Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value

Knowledge Management, Information Technology and Learning in Construction Projects

ICT (Information and Communication Technology) usage in construction is limited when compared with other industries. This may be due to the unique characteristics of the construction industry and the tendency for late take-up of ICT solutions. The amount and diversity of information created and referenced during a typical construction project is considerable. Most people working in the construction business have been involved in projects where costs have enormously exceeded the budget, where timetables have caused problems, and where the end results have been useless or even unhealthy for people. The KM (Knowledge Management) in construction projects fails, and there is no commitment to improve the process even if productivity in the industry is very low compared to other industries. Construction professionals work in complex and heterogeneous networks of human beings and various artefacts. Productive participation in knowledge-intensive work requires that both individual professionals and their communities and organisations continuously transform their practices, develop new competencies, advance their knowledge and understanding, as well as produce innovations and create new knowledge. This present thesis is a case study conducted within the Prolab project in Vaasa University. This study deals with the issues and problems of knowledge management in construction projects. The focus is in construction ICT and solutions that have emerged in this field. There are five published articles that relate to these themes. The empirical part for this study comes from the Prolab project interviews in five demanding public construction projects. The informants were project stakeholders; end-users of the buildings, such as nurses and teachers; architects and special designers; as well as project managers and contractors. My conclusions are that the knowledge processing tools are in use but they are not used in as centralized or intelligent way as they could be. It seems that the solutions are not interoperable because of technical problems. In addition, I found problems related to inefficient information flow, lack of communication and project participants not being ready to utilize the modern technologies, as well as to the lack of centralised KM strategy. In order to improve the process, construction companies must integrate learning with dayto-day work processes in such a way that they not only share knowledge but also provide access to knowledge at any level. The knowledge portal systems that include BIM (Building Information Modelling) operations and perceive user and business requirements are one way to innovative project management systems. Continual discussion between customer and the application provider is necessary for the best results.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Älykäs tunnistauminen ja käyttöoikeuksien hallinta monimuotoisessa verkotetussa maailmassa

Our living environments are full of various connected computing devices. These environments in homes, offices, public spaces, transportation etc. are gaining abilities to acquire and apply knowledge about the environment and its users in order to improve users' experience in that environment. However, before smart adaptive solutions can be deployed in critical applications, authentication and authorization mechanisms are needed to provide protection against various security threats. These mechanisms must be able to interoperate and share information with different devices. The thesis focuses to questions on how to facilitate the interoperability of authentication and authorization solutions and how to enable adaptability and smartness of these solutions. To address questions, this thesis explores existing authentication and authorizations solutions. Then the thesis builds new reusable, interoperable, and adaptive security solutions. The smart space concept, based on semantic web technologies and publish-and-subscribe architecture, is recognized as a prominent approach for interoperability. We contribute by proposing solutions, which facilitate implementation of smart access control applications. An essential enabler for smart spaces is a secure platform for information sharing. This platform can be based on various security protocols and frameworks, providing diverse security levels. We survey security-levels and feasibility of some key establishment protocols and solutions for authentication and authorization. We also study ecosystem and adaptation issues as well as design and implement a fine-grained and context-based reusable security model, which enables development of self-configuring and adaptive authorization solutions.Ympäristöt, joissa elämme, ovat täynnä erilaisia verkkolaitteita. Nämä koteihin, toimistoihin, julkisiin tiloihin ja ajoneuvoihin muodostuvat ympäristöt ovat oppimassa hyödyntämään ympäriltä saatavilla olevaa tietoa ja sopeuttamaan toimintaansa parantaakseen käyttäjän kokemusta näistä ympäristössä. Älykkäiden ja sopeutuvien tilojen käyttöönotto kriittisissä sovelluksissa vaatii kuitenkin tunnistautumis- ja käyttöoikeuksien hallintamenetelmiä tietoturvauhkien torjumiseksi. Näiden menetelmien pitää pystyä yhteistoimintaan ja mahdollistaa tiedonvaihto erilaisten laitteiden kanssa. Tämä lisensiaatin tutkimus keskittyy kysymyksiin, kuinka helpottaa tunnistautumis- ja käyttöoikeusratkaisujen yhteensopivuutta ja kuinka mahdollistaa näiden ratkaisujen sopeutumiskyky ja älykäs toiminta. Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan olemassa olevia menetelmiä. Tämän jälkeen kuvataan toteutuksia uusista tietoturvaratkaisuista, jotka ovat uudelleenkäytettäviä, eri laitteiden kanssa yhteensopivia ja eri vaatimuksiin mukautuvia. Älytilat, jotka perustuvat semanttisten web teknologioiden ja julkaise-ja-tilaa arkkitehtuurin hyödyntämiseen, tunnistetaan työssä lupaavaksi yhteensopivuuden tuovaksi ratkaisuksi. Tutkimus esittää ratkaisuja, jotka helpottavat älykkäiden tunnistautumis- ja käyttöoikeuksien hallintaratkaisujen kehitystä. Oleellinen yhteensopivuuden mahdollistaja on tietoturvallinen yhteensopivuusalusta. Tämä alusta voi perustua erilaisiin avaintenhallinta ja tunnistautumisprotokolliin sekä käyttöoikeuksien hallintakehyksiin. Tutkimuksessa arvioidaan joidenkin olemassa olevien ratkaisujen käytettävyyttä ja tietoturvatasoa. Tutkimuksessa myös tutkitaan ekosysteemi- ja sopeutumiskysymyksiä sekä toteutetaan hienojakoinen ja kontekstiin perustuva uudelleen käytettävä tietoturvamalli, joka mahdollistaa itsesääntyvien ja mukautuvien käyttöoikeuksien hallinta sovellusten toteuttamisen

Medical Informatics

Information technology has been revolutionizing the everyday life of the common man, while medical science has been making rapid strides in understanding disease mechanisms, developing diagnostic techniques and effecting successful treatment regimen, even for those cases which would have been classified as a poor prognosis a decade earlier. The confluence of information technology and biomedicine has brought into its ambit additional dimensions of computerized databases for patient conditions, revolutionizing the way health care and patient information is recorded, processed, interpreted and utilized for improving the quality of life. This book consists of seven chapters dealing with the three primary issues of medical information acquisition from a patient's and health care professional's perspective, translational approaches from a researcher's point of view, and finally the application potential as required by the clinicians/physician. The book covers modern issues in Information Technology, Bioinformatics Methods and Clinical Applications. The chapters describe the basic process of acquisition of information in a health system, recent technological developments in biomedicine and the realistic evaluation of medical informatics

Experimental Evaluation of Growing and Pruning Hyper Basis Function Neural Networks Trained with Extended Information Filter

In this paper we test Extended Information Filter (EIF) for sequential training of Hyper Basis Function Neural Networks with growing and pruning ability (HBF-GP). The HBF neuron allows different scaling of input dimensions to provide better generalization property when dealing with complex nonlinear problems in engineering practice. The main intuition behind HBF is in generalization of Gaussian type of neuron that applies Mahalanobis-like distance as a distance metrics between input training sample and prototype vector. We exploit concept of neuron’s significance and allow growing and pruning of HBF neurons during sequential learning process. From engineer’s perspective, EIF is attractive for training of neural networks because it allows a designer to have scarce initial knowledge of the system/problem. Extensive experimental study shows that HBF neural network trained with EIF achieves same prediction error and compactness of network topology when compared to EKF, but without the need to know initial state uncertainty, which is its main advantage over EKF

Bioinspired metaheuristic algorithms for global optimization

This paper presents concise comparison study of newly developed bioinspired algorithms for global optimization problems. Three different metaheuristic techniques, namely Accelerated Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO), Firefly Algorithm (FA), and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) are investigated and implemented in Matlab environment. These methods are compared on four unimodal and multimodal nonlinear functions in order to find global optimum values. Computational results indicate that GWO outperforms other intelligent techniques, and that all aforementioned algorithms can be successfully used for optimization of continuous functions

Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science

This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities

A software architecture for electro-mobility services: a milestone for sustainable remote vehicle capabilities

To face the tough competition, changing markets and technologies in automotive industry, automakers have to be highly innovative. In the previous decades, innovations were electronics and IT-driven, which increased exponentially the complexity of vehicle’s internal network. Furthermore, the growing expectations and preferences of customers oblige these manufacturers to adapt their business models and to also propose mobility-based services. One other hand, there is also an increasing pressure from regulators to significantly reduce the environmental footprint in transportation and mobility, down to zero in the foreseeable future. This dissertation investigates an architecture for communication and data exchange within a complex and heterogeneous ecosystem. This communication takes place between various third-party entities on one side, and between these entities and the infrastructure on the other. The proposed solution reduces considerably the complexity of vehicle communication and within the parties involved in the ODX life cycle. In such an heterogeneous environment, a particular attention is paid to the protection of confidential and private data. Confidential data here refers to the OEM’s know-how which is enclosed in vehicle projects. The data delivered by a car during a vehicle communication session might contain private data from customers. Our solution ensures that every entity of this ecosystem has access only to data it has the right to. We designed our solution to be non-technological-coupling so that it can be implemented in any platform to benefit from the best environment suited for each task. We also proposed a data model for vehicle projects, which improves query time during a vehicle diagnostic session. The scalability and the backwards compatibility were also taken into account during the design phase of our solution. We proposed the necessary algorithms and the workflow to perform an efficient vehicle diagnostic with considerably lower latency and substantially better complexity time and space than current solutions. To prove the practicality of our design, we presented a prototypical implementation of our design. Then, we analyzed the results of a series of tests we performed on several vehicle models and projects. We also evaluated the prototype against quality attributes in software engineering