Architecture of participation : the realization of the Semantic Web, and Internet OS

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, February 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-68).The Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming an integral part of our daily life and touching every part of the society around the world including both well-developed and developing countries. The simple technology and genuine intention of the original WWW, which is to help researchers share and exchange information and data across incompatible platforms and systems, have evolved into something larger and beyond what one could conceive. While WWW has reached the critical mass, many limitations are uncovered. To address the limitations, the development of its extension, the Semantic Web, has been underway for more than five years by the inventor of WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, and the technical community. Yet, no significant impact has been made. Its awareness by the public is surprisingly and unfortunately low. This thesis will review the development effort of the Semantic Web, examine its progress which appears lagging compared to WWW, and propose a promising business model to accelerate its adoption path.by Shelley Lau.S.M

A distributed approach to XML interoperability

"We expand upon previous research performed on creating a lightweight infrastructure for the purpose of achieving interoperability among XML data sources. The approach is based on enriching local sources with semantic declarations so as to enable interoperability. These declarations capture the information content and concepts of the sources through mappings to a common application specific vocabulary. We design and implement a peer-to-peer network architecture through which global queries are initiated and responded to. We further examine and implement a methodology for merging the XML results of global queries into a single XML formatted response."--Abstract from author supplied metadata

Exploring the fit between CSR and innovation

An exploration of the fit or space between CSR and innovation is presented, based on the RESPONSE project, a 15-month study involving 60 SMEs throughout Europe. The main practical output of the project was the Social Innovation model, yet a conceptual understanding of CSR and innovation is best advanced through the three hypotheses that constitute the conclusions of the project: H1) The diffusion of CSR should be modelled on the diffusion of innovation; H2) CSR implementation and innovation can be configured to form a virtuous circle; and H3) There is a maturity path toward true integration of CSR and innovation. These three hypotheses inform, respectively, on the background, results and development of the project. H1 is framed within the context of the original European Commission call and proposal; H2 ties in with the Social Innovation model; and H3 is discussed in the light of a short case involving a high-performing SME. Since the hypotheses were the result of the project, we do not attempt to prove them here, but discuss their significance, with the idea that further research and community development will fully evaluate their accuracy.Corporate social responsibility; innovation; small and medium-size enterprises;

Value-driven partner search for <i>Energy from Waste</i> projects

Energy from Waste (EfW) projects require complex value chains to operate effectively. To identify business partners, plant operators need to network with organisations whose strategic objectives are aligned with their own. Supplier organisations need to work out where they fit in the value chain. Our aim is to support people in identifying potential business partners, based on their organisation’s interpretation of value. Value for an organisation should reflect its strategy and may be interpreted using key priorities and KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs may comprise any or all of knowledge, operational, economic, social and convenience indicators. This paper presents an ontology for modelling and prioritising connections within the business environment, and in the process provides means for defining value and mapping these to corresponding KPIs. The ontology is used to guide the design of a visual representation of the environment to aid partner search

Weak signal identification with semantic web mining

We investigate an automated identification of weak signals according to Ansoff to improve strategic planning and technological forecasting. Literature shows that weak signals can be found in the organization's environment and that they appear in different contexts. We use internet information to represent organization's environment and we select these websites that are related to a given hypothesis. In contrast to related research, a methodology is provided that uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) for the identification of weak signals. This improves existing knowledge based approaches because LSI considers the aspects of meaning and thus, it is able to identify similar textual patterns in different contexts. A new weak signal maximization approach is introduced that replaces the commonly used prediction modeling approach in LSI. It enables to calculate the largest number of relevant weak signals represented by singular value decomposition (SVD) dimensions. A case study identifies and analyses weak signals to predict trends in the field of on-site medical oxygen production. This supports the planning of research and development (R&D) for a medical oxygen supplier. As a result, it is shown that the proposed methodology enables organizations to identify weak signals from the internet for a given hypothesis. This helps strategic planners to react ahead of time

Privacy mediators:helping IoT cross the chasm

Unease over data privacy will retard consumer acceptance of IoT deployments. The primary source of discomfort is a lack of user control over raw data that is streamed directly from sensors to the cloud. This is a direct consequence of the over-centralization of today’s cloud-based IoT hub designs. We propose a solution that interposes a locally-controlled software component called a privacy mediator on every raw sensor stream. Each mediator is in the same administrative domain as the sensors whose data is being collected, and dynamically enforces the current privacy policies of the owners of the sensors or mobile users within the domain. This solution necessitates a logical point of presence for mediators within the administrative boundaries of each organization. Such points of presence are provided by cloudlets, which are small locally-administered data centers at the edge of the Internet that can support code mobility. The use of cloudlet-based mediators aligns well with natural personal and organizational boundaries of trust and responsibility

A new architecture for dynamic e-business database interoperability

There have been many approaches of data sharing in e-businesses, attempting at mapping each field at the source to its corresponding field at the target. These approaches eliminate the need for deriving the global schema and hence eliminate a substantial overhead. But, the approaches work out well only when both the source and the target databases have approximately the same content. Moreover, if some concepts of source do not have the counterpart fields in the target then the mapping will lose the concepts. This problem will be further aggregated by the mapping compositions and the large size of the databases. In this paper, we propose a framework to alleviate the interoperability problem

ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD - SUCCESS OR FAILURE IN THE MEDICAL DECISION FROM THE ROMANIAN HEALTH SYSTEM ?

The investments in informational and communicational technologies in the health field represent a for of investing in human capital because health and medical services will exceed the physician – patient relationship and the improvement of the physical and emotional condition of the individuals of a society will become a prioritary problem of the community. In Romania is noticed a high degree of data fragmenting, with a negligible communication, often inexistent, within and outside the system, and the decision makers of the health system hold exclusivity on their own data, fact that makes them unavailable to the other participants to the system. The software-s, the formats and supports used differ both inside the system and outside it. And because a patient is given a diagnosis without complete and safe medical data, the medical error is one of the causes for the incorrect diagnosis of the patient. The decision makers from the health system must take on responsibilities for the efficient and safe management of these data, to represent a desired issue for all medical institutions. Only the interconnected and standardized electronic medical files will be able to improve the medical decision and the care given to patients. The care will be safer, more efficient, the medical information will be also useful to other clinic physicians in time and space by using the informational and communicational technologies. The complete electronic medical record must include all types of information connected to the patient`s health (medical, family history, health file, hereditary-collateral antecedents, treatments, prescriptions, allergies) and they must be protected, shared by physicians, patients and those interested in a safe and extended environment. It is necessary to computerize the medical information specific to patient and the clinical processes, and performance in the health system will depend on the transformation of the medical services system by bringing the benefits of the medical science and technology to all individuals.critical; inefficient medical service; electronic medical record; medical information computerization, interconnected electronic medical files, medical error, health electronic file, clinical decision, protected and shared medical information, interoperability, standard.