Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed

Theorizing Audience and Spectatorial Agency

This chapter analyses Georgian audiences and spectatorial agency through several lenses: psychoanalytic film theory, theories of the public sphere and of mass publicity, and media studies of cultural convergence. The first section reads Georgian theatre’s heterogeneous playbills as a syntactical rendering of the audience, the imaginary community of the nation in process of negotiation. The second section shows theatrical paratexts blurring the boundary between theatre and coffee house, creating a theatrical public sphere in which the audience exercises daily public agency in saving or damning the play. The third section highlights the mingling of vulnerability and charisma in the celebrity prologue-speaker, a figure who both judges and entrances the audience while also embodying actors’ exposure to possible audience wrath. The final section looks at the theatres’ encouragement of spouting clubs as a means of channelling spectatorial agency

Framing the collaborative economy - Voices of contestation

Within the context of multiple crises and change, a range of practices discussed under the umbrella term of collaborative (or sharing) economy have been gaining considerable attention. Supporters build an idealistic vision of collaborative societies. Critics have been stripping the concept of its visionary potential, questioning its revolutionary nature. In the study, these debates are brought down to the local level in search for common perceptions among the co-creators of the concept in Vienna, Austria. Towards this aim a Q study is conducted, i.e. a mixed method enabling analyses of subjective perceptions on socially contested topics. Four framings are identified: Visionary Supporters, Market Optimists, Visionary Critics, and Skeptics, each bringing their values, visions, and practical goals characteristic of different understanding of the collaborative economy. The study questions the need for building a globally-applicable definition of the concept, calls for more context-sensitivity, exploratory studies, and city-level multi-stakeholder dialogues

(Re)Designing the Debate Tournament for Civic Life

The presence of public audiences in competitive contest rounds, a central feature of early intercollegiate debate practice, was largely eliminated during the ascent of the tournament model over the last century. However, audience participation in tournament designs has recently become a topic of conversation among those committed to transforming the activity in line with the emerging civic and public attitudes of higher education. Given the preliminary nature of this conversation, we currently lack robust models for and scholarly reflection about the role audiences might play within the calcified and secluded structures of tournament debating. Building on recent work in American intercollegiate debate scholarship and practice, this essay recovers a little noted multimodal adjudication system or MAS (i.e., the use of multiple judging styles simultaneously) implemented at Stanford University on April 2, 1925 as an historical design resource for visualizing the role of audiences in debate competitions. Recovering this system provides a context to employ an historical antecedent as a small-scale case study to inform one approach to tournament redesign in the present. In addition, this essay reflects on numerous advantages of translating the Stanford system into contemporary tournament designs, especially: (1) the value of revisiting historical practices to rediscover pedagogical and competitive elements that have been forgotten over time; (2) the importance of acknowledging critical differences between the activity’s past and present; and, (3) implementing experimental tournament designs that generate novel features of interest for debate, argumentation, and rhetorical scholars

The Differential Impact of User Heterogeneity in Resource Management : A Case Study from Kerala

This paper analyses the heterogeneous users decision to participate in comanagement, which is an institutional alternative proposed in the wake of state's failure in managing the Cochin estuarine fisheries in Kerala, India. Since a collective action under co-management require not only user's active participation in terms of their labor but also involve various types of organizational and managerial costs, the users were given the following choices on co-operation. Firstly, the users had the choice to contribute their labor in conservation activities, which would ensure sustainability of the fisheries. Secondly, they could make a voluntary contribution towards meeting the organizational costs of collective action. Thirdly, they could contribute in terms of labor as well as in monetary terms. Finally, they had the choice not to participate at all. Keeping in view the problems of free rider and adoption of stratagic behaviour by users some incentives were given for each of the above ways of co-operation. A multinomial logit analysis of the decision of about 369 sample fishermen to participate in co-management as defined above shows the differential impact of user heterogeneity in resource management. While heterogeneity in terms of the present legal status of the users motivate them for contributing their labor even in the absence of any additional economic incentives, heterogeneity in economic status and membership in formal organizations matters when it comes to making monetary payments. In addition to these, the overall optimism of the users' motivates them to both physically engage in conservation activities as well as make monetary payments. Adoption of strategic behaviors by at least some users cannot, however, be ruled out. On the whole it is seen that the heterogeneous fishermen's decision to participate depend upon their anticipation of the distribution of benefits from cooperation. However, one must be cautious that those who anticipate disproportionate benefit from co-operation are likely to take a lead role. Therefore, care must be taken to prevent them from deciding the rules of the game in such a manner that they are disproportionately in their favorfisheries co-management, user heterogeneity, collective action

Social Justice as an Essentially Contested Concept: Theoretical and Practical Implications for “Access to Justice”

In the current hyper-partisan environment, it is tempting to treat those who disagree on social, political, and even legal issues with disdain—as willfully ignorant or irrational or profoundly mistaken or even evil. This is surely true with respect to debates on issues regarding access to justice. Besides courtesy, there is an important philosophical reason for avoiding this attitude and treating opponents in our arguments about access to justice with respect: W.B. Gallie’s idea of “essentially contested concepts,” which, as Gallie describes it, includes social justice. My goal in this essay is to illustrate how understanding social justice as an essentially contested concept helps us see more clearly what is at stake when we debate issues pertaining to access to justice

Social Justice as an Essentially Contested Concept: Theoretical and Practical Implications for “Access to Justice”

In the current hyper-partisan environment, it is tempting to treat those who disagree on social, political, and even legal issues with disdain—as willfully ignorant or irrational or profoundly mistaken or even evil. This is surely true with respect to debates on issues regarding access to justice. Besides courtesy, there is an important philosophical reason for avoiding this attitude and treating opponents in our arguments about access to justice with respect: W.B. Gallie’s idea of “essentially contested concepts,” which, as Gallie describes it, includes social justice. My goal in this essay is to illustrate how understanding social justice as an essentially contested concept helps us see more clearly what is at stake when we debate issues pertaining to access to justice