Evaluating Resource Use in Low Input Systems

Work package 5.1 aims at the evaluation of existing accreditation mechanisms and economic approaches related to low-input livestock farming systems and thus of sustainable development processes through a multi-criteria evaluation of the public goods delivered by different production systems, management techniques and breeding innovations. To this end, we are conducting a comparative analysis of approaches to low-input livestock production, based on the multi-criteria assessment of the performances of production schemes in the delivery of public goods

The evolving scholarly record

This report presents a framework to help organize and drive discussions about the evolving scholarly record. The framework provides a high-level view of the categories of material the scholarly record potentially encompasses, as well as the key stakeholder roles associated with the creation, management, and use of the scholarly record. Key highlights: A confluence of trends is accelerating changes to the scholarly record\u27s content and stakeholder roles. Scholarly outcomes are contextualized by materials generated in the process and aftermath of scholarly inquiry. The research process generates materials covering methods employed, evidence used, and formative discussion. The research aftermath generates materials covering discussion, revision, and reuse of scholarly outcomes. The scholarly record is evolving to have greater emphasis on collecting and curating context of scholarly inquiry. The scholarly record’s stakeholder ecosystem encompasses four key roles: create, fix, collect, and use. The stakeholder ecosystem supports thinking about how roles are reconfigured as the scholarly record evolves. The ways and means of scholarly inquiry are experiencing fundamental change, with consequences for scholarly communication and ultimately, the scholarly record. The boundaries of the scholarly record are both expanding and blurring, driven by changes in research practices, as well as changing perceptions of the long-term value of certain forms of scholarly materials. Understanding the nature, scope, and evolutionary trends of the scholarly record is an important concern in many quarters—for libraries, for publishers, for funders, and of course for scholars themselves. Many issues are intrinsic to the scholarly record, such as preservation, citation, replicability, provenance, and data curation. The conceptualization of the scholarly record and its stakeholder ecosystem provided in the report can serve as a common point of reference in discussions within and across domains, and help cultivate the shared understanding and collaborative relationships needed to identify, collect, and make accessible the wide range of materials the scholarly record is evolving to include

Ontology for Representing Human Needs

Need satisfaction plays a fundamental role in human well-being. Hence understanding citizens' needs is crucial for developing a successful social and economic policy. This notwithstanding, the concept of need has not yet found its place in information systems and online tools. Furthermore, assessing needs itself remains a labor-intensive, mostly offline activity, where only a limited support by computational tools is available. In this paper, we make the first step towards employing need management in the design of information systems supporting participation and participatory innovation by proposing OpeNeeD, a family of ontologies for representing human needs data. As a proof of concept, OpeNeeD has been used to represent, enrich and query the results of a needs assessment study in a local citizen community in one of the Vienna districts. The proposed ontology will facilitate such studies and enable the representation of citizens' needs as Linked Data, fostering its co-creation and incentivizing the use of Open Data and services based on it

Sustainability management accounting system (SMAS): towards a conceptual design for the manufacturing industry

[Abstract]: The study reported in this paper aims to identify an effective management accounting system using sustainability accounting concept for environmental and social cost measurement to add value to organizations. The motivation for undertaking this research is driven by the current practice of activity based costing (ABC), which has not identified and allocated costs of environment and social impacts to a single production activity. This has resulted in inaccuracies in cost accounting information when preparing environmental and social performance disclosures for internal management decisions, as well as external disclosures. This study therefore develops a conceptual model for a Sustainability Management Accounting System (SMAS) to improve the identification and measurement of environmental and social impact costs. A SMAS also provides sustainable organizations with a way to enhance cost allocation and analysis efficiently, thus creating more accurate cost accounting information for management decisions and reporting disclosure purposes. This paper describes preliminary work undertaken to date. Currently, it would appear that most Australian firms fail to report on their environmental performance, however, social indicators make it increasingly important for organisations to embrace corporate social reponsibility in their financial reporting and disclosure. Further, the results of quantitative data anlaysis will be used to identify an effective management accounting of sustainable organizations while supporting the development of a SMAS conceptual model

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Project Evaluation Synthesis

Evaluation activity found the technology-supported approach to curriculum design and approval developed by PiP to demonstrate high levels of user acceptance, promote improvements to the quality of curriculum designs, render more transparent and efficient aspects of the curriculum approval and quality monitoring process, demonstrate process efficacy and resolve a number of chronic information management difficulties which pervaded the previous state. The creation of a central repository of curriculum designs as the basis for their management as "knowledge assets", thus facilitating re-use and sharing of designs and exposure of tacit curriculum design practice, was also found to be highly advantageous. However, further process improvements remain possible and evidence of system resistance was found in some stakeholder groups. Recommendations arising from the findings and conclusions include the need to improve data collection surrounding the curriculum approval process so that the process and human impact of C-CAP can be monitored and observed. Strategies for improving C-CAP acceptance among the "late majority", the need for C-CAP best practice guidance, and suggested protocols on the knowledge management of curriculum designs are proposed. Opportunities for further process improvements in institutional curriculum approval, including a re-engineering of post-faculty approval processes, are also recommended

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Evaluation of Impact on Business Processes

The innovation and development work conducted under the auspices of the Principles in Patterns (PiP) project is intended to explore and develop new technology-supported approaches to curriculum design, approval and review. An integral component of this innovation is the use of business process analysis and process change techniques - and their instantiation within the C-CAP system (Class and Course Approval Pilot) - in order to improve the efficacy of curriculum approval processes. Improvements to approval process responsiveness and overall process efficacy can assist institutions in better reviewing or updating curriculum designs to enhance pedagogy. Such improvements also assume a greater significance in a globalised HE environment, in which institutions must adapt or create curricula quickly in order to better reflect rapidly changing academic contexts, as well as better responding to the demands of employment marketplaces and the expectations of professional bodies. This is increasingly an issue for disciplines within the sciences and engineering, where new skills or knowledge need to be rapidly embedded in curricula as a response to emerging technological or environmental developments. All of the aforementioned must also be achieved while simultaneously maintaining high standards of academic quality, thus adding a further layer of complexity to the way in which HE institutions engage in "responsive curriculum design" and approval. This strand of the PiP evaluation therefore entails an analysis of the business process techniques used by PiP, their efficacy, and the impact of process changes on the curriculum approval process, as instantiated by C-CAP. More generally the evaluation is a contribution towards a wider understanding of technology-supported process improvement initiatives within curriculum approval and their potential to render such processes more transparent, efficient and effective. Partly owing to limitations in the data required to facilitate comparative analyses, this evaluation adopts a mixed approach, making use of qualitative and quantitative methods as well as theoretical techniques. These approaches combined enable a comparative evaluation of the curriculum approval process under the "new state" (i.e. using C-CAP) and under the "previous state". This report summarises the methodology used to enable comparative evaluation and presents an analysis and discussion of the results. As the report will explain, the impact of C-CAP and its ability to support improvements in process and document management has resulted in the resolution of numerous process failings. C-CAP has also demonstrated potential for improvements in approval process cycle time, process reliability, process visibility, process automation, process parallelism and a reduction in transition delays within the approval process, thus contributing to considerable process efficiencies; although it is acknowledged that enhancements and redesign may be required to take advantage of C-CAP's potential. Other aspects pertaining to C-CAP's impact on process change, improvements to document management and the curation of curriculum designs will also be discussed

A Survey of Requirements Engineering Methods for Pervasive Services

Designing and deploying ubiquitous computing systems, such as those delivering large-scale mobile services, still requires large-scale investments in both development effort as well as infrastructure costs. Therefore, in order to develop the right system, the design process merits a thorough investigation of the wishes of the foreseen user base. Such investigations are studied in the area of requirements engineering (RE). In this report, we describe and compare three requirements engineering methods that belong to one specific form of RE, namely Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering. By mapping these methods to a common framework, we assess their applicability in the field of ubiquitous computing systems