54 research outputs found

    State-of-the-art assessment on the implementations of international core data models for public administrations

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    Public administrations are often still organised in vertical, closed silos. The lack of common data standards (common data models and reference data) for exchanging information between administrations in a cross-domain and/or cross-border setting stands in the way of digital public services and automated flow of information between public administrations. Core data models address this issue, but are often created within the closed environment of a country or region and within one policy domain. A lack of insight exists in understanding and managing the life-cycle of these initiatives on public administration information systems for data modelling and data exchange. In this paper, we outline state-of-the-art implementations and vocabularies linked to the core data models. In particular we inventoried and selected existing core data models and identified tendencies in current practices based on the criteria creation, use, maintenance and coordination. Based on the analysis, this survey suggest research directions for policy and information management studies pointing to best practices regarding core data model implementations and their role in linking isolated data silos within a cross-country context. Finally we highlight the differences in their coordination and maintenance, depending on the state of creation and use

    The effectiveness of public service delivery : evidence from the uBuhlebezwe Local Municipality waste management system.

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    Master of Public Management in Management Studies. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2017.The global campaign around the sustainability of the environment has resulted in much emphasis being placed on actions that can save people and the environment. Waste management is vital in this era of sustainability and is of utmost importance to ensure a livable environment for the flora and fauna. The need to create a livable environment has continuously resulted in service delivery protests in South Africa. At the municipal level, there are increasing media reports of service delivery protests over the provision of basic utilities. Against this backdrop, the study examined the effectiveness of the service delivery at the local government level, with specific reference to refuse waste management. The focus area of the study was the uBuhlebezwe Local Municipality (BLM). The aim and objective of the study was to review the waste management practices at the BLM, highlighting the shortcomings/challenges and the discrepancies between policy implementation and management practices. The data for the study was collected through one-on-one interviews and focus group discussions. The face-to-face interviews and focus group discussions were used to elicit information from the municipal officials and community members respectively, to address the research questions and objectives. A total number of five municipal officials were interviewed, while a total number of 45 households were involved in the focus group discussions. In gathering information, the researcher compiled an interview guide: a set of questions that guided the interviews. Content analysis, which involved the use of coding, themes, and clusters, was used for the interpretation and analysis of the data; and the findings from the primary data were supported by the findings from the secondary data. The findings of the study indicated some degree of inefficiency in the municipal refuse management logistics system, which sometimes resulted in illegal dumping. The illegal dumping occurred as a result of the inability of the municipality to purchase a dumping site, due to financial constraints. The study also revealed the unreliability of the transport system in the municipality as a result of the frequent breakdown of the municipal vehicles. The lack of an efficient community participatory platform was also determined, and found to result in service delivery protests. The study recommends the need for educational awareness regarding health hazards, and a ‘reduce/reuse/recycle’ approach to refuse waste

    Closed Loop Supply Chain: Evaluating Ecological Footprint

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    Purpose:  The purpose of this research is to evaluate the success of the closed-loop E-waste supply chain operations, primarily focused on achieving sustainability objectives related to the manufacturing, distribution, reusing, and discarding of electrical components. Methodology: The supply chain operations reference model offers suggestions and benchmarking tools to monitor the performance of supply chains and enhance the processes. This study illustrates a conceptual framework to show how these standards could be used in the E-waste supply chain to link business processes, metrics, industry standards, and technology to enhance the relationship and coordination between the supply chain members and to increase sustainability throughout the supply chain. Findings: According to an assessment of the literature, insufficient attention has been paid to the SCOR model's sustainability criteria. Consequently, in the wake of portraying the structure of the Supply Chain Operation Reference model, we make sense of which credits should be included in the Supply Chain Operation Reference to reflect manageability and which cycles and practices are related to every standard or should be remembered for Supply Chain Operation Reference to lay out the connection between execution, cycles, and practices. Conclusions: When a company's supply chain has achieved a desirable degree of eco-friendliness in all regards, its performance will be improved and satisfactory from a sustainability perspectiv

    Foundations of B2B electronic contracting

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    Nowadays, flexible electronic cooperation paradigms are required for core business processes to meet the speed and flexibility requirements dictated by fast-changing markets. These paradigms should include the functionality to establish the formal business relationship required by the importance of these core processes. The business relationship should be established in an automated, electronic way in order to match the speed and flexibility requirements mentioned above. As such, it should considerably improve on the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of traditional contracting in this context. The result of the establishment should be a detailed electronic contract that contains a complete specification of the intended cooperation between organizations. Electronic contracts should contain a precise and unambiguous specification of the collaboration at both the conceptual and technological level. Existing commercial software solutions for business-to-business contracting provide low level of automation and concentrate solely on the automated management of the contract enactment. However, in the modern, dynamic, business settings, an econtracting system has to support high automation of the e-contract establishment, enactment, and management. In the thesis, the business, legal, and technological requirements for the development of a highly automated e-contracting system are investigated. Models that satisfy these requirements and that can be used as a foundation for the implementation of an electronic contracting system are defined. First, the thesis presents the business benefits introduced to companies by highly automated electronic contracting. Next, a data and process analysis of electronic contracting is presented. The specification of electronic contracts and the required process support for electronic contract establishment and enactment are investigated. The business benefits and data and process models defined in the thesis are validated on the basis of two business cases from on-line advertising, namely the cases of online advertising in "De Telegraaf" and "Google". Finally, the thesis presents a specification of the functionalities that must be provided by an e-contracting system. A conceptual reference architecture that can be used as a starting point in the design and implementation of an electronic contracting system is defined. The work in the thesis is conducted on the intersection of the scientific areas of conceptual information and process modeling and specification on the one hand and distributed information system architecture modeling on the other hand

    Foundations of Fuzzy Logic and Semantic Web Languages

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    This book is the first to combine coverage of fuzzy logic and Semantic Web languages. It provides in-depth insight into fuzzy Semantic Web languages for non-fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic experts. It also helps researchers of non-Semantic Web languages get a better understanding of the theoretical fundamentals of Semantic Web languages. The first part of the book covers all the theoretical and logical aspects of classical (two-valued) Semantic Web languages. The second part explains how to generalize these languages to cope with fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic

    Foundations of Fuzzy Logic and Semantic Web Languages

    Get PDF
    This book is the first to combine coverage of fuzzy logic and Semantic Web languages. It provides in-depth insight into fuzzy Semantic Web languages for non-fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic experts. It also helps researchers of non-Semantic Web languages get a better understanding of the theoretical fundamentals of Semantic Web languages. The first part of the book covers all the theoretical and logical aspects of classical (two-valued) Semantic Web languages. The second part explains how to generalize these languages to cope with fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic

    HIDE: User centred Domotic evolution toward Ambient Intelligence

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    Pervasive Computing and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) visions are still far from being achieved, especially with regard to Domotics and home applications. According to the vision of Ambient Intelligence (AmI), the most advanced technologies are those that disappear: at maturity, computer technology should become invisible. All the objects surrounding us must possess sufficient computing capacity to interact with users, the surroundings and each other. The entire physical environment in which users are immersed should thus be a hidden computer system equipped with the appropriate software in order to exhibit intelligent behavior. Even though many implementations have started to appear in several contexts, few applications have been made available for the home environment and the general public. This is mainly due to the segmentation of standards and proprietary solutions, which are currently confusing the market with a sparse offer of uninteroperable devices and systems. Although modern houses are equipped with smart technological appliances, still very few of these appliances can be seamlessly connected to each other. The objective of this research work is to take steps in these directions by proposing, on the one hand, a software system designed to make today’s heterogeneous, mostly incompatible domotic systems fully interoperable and, on the other hand, a feasible software application able to learn the behavior and habits of home inhabitants in order to actively contribute to anticipating user needs, and preventing emergency situations for his health. By applying machine learning techniques, the system offers a complete, ready-to-use practical application that learns through interaction with the user in order to improve life quality in a technological living environment, such as a house, a smart city and so on. The proposed solution, besides making life more comfortable for users without particular needs, represents an opportunity to provide greater autonomy and safety to disabled and elderly occupants, especially the critically ill ones. The prototype has been developed and is currently running at the Pisa CNR laboratory, where a home environment has been faithfully recreated

    Opportunities for sustainable, green and inclusive agricultural value chains in ACP countries

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    The objective of this book, which summarises the findings of 18 value chains in 11 ACP countries, is to identify the factors affecting commercial value chain development. What factors help entrepreneurial initiatives and commercial viability? Which ones provide constraints? Aimed at governments, private companies, donors and NGOs, this detailed publication places emphasis on maximising the inclusion of smallholders. It also highlights some important green initiatives taken by the value chains studied. The text addresses concerns of efficiency and sustainability: the selected chains – which range from rubber processed in Cameroon to hot peppers grown in Jamaica, from sugarcane milled in Uganda to mangoes exported from Haiti and papaya grown on Fiji – all had to prove to be sustainable or to have the potential to be sustainable. Despite the great diversity of ACP agricultural value chains, a number of strong themes emerge. These include that: value chains established by a private initiative develop to exploit market opportunities; market liberalisation has a major impact; efficiency can be improved when small-scale farmers develop collaborative relationships with other value chain participants; and that the adoption of many green activities is driven by market forces

    Parameterized and multi-level tiled loop generation

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    Department Head: L. Darrell Whitley.2010 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.Tiling is a loop transformation that decomposes computations into a set of smaller computation blocks. The transformation has been proven to be useful for many high-level program optimizations, such as data locality optimization and exploiting coarse-grained parallelism, and crucial for architecture with limited resources, such as embedded systems, GPUs, and the Cell architecture. Data locality and parallelism will continue to serve as major vehicles for achieving high performance on modern architecture in multi-core era. In parameterized tiling the size of blocks is not fixed at compile time but remains a symbolic constant so that it can be selected/changed even at runtime. Parameterized tiled loops facilitate iterative and runtime optimizations, such as iterative compilation, auto-tuning and dynamic program adaption. In this dissertation we present a collection of techniques for generating parameterized and multi-level tiled loops from affine control loops and their parallelization. The tiled loop generation problem even for perfectly nested loops has been believed to have an exponential time complexity due to the heavy machinery like Fourier-Motzkin elimination. Disproving this decade-long belief, we provide a simple technique for generating tiled loop nests even from imperfectly nested loops. Our technique for perfectly nested loops consists of only syntactic processing that is applied only once and independently to each loop bound. Our approach to imperfectly nested loops is composed of a direct extension of the tiled code generation technique for perfectly nested loops and three simple optimizations on the resulting parameterized tiled loops. The generation as well as the optimizations are achieved only with purely syntactic processing, hence loop generation time remains negligible. We also present three schemes for multi-level tiling where tiling is applied more than once. All the schemes are scalable with respect to the number of tiling levels and can be combined to achieve better performance. To facilitate parallelization of parameterized tiled loops, we generate outermost tile-loops that are perfectly nested. We also provide a technique for statically restructuring parameterized tiled loops to the wavefront scheduling on shared memory system. Because the formulation of parameterized tiling does not fit into the well established polyhedral framework, such static restructuring has been a great challenge. However, we achieve this limited restructuring through a syntactic processing without any sophisticated machinery
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