Do the citizens of Europe trust their police?

Purpose - The maintenance of public order and the control of crime are clearly amongst the primary objectives of global law enforcement agencies. An important antecedent to this is the consideration of public trust in their police force. The purpose of this paper is to utilise data from the 5th Round European Social Survey (ESS), to investigate how public social indicators may highlight the level of trust in a country’s police force. Design/methodology/approach – The results from the ESS are analysed using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), multiply conjunctional causal configurations of the considered social indicators are then established and analysed. Findings - A consequence of using fsQCA, asymmetric causal configurations are identified for the relative high and low limiting levels of trust towards the police in the considered countries. The results offer novel insights into the relationship between social indicators and police trust, as well as expositing a nascent technique (fsQCA) that may offer future potential in this area. Originality/value – This paper introduces a novel technique to analyse a major European data set relating to citizens perceptions of the police. The findings might prove useful for policing organisations as they develop strategies to maintain/improve the level of trust and confidence of citizens in the policing services they provide

On the incorporation of interval-valued fuzzy sets into the Bousi-Prolog system: declarative semantics, implementation and applications

In this paper we analyse the benefits of incorporating interval-valued fuzzy sets into the Bousi-Prolog system. A syntax, declarative semantics and im- plementation for this extension is presented and formalised. We show, by using potential applications, that fuzzy logic programming frameworks enhanced with them can correctly work together with lexical resources and ontologies in order to improve their capabilities for knowledge representation and reasoning

A General Framework for Representing, Reasoning and Querying with Annotated Semantic Web Data

We describe a generic framework for representing and reasoning with annotated Semantic Web data, a task becoming more important with the recent increased amount of inconsistent and non-reliable meta-data on the web. We formalise the annotated language, the corresponding deductive system and address the query answering problem. Previous contributions on specific RDF annotation domains are encompassed by our unified reasoning formalism as we show by instantiating it on (i) temporal, (ii) fuzzy, and (iii) provenance annotations. Moreover, we provide a generic method for combining multiple annotation domains allowing to represent, e.g. temporally-annotated fuzzy RDF. Furthermore, we address the development of a query language -- AnQL -- that is inspired by SPARQL, including several features of SPARQL 1.1 (subqueries, aggregates, assignment, solution modifiers) along with the formal definitions of their semantics

A Model for an Intelligent Support Decision System in Aquaculture

The paper purpose an intelligent software system agents–based to support decision in aquculture and the approach of fish diagnosis with informatics methods, techniques and solutions. A major purpose is to develop new methods and techniques for quick fish diagnosis, treatment and prophyilaxis at infectious and parasite-based known disorders, that may occur at fishes raised in high density in intensive raising systems. But, the goal of this paper is to presents a model of an intelligent agents-based diagnosis method will be developed for a support decision system.support decision system, diagnosis, multi-agent system, fish diseases

Determining rules for closing customer service centers: A public utility company's fuzzy decision

In the present work, we consider the general problem of knowledge acquisition under uncertainty. A commonly used method is to learn by examples. We observe how the expert solves specific cases and from this infer some rules by which the decision was made. Unique to this work is the fuzzy set representation of the conditions or attributes upon which the decision make may base his fuzzy set decision. From our examples, we infer certain and possible rules containing fuzzy terms. It should be stressed that the procedure determines how closely the expert follows the conditions under consideration in making his decision. We offer two examples pertaining to the possible decision to close a customer service center of a public utility company. In the first example, the decision maker does not follow too closely the conditions. In the second example, the conditions are much more relevant to the decision of the expert

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201