data in the Web 2.0 Era 226 requests to find associated attributes on people or or- ganizations in practice to fetch related social insurance data. On the other hand, temporal data manipulation, a common feature of human resource information man- agement, is also allowed here and the storage and the index are optimized to make the temporal queries to be processed more convenient and quickly. In the Social Security Information Service Layer, a query interface named SSQ, standing for Social Security Query, is provided as the major component of the Hu- man-Computer interface of i-SSIS. SSQ is much more than a simple application of INM-DBMS’s query [10] interface because it uses a temporal query language named HRQL as the intermediate query language for the data management layer. HRQL can easily present query requirements on temporal information of person entities. This query language is an extension of our previous stu- dy [12], and the featur e of entity—object correspondence of INM-DBMS is properly utilized in processing the HRQL. The SSQ interface transforms the user’s query requests to the typical queries implemented in HRQL, and then forward the parsed queries to the under layers. Besides the query service, a novel social security infor- mation searching service is proposed in establishing i-SSIS and discussed in brief in the next section. 5. Searching Service of I-SSIS Social security information service is a special part of so- cial security data management because it provides users the approaches to utilize the social security data in prac- tice. Conventionally, the information service is only the common query service provided by the database system. However, in the Internet era, everything is associated with searching. Therefore, it is impor tant and challenging to build a searching service especially for social security information to make the work more efficient and con- venient. In i-SSIS, we propose and design a social security in- formation searching service under the assistance of the Pluto searching engine [13] which is supported by INM- DBMS to undertake the INM data searchin g. The se arch- ing service deploys a structured data searching model. The model specifies the Steiner-trees containing all the keywords as the searching results. It ranks the results according to the compactness of the tree, the authority of the nodes and the redundancy of information. This sear- ching model can enable the users not familiar with the INM model to utilize the social security information in i-SSIS without being aware of the networked structure of underlying entities and relationships. It can not only in- crease the quality and precision of searching results but also present users useful semantic relationships and con- text information of entities. The searching service utilizes a heuristic searching ap- proach based on pruning matching nodes. This approach can enhance the searching efficiency by pruning the top- k matching nodes which have minor possibilities. Based on this approach, the underlying INM-DBMS in i-SSIS deploys a special index system to support pruning mat- ching nodes. The index system collects the neighbor- hood information of the nodes and utilizes it to calculate latent matching nodes. The undergoing prototype shows that the searching service can provide users a novel and efficient experience of utilizing social security data dis- tinct from the conventio nal one. 6. Conclusions Social security data management is an important topic both in application of information management and so- cial security management. In the Web 2.0 era, more and more human information and healthcare information is released to the Internet through various approaches. This abundance makes managing social security data go be- yond managing conventional social security database re- cords. How to organize the conventional records together with the related information gathered from the Web is an interesting problem to solve to provide more convenient and powerful social security information service. In this paper, we introduce our initial work in build ing a Web-oriented social security information system named i-SSIS. I-SSIS is a special database management system INM-DBMS which is used to describe and manage the real world entities using a data model named INM. Un- der the support of INM-DBMS and other preparation and query tools, i-SSIS can efficiently manage the social se- curity information and provide useful service for com- mon or specific purposes. Up to now, i-SSIS is still in its initial design phase, and we are working at building effi- cient information extraction tools to gather and analyze the social-security related information from Web re- sources. In the next step we would integrate the social security extraction system with i-SSIS and to provide a prototype for searching and utilizing the social security information. 7. Acknowledgements This paper is partially supported by the Key Research Funds of Hubei Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Re- search Center under contract No.WH2011001 and the National Social Science Foundation of China under con- tract No.09CZZ032. REFERENCES [1] Department of Health of the United States, “Second Re- view of a New Data Management System for the Social Copyright © 2012 SciRes. IB ![]() Managing Social Security Data in the Web 2.0 Era Copyright © 2012 SciRes. IB 227 Security Administration,” National Academies Publica- tion, Washington DC, 1979. [2] P. A. Diamond, “A Framework for Social Security Analy- sis,” Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1977, pp. 275-298. doi:10.1016/0047-2727(77)90002-0 [3] S. Wu, Y. Zhao, H. Zhang, C. Zhang and L. 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