From Databases to Information Systems

Research and business is currently moving from centralized databases towards information systems integrating distributed and autonomous data sources. Simultaneously, it is a well acknowledged fact that consideration of information quality_IQreasoning _is an important issue for large-scale integrated information systems. We show that IQ-reasoning can be the driving force of the current shift from databases to integrated information systems. In this paper, we explore the implications and consequences of this shift. All areas of answering user queries are affected – from user input, to query planning and query optimization, and finally to building the query result. The application of IQ-reasoning brings both challenges, such as new cost models for optimization, and opportunities, such as improved query planning. We highlight several emerging aspects and suggest solutions toward a pervasion of information quality in information systems.Peer Reviewe

The Role of Vocabularies in the Age of Data: The Question of Research Data

Objective: This paper discusses the role of vocabularies in addressing the issues associated with Big Data. Methodology: The materials used are definitions of Big Data found in literature, standards, and technologies used in the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data, as well as the use case of a research dataset; we use the conceptual bases of semiotics and ontology to analyze the role of vocabularies in knowledge organization (KO) in assigning subjects to documents as a special, limited, use case that may be expanded within such context. Results: We develop and expand the conception of data as an artificial, intentional construction that represents a property of an entity within a specific domain and serving as the essential component of the Big Data. We present a comprehensive conceptualization of semantic expressivity and use it to classify the different vocabularies. We suggest and specify features to vocabularies that may be used within the context of the Semantic Web and the Linked Open Data to assign machine-processable semantics to Big Data. We identify computational ontologies as a type of knowledge organization system with a higher degree of semantic expressivity. It is suggested that such themes should be incorporated into professional qualifications in KO

Precursors to postcolonialism : Leonard Woolf, E.J.Thompson, and E.M.Forster and the rhetoric of English India.

Digitisation of this thesis was sponsored by Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

Being in time - the fictional coloniser as dasein

This study examines the theory and praxis of colonial discourse analysis and the validity of its conception of 'the colonising (white, European, Western) subject' via a Heideggarian interpretation of colonial fiction. The Introduction provides a brief review of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial studies since Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 and isolates the main themes to be examined. The First Chapter examines in detail the problems which adhere to the concept of colonial discourse and its theoretical homogenisation, un-worlding and de-humanisation of the fictional and historical coloniser as understood in relation to Heidegger's description of "Enframing". The Second Chapter sets out the basic structures of Dasein's existential-ontological constitution as described by Heidegger in Being and Time and introduces the principle criterion for the critical analysis which follows. The Third Chapter re-defines colonial discourse, as "idle talk", in terms of the temporality of Dasein and examines the various ways in which certain fictional colonisers, when understood as "beings in Time", reflect the fact that Dasein's individuality is always already ontologically grounded and made manifest in its "authentic potentiality-for-Being-its-Self'. The Fourth Chapter discusses the theme of death, as "Being towards death", in the life and work of Rudyard Kipling, and suggests that death, as both a profoundly significant environmental factor and as a fundamental temporal orientation can be understood to bring Dasein before itself as a 'Being in the world'. The Fifth Chapter examines anxiety and boredom in certain works of colonial literature in terms of the intentional comportments of Dasein's "care" and as those ontological "states-of-mind" which deliver the individual Dasein and the world (as "Being-in-the- world") over to Dasein. The Final Chapter investigates the cultural phenomenon of 'colonial heroism' in terms of the ontological constitution of the hero, the writer and the reader, as Dasein, and in relation to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. My Conclusion offers a summary of each of the previous chapters before considering some of the broader ramifications of the arguments which have been advanced