519 research outputs found

    Big data and humanitarian supply networks: Can Big Data give voice to the voiceless?

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    This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright © 2013 IEEE.Billions of US dollars are spent each year in emergency aid to save lives and alleviate the suffering of those affected by disaster. This aid flows through a humanitarian system that consists of governments, different United Nations agencies, the Red Cross movement and myriad non-governmental organizations (NGOs). As scarcer resources, financial crisis and economic inter-dependencies continue to constrain humanitarian relief there is an increasing focus from donors and governments to assess the impact of humanitarian supply networks. Using commercial (`for-profit') supply networks as a benchmark; this paper exposes the counter-intuitive competition dynamic of humanitarian supply networks, which results in an open-loop system unable to calibrate supply with actual need and impact. In that light, the phenomenon of Big Data in the humanitarian field is discussed and an agenda for the `datafication' of the supply network set out as a means of closing the loop between supply, need and impact

    Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

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    Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse
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