4,780 research outputs found

    A Grammatical Approach to Data-centric Case Management in a Distributed Collaborative Environment

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    This paper presents a purely declarative approach to artifact-centric case management systems, and a decentralization scheme for this model. Each case is presented as a tree-like structure; nodes bear information that combines data and computations. Each node belongs to a given stakeholder, and semantic rules govern the evolution of the tree structure, as well as how data values derive from information stemming from the context of the node. Stakeholders communicate through asynchronous message passing without shared memory, enabling convenient distribution

    Intelligent Software for Ecological Building Design

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    Building design is a complex process because of the number of elements and issues involved and the number of relationships that exist among them. Adding sustainability issues to the list increases the complexity of design by an order of magnitude. There is a need for computer assistance to manage the increased complexity of design and to provide intelligent collaboration in formulating acceptable design solutions. Software development technology today offers opportunities to design and build an intelligent software system environment that can serve as a reliable intelligent partner to the human designer. In this paper the authors discuss the requirements for an intelligent software design environment, explain the major challenges in designing this environment, propose an architecture for an intelligent design support system for sustainable design and present the existing technologies that can be used to implement that architecture

    Indigenous African Leadership: Key differences from Anglo-centric thinking and writings

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    The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article draws on historical explorers’ accounts, ethnography and organisational approaches to examine practices, discourses and perceptions of leadership in 12 prototypical indigenous communities in West and Central Africa. By so doing, it highlights how leadership meanings from this context differ from Anglo-centric thinking and writings. Key to this contribution is an unravelling of ways in which historical cultural hegemonies impose particular discursive formations, constructed practices and mind-programming in a non-Anglo-Saxon socio-cultural context. Dramaturgical power arrangement, lucid role substitution and the notion of leadership as nonhuman emerge as dominant themes in the analysis. Also, featuring significantly are representations of leadership in symbols, mythology and as transcendental and metaphysical. These conceptualisations are different from predominant Anglo-Saxon writings that frequently present leadership as linear hierarchies, dyadic (leader-follower) relationship, acts and behaviours of heroic figures and as an essentially human action. An Afro-centric indigenous concept of leadership reflecting the context is proposed which challenges heroism, linearity, individualism and objectivism

    A Language and Methodology based on Scenarios, Grammars and Views, for Administrative Business Processes Modelling

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    International audienceIn Business Process Management (BPM), process modelling has been solved in various ways. However, there are no commonly accepted modelling tools (languages). Some of them are criticized for their inability to capture both the lifecycle, informational and organizational models of processes. For some others, process modelling is generally done using a single graph; this does not facilitate modularity, maintenance and scalability. In addition, some of these languages are very general; hence, their application to specific domain processes (such as administrative processes) is very complex. In this paper, we present a new language and a new methodology, dedicated to administrative process modelling. This language is based on a variant of attributed grammars and is able to capture the lifecycle, informational and organizational models of such processes. Also, it proposes a simple graphical formalism allowing to model each process's execution scenario as an annotated tree (modularity). In the new language, a particular emphasis is put on modelling (using "views") the perceptions that actors have on processes and their data

    OER Development and Promotion. Outcomes of an International Research Project on the OpenCourseWare Model

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    In this paper, we describe the successful results of an international research project focused on the use of Web technology in the educational context. The article explains how this international project, funded by public organizations and developed over the last two academic years, focuses on the area of open educational resources (OER) and particularly the educational content of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) model. This initiative has been developed by a research group composed of researchers from three countries. The project was enabled by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid OCW Office�s leadership of the Consortium of Latin American Universities and the distance education know-how of the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL, Ecuador). We give a full account of the project, methodology, main outcomes and validation. The project results have further consolidated the group, and increased the maturity of group members and networking with other groups in the area. The group is now participating in other research projects that continue the lines developed her

    Policy-based asset sharing in collaborative environments

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    Resource sharing is an important but complex problem to be solved. The problem is exacerbated in a dynamic coalition context, due to multi-partner constraints (imposed by security, privacy and general operational issues) placed on the resources. Take for example scenarios such as emergency response operations, corporate collaborative environments, or even short-lived opportunistic networks, where multi-party teams are formed, utilizing and sharing their own resources in order to support collective endeavors, which otherwise would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve by a single party. Policy-Based Management Systems (PBMS) have been proposed as a suitable paradigm to reduce this complexity and provide a means for effective resource sharing. The overarching problem that this thesis deals with, is the development of PBMS techniques and technologies that will allow in a dynamic and transparent way, users that operate in collaborative environments to share their assets through high-level policies. To do so, it focuses on three sub-problems each one of which is related to a different aspect of a PBMS, making three key contributions. The first is a novel model, which proposes an alternative way for asset sharing, better fit than the traditional approaches when dealing with collaborative and dynamic environments. In order for all of the existing asset sharing approaches to comply with situational changes, an extra overhead is needed due to the fact that the decision making centre – and therefore, the policy making centre – is far away from where the changes take place unlike the event-driven approach proposed in this thesis. The second contribution is the proposal of an efficient, high-level policy conflict analysis mechanism, that provides a more transparent – in terms of user interaction – alternative way for maintaining unconflicted PBMS. Its discrete and sequential execution, breaks down the analysis process into discrete steps, making the conflict analysis more efficient compared to existing approaches, while eases human policy authors to track the whole process interfacing with it, in a near to natural language representation. The contribution of the third piece of research work is an interest-based policy negotiation mechanism, for enhancing asset sharing while promoting collaboration in coalition environments. The enabling technology for achieving the last two contributions (contribution 2 & 3) is a controlled natural language representation, which is used for defining a policy language. For evaluating the proposed ideas, in the first and third contributions we run simulation experiments while we simulate and also conduct formal analysis for the second one

    La estructura retórica del resumen (abstract) en las disciplinas arte y diseño : un estudio descriptivo

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    Maestría en Inglés con Orientación en Lingüística AplicadaAs an effective means of representing the research article, the abstract has increasingly become an essential part of this genre. For that reason, understanding the rhetorical conventions that govern abstract writing in their respective fields may help students and novice researchers acquire reading and writing skills in their fields of specialization. Recent research on the rhetorical features of abstracts has revealed broad patterns of regularity as well as disciplinary variation. Although several investigations have focused their analysis on a variety of disciplines, no study appears to have explored the rhetorical structure of abstracts in the fields of Art and Design. The present research, therefore, examines the rhetorical moves and main linguistic features of Art and Design abstracts, and proposes a schema for the abstract genre in each of these disciplinary domains. To conduct the study, a corpus of 30 abstracts from four high-impact journals was compiled, and subjected to a move analysis (Swales, 1981, 1990) using the analytical framework proposed by Pho (2008), and the methodology suggested by Dudley-Evans (1994) and Holmes (1997). The results reveal that although Art and Design abstracts bear some similarities, they also show some differences that result in distinct emerging patterns. Based on these findings, two models are proposed of the rhetorical elements that are constitutive of each discipline. The outcome of this research has pedagogical implications for students, novice researchers and teachers within ESP (English for Specific Purposes) contexts.Fil: Caturegli, Alicia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina

    A publish/subscribe approach for implementing GAG's distributed collaborative business processes with high data availability

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    International audienceWith the ever-increasing development of the Internet and the diversification of communication media, there is a growing interest in distributed business process models that focus on exchanged data (or artifact) to control and pilot processes. The Guarded Attribute Grammars (GAG) is one such model; it stands out from the others by the fact that it emphasizes the central place occupied by user decisions during the process execution: it is both data-driven and user-centric. In this paper we present an approach to implementing distributed collaborative business processes modeled using GAG in which communications are done by publish/subscribe with redirection of subscriptions (pub/sub-RS). Pub/sub-RS-which we propose-guarantees high data availability during the process execution, by ensuring that an actor, perceived as a subscriber, will always receive a data he needs to perform a task as soon as it is produced. Moreover, if the data is semi-structured, and is produced collaboratively and incrementally by several actors, its subscribers will be notified as soon as one of its components (a prefix) is produced at the same time they will be subscribed in a transparent way to the remaining components (the suffix).Avec le développement toujours croissant d'internet et la diversification des moyens de communication il est un intérêt croissant pour les modèles de processus métiers distribués qui mettent l'accent sur les données échangées (ou artefacts) pour contrôler et piloter les processus. Les grammaires attribuées avec gardes (GAG) est l'un de ces modèles; il se démarque des autres par le fait qu'il met l'emphase sur la place centrale qu'occupe les décisions des utilisateurs lors de l'exécution d'un processus: il est à la fois centré sur les données et sur l'utilisateur. Dans ce papier, nous présentons une approche de mise en œuvre de processus métiers collaboratifs distribués modélisés à l'aide des GAG dans lesquels les communications se font par publish/subscribe avec redirection de souscriptions (pub/sub-RS). Le pub/sub-RS (que nous proposons), garantit une haute disponibilité des données pendant l'exécution des processus en assurant qu'un acteur (vu comme un abonné), recevra toujours une donnée dont il a besoin pour effectuer une tâche dès qu'elle est produite. De plus, si la donnée est semi-structurée, et produite collaborativement et incrémentalement par plusieurs acteurs, les abonnés seront notifiés dès qu'une de ses composantes (un préfixe) est produite en même temps qu'ils seront abonnés de manière transparente à ses composantes résiduelles (le suffixe)

    Content and Language Integrated Learning for First and Second Year University Students - Aspirations, Challenges and Solutions

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    This paper offers an overview of two modules from the Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore. These belong to a programme entitled the Ideas and Exposition Modules (IEM) and they pertain to a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach. The courses and some of the main learning objectives are explained. These are critical thinking abilities; research skills; and academic study skills. It is surmised that these are useful for all students independent of their academic discipline. The challenges that the lecturer and students face during the courses are also presented. These challenges often arise because students are from different educational cultures and academic disciplines, and as a result, classes tend to be comprised of students with mixed interests, English language levels and academic research and writing experience. Students also tend to vary in their abilities to think critically and work independently. The first section in this paper looks at the educational context of the IEM courses; the second, presents the core learning outcomes aspired to; the third, examines the challenges faced and how these are met by the tutor and students taking the courses. The final section offers a brief overview of the paper and considers the future for this genre of course, particularly how students benefit from a more student-centered, individualized educational practice today
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