Eco-innovate: a guide to eco-innovation for SMEs and business coaches

This guide is a practical and comprehensive introduction to eco-innovation addressed primarily to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The booklet overviews emerging business opportunities eco-innovation has to offer to companies that reconsider business models, develop new products, technologies or services, or improve production processes

The Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy Reporting Guidelines

The Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy brings together local and regional authorities voluntarily committing to implementing the European Union’s climate and energy objectives on their territory. Signatory local authorities share a vision for making cities decarbonised and resilient, where citizens have access to secure, sustainable and affordable energy. Signatories pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by at least 40% by 2030 and to increase their resilience to the impacts of climate change. The Covenant of Mayors helps local authorities to translate their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction ambitions into reality, while taking into account the immense diversity on the ground. it provides signatories with a harmonised data compilation and reporting framework which is unique in Europe which assists them to follow a systemic climate and energy planning and monitoring at the local level. The Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) template constitutes the standard reporting framework for Covenant Signatories. The SECAP template forms the skeleton of the individual action plans. The SECAP and its monitoring part allow signatories to collect and analyse data in a structured and systematic manner, serve as a basis for good climate and energy management and for tracking progress in implementation. This guide has been developed to assist signatories in understanding the Covenant reporting framework. It seeks to provide signatories with step-by-step guidelines throughout the reporting process. Step I is dedicated to guide signatories through the process of filling in the templates, namely Section I for the SECAP template and Section II for the monitoring template. Step II addresses the upload of documents such as the SECAP, while Step III is focused on the integrated checking system developed for the climate mitigation part of the template and official submission. The guide is enriched with some practical recommendations and concrete examples. Link to the SECAP Template and other technical material: http://www.covenantofmayors.eu/Covenant-technical-materials.html (selectable in URL below).JRC.C.2-Energy Efficiency and Renewable

The Canopy Health Monitoring (CanHeMon) project

As part of the EU emergency measures against the pine wood nematode (PWN) (Bursaphelenchus xylophilus) laid down under Decision 2012/535/EU, Portugal should perform, outside and during the flight season of the vector, surveys of coniferous trees located in the 20 km wide buffer zone established along the Spanish border, with the aim to detect trees which are dead, in poor health or affected by fire or storm. These trees shall be felled and removed, as required by the Decision, to avoid that they act as attractants for the longhorn beetle (Monochamus species), the vector responsible for the spread of PWN. The CanHeMon project tasked the Joint Research Centre with analysing a portion of the buffer zone, using remote sensing data, to support detection on the ground of declining pine trees. During the project, a 400 km2 area was imaged twice, in autumn 2015 and autumn 2016, at 15 cm resolution from aircraft, and individual declining tree crowns were detected using a MaxEnt-based iterative image analysis algorithm, the performance of which was gauged through visual photointerpretation. The scalability of the automated methods was then tested using an image mosaic of the entire buffer zone at 30 cm resolution. Finally, broad recommendations were formulated on the use of remote sensing for large-area surveys in the context of plant health emergencies.JRC.D.1-Bio-econom

Strategies and Approaches for Exploiting the Value of Open Data

Data is increasingly permeating into all dimensions of our society and has become an indispensable commodity that serves as a basis for many products and services. Traditional sectors, such as health, transport, retail, are all benefiting from digital developments. In recent years, governments have also started to participate in the open data venture, usually with the motivation of increasing transparency. In fact, governments are one of the largest producers and collectors of data in many different domains. As the increasing amount of open data and open government data initiatives show, it is becoming more and more vital to identify the means and methods how to exploit the value of this data that ultimately affects various dimensions. In this thesis we therefore focus on researching how open data can be exploited to its highest value potential, and how we can enable stakeholders to create value upon data accordingly. Albeit the radical advances in technology enabling data and knowledge sharing, and the lowering of barriers to information access, raw data was given only recently the attention and relevance it merits. Moreover, even though the publishing of data is increasing at an enormously fast rate, there are many challenges that hinder its exploitation and consumption. Technical issues hinder the re-use of data, whilst policy, economic, organisational and cultural issues hinder entities from participating or collaborating in open data initiatives. Our focus is thus to contribute to the topic by researching current approaches towards the use of open data. We explore methods for creating value upon open (government) data, and identify the strengths and weaknesses that subsequently influence the success of an open data initiative. This research then acts as a baseline for the value creation guidelines, methodologies, and approaches that we propose. Our contribution is based on the premise that if stakeholders are provided with adequate means and models to follow, then they will be encouraged to create value and exploit data products. Our subsequent contribution in this thesis therefore enables stakeholders to easily access and consume open data, as the first step towards creating value. Thereafter we proceed to identify and model the various value creation processes through the definition of a Data Value Network, and also provide a concrete implementation that allows stakeholders to create value. Ultimately, by creating value on data products, stakeholders participate in the global data economy and impact not only the economic dimension, but also other dimensions including technical, societal and political

Big data for monitoring educational systems

This report considers “how advances in big data are likely to transform the context and methodology of monitoring educational systems within a long-term perspective (10-30 years) and impact the evidence based policy development in the sector”, big data are “large amounts of different types of data produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.” Five independent experts were commissioned by Ecorys, responding to themes of: students' privacy, educational equity and efficiency, student tracking, assessment and skills. The experts were asked to consider the “macro perspective on governance on educational systems at all levels from primary, secondary education and tertiary – the latter covering all aspects of tertiary from further, to higher, and to VET”, prioritising primary and secondary levels of education

Prospects of Mobile Search

Search faces (at least) two major challenges. One is to improve efficiency of retrieving relevant content for all digital formats (images, audio, video, 3D shapes, etc). The second is making relevant information retrievable in a range of platforms, particularly in high diffusion ones as mobiles. The two challenges are interrelated but distinct. This report aims at assessing the potential of future Mobile Search. Two broad groups of search-based applications can be identified. The first one is the adaptation and emulation of web search processes and services to the mobile environment. The second one is services exploiting the unique features of the mobile devices and the mobile environments. Examples of these context-aware services include location-based services or interfacing to the internet of things (RFID networks). The report starts by providing an introduction to mobile search. It highlights differences and commonalities with search technologies on other platforms (Chapter 1). Chapter 2 is devoted to the supply side of mobile search markets. It describes mobile markets, presents key figures and gives an outline of main business models and players. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the demand side of the market. It studies users¿ acceptance and demand using the results on a case study in Sweden. Chapter 4 presents emerging trends in technology and markets that could shape mobile search. It is the author's view after discussing with many experts. One input to this discussion was the analysis of on forward-looking scenarios for mobile developed by the authors (Chapter 5). Experts were asked to evaluate these scenarios. Another input was a questionnaire to which 61 experts responded. Drivers, barriers and enablers for mobile search have been synthesised into SWOT analysis. The report concludes with some policy recommendations in view of the likely socio-economic implications of mobile search in Europe.JRC.DG.J.4-Information Societ

Creation of a Marketplace for NFV Functions

Actualmente, a virtualização tem sido bastante importante pelo mundo fora porque pode tornar aplicações de rede com a eficiência e flexibilidade de aplicações de software. Existem imensas razões pelas quais há investimento neste tipo de tecnologia. As principais razões são a motivação financeira, a optimização de recursos e a carga de trabalho de fácil migração.Uma das tecnologias de virtualização que está a ser desenvolvida é NFV. NFV permite a substituição e complementação de dispositivos físicos de rede com funções de rede virtuais. Funções de rede como a NAT, DNS e IMS são separadas do hardware físico para software através desta tecnologia.Esta tese explica a motivação e solução da criação de um Marketplace para funções NFV. O Marketplace será capaz de acelerar o processo de Aprovisionamento no NFV. Está definido para fornecer aos clientes as funcionalidades de descarregamento, comparação e instalação de VNFs que melhor correspondem às suas necessidades.Nowadays virtualisation has been very important worldwide because it can make network applications with the efficiency and flexibility of software applications. There are many reasons why there is investment in this type of technology. The main reasons are the financial motivation, the resource optimization and the easily migration workload.One of the virtualisation technologies that is being developed is the NFV. NFV allows the replacement and complement physical network devices with virtual network functions. Network Functions such as NAT, DNS and IMS are separated from the physical hardware for software through this technology.This thesis explains the motivation and solution of creating a Marketplace for NFV Functions. This Marketplace will be able to accelerate the Procurement process in NFV. It is defined to give customers the ability of download, compare and install VNFs to best match their needs

Information visualisation and data analysis using web mash-up systems

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThe arrival of E-commerce systems have contributed greatly to the economy and have played a vital role in collecting a huge amount of transactional data. It is becoming difficult day by day to analyse business and consumer behaviour with the production of such a colossal volume of data. Enterprise 2.0 has the ability to store and create an enormous amount of transactional data; the purpose for which data was collected could quite easily be disassociated as the essential information goes unnoticed in large and complex data sets. The information overflow is a major contributor to the dilemma. In the current environment, where hardware systems have the ability to store such large volumes of data and the software systems have the capability of substantial data production, data exploration problems are on the rise. The problem is not with the production or storage of data but with the effectiveness of the systems and techniques where essential information could be retrieved from complex data sets in a comprehensive and logical approach as the data questions are asked. Using the existing information retrieval systems and visualisation tools, the more specific questions are asked, the more definitive and unambiguous are the visualised results that could be attained, but when it comes to complex and large data sets there are no elementary or simple questions. Therefore a profound information visualisation model and system is required to analyse complex data sets through data analysis and information visualisation, to make it possible for the decision makers to identify the expected and discover the unexpected. In order to address complex data problems, a comprehensive and robust visualisation model and system is introduced. The visualisation model consists of four major layers, (i) acquisition and data analysis, (ii) data representation, (iii) user and computer interaction and (iv) results repositories. There are major contributions in all four layers but particularly in data acquisition and data representation. Multiple attribute and dimensional data visualisation techniques are identified in Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 environment. Transactional tagging and linked data are unearthed which is a novel contribution in information visualisation. The visualisation model and system is first realised as a tangible software system, which is then validated through different and large types of data sets in three experiments. The first experiment is based on the large Royal Mail postcode data set. The second experiment is based on a large transactional data set in an enterprise environment while the same data set is processed in a non-enterprise environment. The system interaction facilitated through new mashup techniques enables users to interact more fluently with data and the representation layer. The results are exported into various reusable formats and retrieved for further comparison and analysis purposes. The information visualisation model introduced in this research is a compact process for any size and type of data set which is a major contribution in information visualisation and data analysis. Advanced data representation techniques are employed using various web mashup technologies. New visualisation techniques have emerged from the research such as transactional tagging visualisation and linked data visualisation. The information visualisation model and system is extremely useful in addressing complex data problems with strategies that are easy to interact with and integrate

Anti-Corruption Models and Experiences

The challenge of fighting corruption is strategic at a global and European level, and the inadequacy of the repressive and penal response alone has now been evidenced: corruption must not only be fought, but understood, and preventive administrative measures must be taken. Anti-corruption is not an issue that concerns only the judiciary branch, the legal system, and police authorities, but it is, above all, a challenge for society and institutions as a whole. And it is a challenge to be transformed, in particular, into a change in administrations and institutions, in their way of organizing and operating. This volume the result of the Project “Administrative Prevention through Targeted Anti-corruption MODels for candidate countries” – APTAMOD, co-funded by the European Union’s HERCULE III programme, which has conducted comparative law studies and high-profile research activities in the field of administrative prevention of corruption, with specific focus on Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia