Designing Reusable Systems that Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems : Revisiting Object-Oriented Principles

In the age of the Cloud and so-called Big Data systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming critical to their success. To be able to cope with change, systems must have the capability of reuse and the ability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. To address the issues of reuse in designing evolvable systems, this paper proposes a so-called description-driven approach to systems design. This approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. The efficacy of the description-driven approach is exemplified by the CRISTAL project. CRISTAL is based on description-driven design principles; it uses versions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in diverse forms. This paper discusses the need for capturing holistic system description when modelling large-scale distributed systems.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure and 1 table. Accepted by the 9th Int Conf on the Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE'14). Lisbon, Portugal. April 201

Representations of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in British and Spanish Newspapers:A Multimodal Cognitive-linguistic Analysis

With the (European) Refugee Crisis (RC) still ongoing, the dynamics of representation in media coverage of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants (RASIM) remains a pressing issue. While much has been written about linguistic representations of migration in the media (e.g., Baker et al., 2008), comparatively little has been written about the visual/multimodal depictions of RASIM (cf. Catalano & Musolff, 2019). This is despite a wealth of literature which highlights the role that pictures play in communicating values and thus in creating and sustaining social identities and inequalities more generally (Bednarek & Caple, 2012). In this thesis I (1) critically analyse online newspapers’ patterns of conceptualisations of events within the RC in both language and image; (2) assess the interactions between patterns of conceptualisation across these modes and their potential ideological import; and (3) account for the variation in patterns of conceptualisation across countries and news sources of contrasting ideology. This research develops and operationalises a cognitive-linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Studies (i.e., Hart, 2014). The theoretical-methodological apparatus is designed to critically examine the visual and linguistic enactors of construal operations of schematisation, spatial viewpoint and conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Hart, 2015; Talmy, 2000; Forceville, 2009). This includes examining Language-Image relations from an intersemiotic convergence perspective (Hart & Mármol Queraltó, 2021). Patterns of conceptualisation in three semantic domains were analysed: MOTION, ACTION and FORCE (Hart, 2011a/b). The data for this project comprised 385 news reports extracted and sampled adapting the method in Baker et al. (2008). Four Spanish and British newspapers of contrasting ideological persuasions were examined: El País and The Guardian as ‘liberal’ newspapers, and El Mundo and The Telegraph as ‘conservative’ ii newspapers. Data coding and analysis employed UAM Corpus Tool, also in its version for image analysis. Substantial but subtle variation across countries and newspapers was found in both language and image across all three semantic domains. The national context of newspapers and their ideological inclinations are also relevant. Expanding on previous findings (cf., Moore et al, 2018), Spanish newspapers display more convergent, humanitarian depictions of events during the RC, while British newspapers display a high degree of polarization. Spanish newspapers coincide in primarily representing RASIM as entities arriving to European countries, as passive collectives being acted upon, and as weaker entities being impinged upon by various governmental forces. The Guardian displays relatively similar patterns of conceptualisation, where The Telegraph stands out as the newspaper which depicts RASIM events as inherently negative. Alongside these empirical findings, this thesis makes several theoretical and methodological contributions, including (1) setting out a protocol for text-annotation within a cognitive linguistic paradigm, and (2) advancing our understanding of intersemiotic relations from a critical cognitive linguistic perspective

Music interaction: understanding music and human-computer interaction

We introduce and review recent research in Music and Human Computer Interaction, also known as Music Interaction. After a general overview of the discipline, we analyse the themes and issues raised by the fifteen chapters of this book, each of which presents recent research in this field. The bulk of this chapter is organised as an FAQ. This enables some FAQs to focus on cross cutting issues that appear in multiple chapters, and some chapters to feature in multiple FAQs. Broad topics include: the scope of research in Music Interaction; the role of HCI in Music Interaction; and conversely, the role of Music Interaction in HCI. High-level themes include embodied cognition, spatial cognition, evolutionary interaction, gesture, formal language, affective interaction, and methodologies from social science. Musical activities of interest include performance, composition, analysis, collaborative music making, and human and machine improvisation. Specific issues include: whether Music Interaction should be easy; what can be learned from the experience of being “in the groove”, and what can be learned from the deep commitment of musical amateurs. Broader issues include: what Music Interaction can offer traditional instruments and traditional musical activities; what relevance it has for non-musical domains; and ways in which Music Interaction can enable entirely new musical activities possible

Online discourse construction of enterprise identity : a cognitive-semiotic approach

Cognitive linguistics postulates an intimate relationship between experience and linguistic conceptualizations. Therefore, the human body plays a fundamental role in conceptualizing abstract notions, which, according to the cognitive perspective, is, to a great extent, achieved by means of processes that have an overwhelmingly metaphorical nature. In our work, conceptual metaphor theory, blending theory and the semiotic mental space network model constitute an integrated perspective for a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of meaning representation and meaning construction that accounts for the presence of the phenomenological human body in the language presented by multinationals in their websites. Thus, the present work deals with self-representations of enterprise discourse on the internet, that constitutes a common means of disseminating information on these organizations in all their domains. As it happens, self-representations of multinational organizations are anchored in conceptual mappings that render enterprise discourse as intelligible as possible, thus representing and structuring the identity of these multinationals. In a globalized computer-mediated era, metaphorical mappings of organizations and of multinationals in particular, must be accounted for as intercultural symbolizations accessible to a very broad audience of different social and cultural backgrounds. Hence, we postulate that conceptual mappings in enterprise discourse must resort to the most universal source domain of all: the phenomenological human being. The corpus comprises naturally-occurring texts from the link “About us” of both German and American multinationals of various business branches. Hence the double scope vii of the term “online” in the title of this dissertation: it regards texts that are available on the internet on a permanent basis, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the thought processes that the human mind goes through constantly, so as to understand and process the representations under analysis. In brief, this work aims at unveiling the metaphorical representations underlying enterprise discourse and the implications of these in terms of the identity of the multinationals studied.A linguística cognitiva advoga uma relação estreita entre a experiência e as conceptualizações linguísticas, com ênfase também na componente cultural. Neste contexto, o corpo humano desempenha um papel crucial na conceptualização de noções de maior ou menor grau de abstracção, o que, de acordo com a perspectiva da linguística cognitiva, se traduz, em grande medida, no recurso a processos mentais que são de natureza predominantemente metafórica para estruturar o significado. No nosso trabalho, salienta-se a perspectiva integrada da teoria da metáfora conceptual, da integração conceptual e do modelo semiótico das redes de espaços mentais, tendo em vista um entendimento e discernimento mais abrangentes, rigorosos e precisos da representação e construção de instanciações de significado que manifestam a presença do corpo humano fenomenológico na linguagem nas páginas de internet de multinacionais. Desta forma, este estudo contempla as representações veiculadas pelas próprias multinacionais no discurso empresarial na internet, que constitui, numa perspectiva actual, uma clara forma de diáspora de informação destas organizações e de tudo o que lhes diz respeito. É notório que as representações de empresas multinacionais está fortemente baseada em mapeamentos conceptuais que tornam o discurso empresarial tão inteligível quanto possível, o que se harmoniza com a representação e estruturação da identidade destas multinacionais. De facto, na era moderna em que vivemos, em que os computadores e praticamente todas as novas tecnologias são catalisadores da globalização, os mapeamentos metafóricos das organizações, e em particular das empresas multinacionais, têm necessariamante de ser estudados à luz de constructos simbólicos interculturais que são acessíveis a um público muito vasto, de origens culturais e sociais bem diferentes. Assim, defendemos que os mapeamentos conceptuais presentes no discurso empresarial em análise têm origem predominante na noção de corpo humano fenomenológico, que sitematiza as diversas esferas de acção do corpo humano. O nosso corpus inclui ocorrências de textos reais dos links “About us” de páginas de internet de empresas alemãs e americanas, exercendo estas a sua actividade em variados ramos. De notar a esfera de acção dupla do termo “online”, constante do título desta dissertação: se por um lado ele se refere, numa perspectiva de micro-cosmos, aos textos em estudo, que estão disponíveis para consulta na internet de forma permanente, por outro, e numa perspectiva de macro-cosmos que se reveste de suprema importância, o termo contempla os processos mentais levados permanentemente a cabo pela mente humana, tendo em vista a compreensão e o processamento das representações em análise. A aplicação do modelo semiótico das redes de espaços mentais, segundo Brandt e Brandt (2005) ao nosso nosso estudo despoletou toda uma tipologia com base no corpo humano, surpreendente tanto pela sua amplitude como pela sua natureza singular e exclusiva, uma vez que quaisquer outras representações não foram encontradas durante a análise. A existência de uma mescla metafórica dominante é assegurada, elaborada e consubstancializada por dez hiper-mesclas metafóricas, cada uma com a sua especificação. As hiper-mesclas, conforme demonstrado, comprovam e exemplificam a natureza tendencialmente cadencial do processo de integração conceptual, que é, por isso, potencialmente infinito. No que diz respeito à organização interna do nosso trabalho, começamos por referir o capítulo inicial, no qual o paradigma cognitivo é sumariamente exposto; contemplam-se igualmente as origens europeias deste enquadramento teórico, em que os estudos da metáfora têm papel de relevo, por permitirem o seu desenvolvimento na posterior pesquisa sobre a metáfora conceptual, marcantemente sistematizada por Lakoff e Johnson, mais tarde desenvolvida e optimizada por Fauconnier e Turner. Clarificam-se igualmente as principais linhas orientadoras da linguística cognitiva. Este capítulo também se concentra no advento da semiótica cognitiva (Brandt), materializada num modelo semiótico discursivo que encara o texto como constructo discursivo que constrói o significado de forma intencional, incluindo os sujeitos responsáveis pela emissão e pela recepção do significado, bem como toda a envolvente da situação comunicativa – este modelo torna-se possível pelo desdobramento entre espaços mentais de referência e de representação, em articulação conjunta com cenários esquemáticos de relevância. A intersecção virtual dos espaços resulta em construções que conduzem ao significado em vista. Quanto ao segundo capítulo, ele contempla uma retrospectiva dos estudos sobre a interacção entre metáfora e discurso organizacional, o que passa por várias abordagens, desde a linguística ao estudos das organizações. A noção de identidade também é alvo de atenção neste capítulo, tanto em termos gerais como no âmbito particular da identidade organizacional e empresarial. No terceiro capítulo, que constitui parte muito significativa da nossa dissertação, dedicamo-nos à análise do corpus de dados reais e autênticos, recolhidos nos sites de empresas multinacionais de ramos variados. Esta análise é levada a cabo tendo em conta um critério decrescente, começando-se em mapeamentos de actividade de natureza exclusivamente biológica do corpo humano, em direcção a mapeamentos de actividade de natureza moral. Previamente, dá-se alguma atenção às questões metodológicas, problematizando-se algumas tendências recentes, bem como à noção de corpo humano fenomenológico, na linha de Brandt e Merleau-Ponty. No capítulo seguinte, o quarto, compilam-se as conclusões despoletadas pela análise do corpus, em que as mesclas metafóricas são vistas em conjunto com a questão da identidade empresarial, o que resulta numa íntima relação de interdependência e articulação, consubstanciada pela apresentação de uma análise quantitativa dos dados em análise. Por último, o capítulo cinco apresenta algumas considerações finais e indicações de possíveis caminhos de investigação futuros, sendo que permanece, após este trabalho em particular, a certeza de que muito ainda pode ser feito neste âmbito. De forma sumária, este trabalho visa analisar as estruturas metafóricas subjacentes ao discurso empresarial e as implicações destas na identidade nas empresas multinacionais contempladas, sendo que o corpo humano ganha particular relevo neste nosso estudo, revelando ser determinante para a estruturação do pensamento humano, em concordância não só com a natureza abrangente e omnipresente da metáfora como ferramenta conceptual e mental (e não apenas como ornamento linguístico, opinião desde logo posta em causa por todo o enquadramento da linguística cognitiva), mas também com os últimos estudos de Damásio, igualmente contemplados pelo nosso estudo. Em última análise, pretendemos contribuir para um melhor conhecimento do funcionamento da mente humana, uma tarefa que, embora já possa contar com preciosos contributos, continua a afigurar-se longa, árdua e em permanente processo de aperfeiçoamento.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologi

The puzzle of (un)countability in English : a study in cognitive grammar

Monografia poświęcona jest zagadnieniu policzalności i niepoliczalności rzeczownika w języku angielskim. Przyjmując punkt widzenia jednej z teorii językoznawstwa kognitywnego – Gramatyki Kognitywnej Ronalda Langackera – praca stawia sobie dwa cele. Po pierwsze, weryfikuje jedno z twierdzeń tej teorii, iż prawdopodobnie każdy rzeczownik może wystąpić zarówno w formie policzalnej, jak i niepoliczalnej. Po drugie, wskazuje regularności zmian tych własności gramatycznych rzeczownika. Książka składa się z dwóch rozdziałów. W pierwszym z nich autor dokonuje przeglądu literatury poświęconej zagadnieniu policzalności i niepoliczalności i przedstawia najważniejsze osiągnięcia wypracowane w ramach różnych podejść: logicznego, morfologicznego, syntaktycznego, semantycznego oraz pragmatycznego. Zarysowano tu również główne założenia oraz aparat terminologiczny Gramatyki Kognitywnej, która stanowi bazę teoretyczną dla przeprowadzonej w drugiej części monografii analizy. Rozdział kończy zestawienie wybranych założeń Gramatyki Kognitywnej z postulatami poszczególnych podejść. Rozdział drugi to część badawcza, której trzon stanowi analiza 30 rzeczowników klasyfikowanych w słownikach języka angielskiego jako policzalne oraz 30 rzeczowników typowo niepoliczalnych. Badanie dotyczy użyć tych rzeczowników w kontekstach, w których przejawiają one odwrotną własność gramatyczną. Analizę przeprowadzono na podstawie autentycznego materiału językowego obejmującego ponad 1700 wypowiedzi rodzimych użytkowników języka angielskiego. W ramach analizy opisano szereg ekstensji semantycznych, głównie metonimicznych, towarzyszących omawianym tu zmianom gramatycznym. Na wyższym poziomie abstrakcji ekstensje te ujęte zostały w formie schematów rozszerzenia semantycznego. W podsumowaniu autor ocenia wiarygodność twierdzenia dotyczącego możliwości użycia każdego rzeczownika zarówno w formie policzalnej, jak i niepoliczalnej oraz przedstawia zestaw regularności dotyczących zmian tych własności gramatycznych rzeczownika. Poza odniesieniem się do dwóch głównych celów monografii, autor wskazuje również inne zjawiska językowe związane z omawianą zmianą własności gramatycznych rzeczownika, takie jak elipsa czy łańcuchy punktów odniesienia

Special Issue Editorial – Accumulation and Evolution of Design Knowledge in Design Science Research: A Journey Through Time and Space

Sir Isaac Newton (1676) famously said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Research is a collaborative, evolutionary endeavor—and it is no different with design science research (DSR), which builds upon existing design knowledge and creates new design knowledge to pass on to future projects. However, despite the vast, growing body of DSR contributions, scant evidence of the accumulation and evolution of design knowledge has been articulated in an organized DSR body of knowledge. Most contributions rather stand on their own feet than on the shoulders of giants, and this continues to limit how far we can see, curtailing the extent of the broader impacts that can be made through DSR. In this editorial, we aim at providing guidance on how to position design knowledge contributions in wider problem and solution spaces. We propose (1) a model conceptualizing design knowledge as a resilient relationship between problem and solution spaces, (2) a model that demonstrates how individual DSR projects consume and produce design knowledge, (3) a map to position a design knowledge contribution in problem and solution spaces, and (4) principles on how to use this map in a DSR project. We show how fellow researchers, readers, editors, and reviewers, as well as the IS community as a whole, can make use of these proposals, and also illustrate future research opportunities

On the Development and Management of Adaptive Business Collaborations.

Today’s business climate demands a high rate of change with which Information Technology (IT)-minded organizations are required to cope. Organizations face rapidly changing market conditions, new competitive pressures, new regulatory fiats that demand compliance, and new competitive threats. All of these situations and more drive the need for the IT infrastructure of an organization to respond quickly in support of new business models and requirements. This dissertation studies the adaptive development and management of such dynamic business models and requirements. A rule based environment is developed in which the people who develop and manage business collaborations in organizations can do so in a way that is as independent of specific implementation technologies as possible; and where they can take business requirements into consideration, and in which they can respond to changes as effectively as possible.