A study of facility management knowledge classification for the effective stewardship of existing buildings

The aim of the study was to establish the Facility Management knowledge categories within the life cycle of a building context. The significance of the study stemmed from research undertaken into the compliance to Australian Standards 1851-17:2005 Maintenance of Fire and Smoke Doors within West Australian nursing homes, which demonstrated 87 per cent non-compliance. The level of non-compliance appeared to identify a lack of knowledge, and appropriately qualified and experienced personnel involved within the management of nursing homes (Doleman, 2008). The issues identified prompted the question on how facility management knowledge categories evolves and develops throughout the life cycle of a building. The research used a three Phase, Grounded Theory interpretive analysis of the Facility Management knowledge construct. Phase One involved the examination of 21 international tertiary undergraduate Facility Managers courses. The course content was analysed and assessed through linguistic analysis to extract the knowledge categories and subordinate concepts. The findings identified 14 primary knowledge categories which were presented to 10 Facility Management experts for validation. Phase Two presented the findings of Phase One in a Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS) survey instrument to Facility Management experts for dissimilarity assessments. The results from the 56 completed surveys were embedded within MDS software to present spatial knowledge proximity cluster analysis. The final phase was the validation of the research findings through semi-structured interviews of 10 industry experts, selected with consideration of heterogeneity in order to validate the findings of the previous phase. The outcome of this study was to develop an understanding of the Facility Management knowledge categories within the life cycle of a building context and the identification of 14 core knowledge base, required as a Facility Manager practitioner. Core knowledge categories included Finance as a central theme within the Facility Management domain with Building Services and Business providing an indication as to the broad nature of Facility Management knowledge construct. Also identified within the research was the lack of legislative harmonisation between different states and territories within the Facility Management domain and the disparity between Facility Management practitioners with regards to knowledge context and application. The role of Facility Management and their involvement within the lifecycle of a building was also identified within the research as being little or none during the design and construction phases of the building. The handover and management of the buildings to Facility Managers occurs within the occupancy phase of the buildings life cycle meaning that the building was inherited without due consideration of continued operational efficiencies or functionality affecting the overall cost effectiveness of the building. Such outcomes lead to a number of recommendations such as a the introduction of central knowledge standard in order to provide context of definitions and well as the continued development and drive of Facility Management practitioners and associations to establish the Facility Management profession as a respected body

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

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

Algorithmic Transparency for the Smart City

As artificial intelligence and big data analytics increasingly replace human decision making, questions about algorithmic ethics become more pressing. Many are concerned that an algorithmic society is too opaque to be accountable for its behavior. An individual can be denied parole or credit, fired, or not hired for reasons that she will never know and which cannot be articulated. In the public sector, the opacity of algorithmic decision making is particularly problematic, both because governmental decisions may be especially weighty and because democratically elected governments have special duties of accountability

Regionally distributed architecture for dynamic e-learning environment (RDADeLE)

e-Learning is becoming an influential role as an economic method and a flexible mode of study in the institutions of higher education today which has a presence in an increasing number of college and university courses. e-Learning as system of systems is a dynamic and scalable environment. Within this environment, e-learning is still searching for a permanent, comfortable and serviceable position that is to be controlled, managed, flexible, accessible and continually up-to-date with the wider university structure. As most academic and business institutions and training centres around the world have adopted the e-learning concept and technology in order to create, deliver and manage their learning materials through the web, it has become the focus of investigation. However, management, monitoring and collaboration between these institutions and centres are limited. Existing technologies such as grid, web services and agents are promising better results. In this research a new architecture has been developed and adopted to make the e-learning environment more dynamic and scalable by dividing it into regional data grids which are managed and monitored by agents. Multi-agent technology has been applied to integrate each regional data grid with others in order to produce an architecture which is more scalable, reliable, and efficient. The result we refer to as Regionally Distributed Architecture for Dynamic e-Learning Environment (RDADeLE). Our RDADeLE architecture is an agent-based grid environment which is composed of components such as learners, staff, nodes, regional grids, grid services and Learning Objects (LOs). These components are built and organised as a multi-agent system (MAS) using the Java Agent Development (JADE) platform. The main role of the agents in our architecture is to control and monitor grid components in order to build an adaptable, extensible, and flexible grid-based e-learning system. Two techniques have been developed and adopted in the architecture to build LOs' information and grid services. The first technique is the XML-based Registries Technique (XRT). In this technique LOs' information is built using XML registries to be discovered by the learners. The registries are written in Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) format. The second technique is the Registered-based Services Technique (RST). In this technique the services are grid services which are built using agents. The services are registered with the Directory Facilitator (DF) of a JADE platform in order to be discovered by all other components. All components of the RDADeLE system, including grid service, are built as a multi-agent system (MAS). Each regional grid in the first technique has only its own registry, whereas in the second technique the grid services of all regional grids have to be registered with the DF. We have evaluated the RDADeLE system guided by both techniques by building a simulation of the prototype. The prototype has a main interface which consists of the name of the system (RDADeLE) and a specification table which includes Number of Regional Grids, Number of Nodes, Maximum Number of Learners connected to each node, and Number of Grid Services to be filled by the administrator of the RDADeLE system in order to create the prototype. Using the RST technique shows that the RDADeLE system can be built with more regional grids with less memory consumption. Moreover, using the RST technique shows that more grid services can be registered in the RDADeLE system with a lower average search time and the search performance is increased compared with the XRT technique. Finally, using one or both techniques, the XRT or the RST, in the prototype does not affect the reliability of the RDADeLE system.Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu - Directorate General For Jubail Project Kingdom of Saudi Arabi

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field