Towards information profiling: data lake content metadata management

There is currently a burst of Big Data (BD) processed and stored in huge raw data repositories, commonly called Data Lakes (DL). These BD require new techniques of data integration and schema alignment in order to make the data usable by its consumers and to discover the relationships linking their content. This can be provided by metadata services which discover and describe their content. However, there is currently a lack of a systematic approach for such kind of metadata discovery and management. Thus, we propose a framework for the profiling of informational content stored in the DL, which we call information profiling. The profiles are stored as metadata to support data analysis. We formally define a metadata management process which identifies the key activities required to effectively handle this.We demonstrate the alternative techniques and performance of our process using a prototype implementation handling a real-life case-study from the OpenML DL, which showcases the value and feasibility of our approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Executive Compensation Eligibility in Global Businesses: A Global Banding Approach

As corporations expand their geographic reach and executive talent moves across geographic borders as freely as capital, global compensation executives must keep pace. Ethnocentric, nationalistic and parochial HR systems and policies inherited from the past that are focused on a single country may actually be barriers to the establishment of effective global organizational processes. Leaving local units in various countries determine their own executive compensation philosophies and practices may be equally detrimental

The Network Newsletter, Volume 4 Number 1

The_Organizational_Case_for_Diversityvol_4_no1.pdf: 331 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Maryland: Round 1 - State Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.There is clear alignment among most groups and institutions on the state's adoption and implementation of the ACA. Because of its all-payer rate system, competition between private plans and exchange plans is muted. Some conservative elements in the Democratic-heavy legislature oppose rate-setting and the state's generous Medicaid expansions as well as its affirmation of the ACA. But with strong Democratic majorities in both houses, together with Democrats in the governor's and lieutenant governor's offices and professionals with policy and political expertise, the state's progressive reformers are clear winners. The state's inclusive and generous eligibility decisions will afford coverage to a broad portion of the state's uninsured populations. Advocates for these groups also win. In the case of Maryland, the "stars were aligned" to formulate an aggressive and expansive approach to the law. Minority opposition simply could not mount effective challenges to these forces

Washington: Round 1 - State-Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.The state of Washington is expanding its Medicaid program and operating its own health insurance marketplace, as authorized by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The state legislature made the decision to run an insurance exchange in 2011, ahead of the June 2012 Supreme Court decision on the ACA's constitutionality, and well in advance of the 2012 presidential election. On July 1, 2013, Governor Jay Inslee signed the state's biennial budget, which authorized Medicaid expansion. Thus began the formal action signaling Washington State's intent to fully implement the ACA

Technical alignment

This essay discusses the importance of the areas of infrastructure and testing to help digital preservation services demonstrate reliability, transparency, and accountability. It encourages practitioners to build a strong culture in which transparency and collaborations between technical frameworks are valued highly. It also argues for devising and applying agreed-upon metrics that will enable the systematic analysis of preservation infrastructure. The essay begins by defining technical infrastructure and testing in the digital preservation context, provides case studies that exemplify both progress and challenges for technical alignment in both areas, and concludes with suggestions for achieving greater degrees of technical alignment going forward

BioWorkbench: A High-Performance Framework for Managing and Analyzing Bioinformatics Experiments

Advances in sequencing techniques have led to exponential growth in biological data, demanding the development of large-scale bioinformatics experiments. Because these experiments are computation- and data-intensive, they require high-performance computing (HPC) techniques and can benefit from specialized technologies such as Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) and databases. In this work, we present BioWorkbench, a framework for managing and analyzing bioinformatics experiments. This framework automatically collects provenance data, including both performance data from workflow execution and data from the scientific domain of the workflow application. Provenance data can be analyzed through a web application that abstracts a set of queries to the provenance database, simplifying access to provenance information. We evaluate BioWorkbench using three case studies: SwiftPhylo, a phylogenetic tree assembly workflow; SwiftGECKO, a comparative genomics workflow; and RASflow, a RASopathy analysis workflow. We analyze each workflow from both computational and scientific domain perspectives, by using queries to a provenance and annotation database. Some of these queries are available as a pre-built feature of the BioWorkbench web application. Through the provenance data, we show that the framework is scalable and achieves high-performance, reducing up to 98% of the case studies execution time. We also show how the application of machine learning techniques can enrich the analysis process

Arizona: Round 1 - State-Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.A number of decisions helped set the stage for Arizona's implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These decisions and the dynamics that led to them reflect a complex mix of intergovernmental political calculation and pragmatic public policy, past and present, which frame the state's capacity for implementing ACA in Arizona

A new governance approach for multi-firm projects: lessons from Olkiluoto 3 and Flamanville 3 nuclear power plant projects

We analyze governance in two contemporary nuclear power plant projects: Olkiluoto 3 (Finland) and Flamanville 3 (France). We suggest that in the governance of large multi-firm projects, any of the prevalent governance approaches that rely on market, hierarchy, or hybrid forms, is not adequate as such. This paper opens up avenues towards a novel theory of governance in large projects by adopting a project network view with multiple networked firms within a single project, and by simultaneously going beyond organizational forms that cut across the traditional firm–market dichotomy. Our analysis suggests four changes in the prevailing perspective towards the governance of large projects. First, there should be a shift from viewing multi-firm projects as hierarchical contract organizations to viewing them as supply networks characterized by a complex and networked organizational structure. Second, there should be a shift in the emphasis of the predominant modes of governance, market and hierarchy towards novel governance approaches that emphasize network-level mechanisms such as self-regulation within the project. Third, there should be a shift from viewing projects as temporary endeavors to viewing projects as short-term events or episodes embedded in the long-term sphere of shared history and expected future activities among the involved actors. Fourth, there should be a shift from the prevailing narrow view of a hierarchical project management system towards an open system view of managing in complex and challenging institutional environments