Monitoring of Spatial Data Infraestructures

SDI monitoring and evaluation is increasingly attracting the attention of both public sector bureaucrats seeking justification for providing public sources to SDI and SDI practitioners requiring a measure of success of their SDI strategy. In recent years, a shift from an intuitive to more rational SDI assessments can be observed. SDI monitoring and evaluation is becoming operational and is already part of some SDI implementations and practices. Based on an analysis of the operational monitoring systems of the Dutch national SDI (GIDEON), the European SDI (INSPIRE) and the Catalan SDI (IDEC). We describe, analyze and compare comprehensively the design and application of operational SDI monitoring systems and identify common issues to be taken into account for monitoring of SDIs. This can support further improvement of evaluation practices and operational setups of SDI monitoring systems

Roadmaps to Utopia: Tales of the Smart City

Notions of the Smart City are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualized as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a £16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealized smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimization of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasize the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilizing a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them

How can SMEs benefit from big data? Challenges and a path forward

Big data is big news, and large companies in all sectors are making significant advances in their customer relations, product selection and development and consequent profitability through using this valuable commodity. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have proved themselves to be slow adopters of the new technology of big data analytics and are in danger of being left behind. In Europe, SMEs are a vital part of the economy, and the challenges they encounter need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. This paper identifies barriers to SME uptake of big data analytics and recognises their complex challenge to all stakeholders, including national and international policy makers, IT, business management and data science communities. The paper proposes a big data maturity model for SMEs as a first step towards an SME roadmap to data analytics. It considers the ‘state-of-the-art’ of IT with respect to usability and usefulness for SMEs and discusses how SMEs can overcome the barriers preventing them from adopting existing solutions. The paper then considers management perspectives and the role of maturity models in enhancing and structuring the adoption of data analytics in an organisation. The history of total quality management is reviewed to inform the core aspects of implanting a new paradigm. The paper concludes with recommendations to help SMEs develop their big data capability and enable them to continue as the engines of European industrial and business success. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Authentication and authorisation in entrusted unions

This paper reports on the status of a project whose aim is to implement and demonstrate in a real-life environment an integrated eAuthentication and eAuthorisation framework to enable trusted collaborations and delivery of services across different organisational/governmental jurisdictions. This aim will be achieved by designing a framework with assurance of claims, trust indicators, policy enforcement mechanisms and processing under encryption to address the security and confidentiality requirements of large distributed infrastructures. The framework supports collaborative secure distributed storage, secure data processing and management in both the cloud and offline scenarios and is intended to be deployed and tested in two pilot studies in two different domains, viz, Bio-security incident management and Ambient Assisted Living (eHealth). Interim results in terms of security requirements, privacy preserving authentication, and authorisation are reported

Evaluating strategies for implementing industry 4.0: a hybrid expert oriented approach of B.W.M. and interval valued intuitionistic fuzzy T.O.D.I.M.

open access articleDeveloping and accepting industry 4.0 influences the industry structure and customer willingness. To a successful transition to industry 4.0, implementation strategies should be selected with a systematic and comprehensive view to responding to the changes flexibly. This research aims to identify and prioritise the strategies for implementing industry 4.0. For this purpose, at first, evaluation attributes of strategies and also strategies to put industry 4.0 in practice are recognised. Then, the attributes are weighted to the experts’ opinion by using the Best Worst Method (BWM). Subsequently, the strategies for implementing industry 4.0 in Fara-Sanat Company, as a case study, have been ranked based on the Interval Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy (IVIF) of the TODIM method. The results indicated that the attributes of ‘Technology’, ‘Quality’, and ‘Operation’ have respectively the highest importance. Furthermore, the strategies for “new business models development’, ‘Improving information systems’ and ‘Human resource management’ received a higher rank. Eventually, some research and executive recommendations are provided. Having strategies for implementing industry 4.0 is a very important solution. Accordingly, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods are a useful tool for adopting and selecting appropriate strategies. In this research, a novel and hybrid combination of BWM-TODIM is presented under IVIF information