68,926 research outputs found

    The irony of coal mining infrastructure projects: the more talk about cost, the more they cost

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    A substantial amount of mining infrastructure projects experience cost and schedule overruns, and this situation is largely brought about by poor requirements management. More specifically, evidence suggests that overruns are primarily due to inadequate requirements definition and scoping, as well as the poor handling of requirements information throughout the project lifecycle. With many parallels to mining infrastructure, the construction management literature agrees that there are some common compromising conditions associated with poor requirements management: clients are not fully engaged in the requirements gathering/identifying process; client’s requirements are not properly elicited, identified and captured; decisions made about requirements specifications are solution biased by partisan factions; manual requirements documentation suffers from version control; and the end user’s identification and involvement is usually too late. Of concern to the mining industry and their infrastructure projects, is that the implications of cost and schedule overruns is significant, to the extent that on average cost overruns can be 95% above the original estimate. This suggests that for the mining industry, overrunning the sanctioned budget and schedule commitments are a regular occurrence. Therefore, the research problem for this study is to the explore requirements management conditions and establish the subsequent contributing factors in mining infrastructure projects that persistently makes them vulnerable to costly overruns. This research was divided into two stages, with Study 1 exploring the comprising conditions in requirements management, which subsequently informed Study 2 to establish the contributing factors. This study used semi-structured interviews and some internal documentation reviews to develop a theory to explain why the situation is not improving for mining infrastructure projects. Interview data was collected from a cross-section of professionals currently in owner teams, consulting, and delivering infrastructure projects in the Australian Coal Mining industry. The results of a thematic analysis on interview transcripts finds the claims of the previously identified compromising conditions of construction projects to also be true of mining infrastructure projects, with the additional compromising conditions of ‘late changes to projects by new stakeholders’, which may be peculiar to mining infrastructure projects. However, more pertinently to the development of a theory to explain the situation, a second round of analysis and coding on the transcripts and documentation applied with a Husserlian lens revealed that the requirements management documentation was not fit for purpose, in terms of how it is dominated by exchange-value and fails to adequately capture the use-value and benefits of the project. The terms exchange-value is defined as the monetary amount realized at a certain point in time, whereas use-value refers to the specific qualities of the product perceived by customers in relation to their needs, which for example could be functionality. The preferencing of exchange-values is considered a result of the influence of management discourse. This discourse is evident in the requirements documentation that management sanction. However, in the interviews, participants appeared to feel less pressured or bound to adopt the management discourse. As many of them are mining engineers or engineering/mining workers who have moved into management roles, they tend to speak in terms of use-value (a things ability to satisfy a need) as well as exchange-value (the price or cost of production). The findings of this study include the determination of an additional compromising condition to requirements management, which is that of late changes by new stakeholders. Another finding is that a contributing factor to cost and schedule overruns in mining infrastructure projects is the misalignment of values inculcated in requirements management documentation, which privilege the values of management (exchange-value) rather than the values of the client and end-users (use-value). Whilst these documents and processes are intended to describe, convey, and ultimately safeguard the project’s use-value for the client through to delivery, management is largely the consumers of these documents, and they have unwittingly biased these documents to communicate exchange-value. Furthermore, the exchange-value biased requirements management documentation, influences the processes and discourse around the project, and consequentially marginalizes use-value discourse, which ironically in the long run, drastically increases the cost of the project

    From manuscript catalogues to a handbook of Syriac literature: Modeling an infrastructure for Syriaca.org

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    Despite increasing interest in Syriac studies and growing digital availability of Syriac texts, there is currently no up-to-date infrastructure for discovering, identifying, classifying, and referencing works of Syriac literature. The standard reference work (Baumstark's Geschichte) is over ninety years old, and the perhaps 20,000 Syriac manuscripts extant worldwide can be accessed only through disparate catalogues and databases. The present article proposes a tentative data model for Syriaca.org's New Handbook of Syriac Literature, an open-access digital publication that will serve as both an authority file for Syriac works and a guide to accessing their manuscript representations, editions, and translations. The authors hope that by publishing a draft data model they can receive feedback and incorporate suggestions into the next stage of the project.Comment: Part of special issue: Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages. 15 pages, 4 figure

    Migrating existing multimedia courseware to Moodle

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    Open source course management systems offer increased flexibility for instructors and instructional designers. Communities can influence the development of these systems and on an individual basis, the possibility to modify the system software exists. Migrating existing courseware to these systems can therefore be beneficial, sometimes even required. We report here about our experience in migrating an existing courseware system consisting of multimedia content and interactive, integrated infrastructure functionality to an open source course management system called Moodle. We will assess the difficulties that we have encountered during this process and, discuss the importance of standards in this context, and we aim to provide other instructors or instructional designers with guidelines and assessment support for other migration projects

    1st INCF Workshop on Sustainability of Neuroscience Databases

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    The goal of the workshop was to discuss issues related to the sustainability of neuroscience databases, identify problems and propose solutions, and formulate recommendations to the INCF. The report summarizes the discussions of invited participants from the neuroinformatics community as well as from other disciplines where sustainability issues have already been approached. The recommendations for the INCF involve rating, ranking, and supporting database sustainability

    Software Metrics in Boa Large-Scale Software Mining Infrastructure: Challenges and Solutions

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    In this paper, we describe our experience implementing some of classic software engineering metrics using Boa - a large-scale software repository mining platform - and its dedicated language. We also aim to take an advantage of the Boa infrastructure to propose new software metrics and to characterize open source projects by software metrics to provide reference values of software metrics based on large number of open source projects. Presented software metrics, well known and proposed in this paper, can be used to build large-scale software defect prediction models. Additionally, we present the obstacles we met while developing metrics, and our analysis can be used to improve Boa in its future releases. The implemented metrics can also be used as a foundation for more complex explorations of open source projects and serve as a guide how to implement software metrics using Boa as the source code of the metrics is freely available to support reproducible research.Comment: Chapter 8 of the book "Software Engineering: Improving Practice through Research" (B. Hnatkowska and M. \'Smia{\l}ek, eds.), pp. 131-146, 201

    Specification of vertical semantic consistency rules of UML class diagram refinement using logical approach

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    Unified Modelling Language (UML) is the most popular modelling language use for software design in software development industries with a class diagram being the most frequently use diagram. Despite the popularity of UML, it is being affected by inconsistency problems of its diagrams at the same or different abstraction levels. Inconsistency in UML is mostly caused by existence of various views on the same system and sometimes leads to potentially conflicting system specifications. In general, syntactic consistency can be automatically checked and therefore is supported by current UML Computer-aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools. Semantic consistency problems, unlike syntactic consistency problems, there exists no specific method for specifying semantic consistency rules and constraints. Therefore, this research has specified twenty-four abstraction rules of class‟s relation semantic among any three related classes of a refined class diagram to semantically equivalent relations of two of the classes using a logical approach. This research has also formalized three vertical semantic consistency rules of a class diagram refinement identified by previous researchers using a logical approach and a set of formalized abstraction rules. The results were successfully evaluated using hotel management system and passenger list system case studies and were found to be reliable and efficient

    Reforming Energy Law at a National Level

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