Facilitating Knowledge Sharing and Analysis in EnergyInformatics with the Ontology for Energy Investigations (OEI)

Just as the other informatics-related domains (e.g., Bioinformatics) have discovered in recent years, the ever-growing domain of Energy Informatics (EI) can benefit from the use of ontologies, formalized, domain-specific taxonomies or vocabularies that are shared by a community of users. In this paper, an overview of the Ontology for Energy Investigations (OEI), an ontology that extends a subset of the well-conceived and heavily-researched Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), is provided as well as a motivating example demonstrating how the use of a formal ontology for the EI domain can facilitate correct and consistent knowledge sharing and the multi-level analysis of its data and scientific investigations

Reason and Experience in Buddhist Epistemology

Among the key factors that play a crucial role in the acquisition of knowledge, Buddhist philosophers list (i) the testimony of sense experience, (ii) introspective awareness (iii) inferences drawn from these directs modes of acquaintance, and (iv) some version of coherentism, so as guarantee that truth claims remains consistent across a diverse philosophical corpus. This paper argues that when Buddhists employ reason, they do so primarily in order to advance a range of empirical and introspective claims. As a result, reasoning, in particular inductive reasoning on the testimony of perception, is based on a theory of causation

Proceedings of the Inaugural Meeting ofAIS SIGPrag

The Special Interest Group on Pragmatist IS Research (SIGPrag) was approved by the Association for InformationSystems (AIS) council at its June 2008 meeting in Gallway. The motivation for this initiative is the growingrecognition of the importance of theorizing the IT artifact and its organizational and societal context from apragmatic and action-oriented perspective. SIGPrag\u27s mission is to provide a much-needed centre of gravity and tofacilitate exchange of ideas and further development of this area of IS scholarship.In summary, pragmatist IS research rests on the following set of assumptions: * Human life is a life of activity.* Humans do things that effect changes in their environment and/or within themselves.* Doing permeates thinking, conceptualizations and language use.* Human consciousness is a practical one that is in constant interplay with interventive, investigative, andevaluative actions.* Practical consciousness is formed by experience from previous actions and participation in social contexts.* IT and information systems are fundamentally symbolic language systems.* Linguistically expressed collective presuppositions, norms and categories (such as those embedded in ITand information systems) serve human activity and life.* The true value of IT and information systems lies in their potential to support human communication andcollaboration central to human activity and life.For more information about SIGPrag, its mission and current activities, please visit http://www.sigprag.org/The inaugural meeting of SIGPrag is to be held in Paris on Dec 14, 2008, in conjunction with the InternationalConference on Information Systems (ICIS). The meeting will consist of two parts, a scientific meeting and abusiness meeting. For the scientific meeting a call for position papers was issued in the summer of 2008, whichresulted in the following papers being selected for presentation:• What Kind of Pragmatism in Information Systems Research? by Göran Goldkuhl.• Pragmatic Approach in IS Projects Grounded on Recognised Frameworks by Raija Halonen.• Co-Design as Social Constructive Pragmatism by Mikael Lind, Ulf Seigerroth, Olov Forsgren, and AndersHjalmarsson.• Pragmatism and Information Systems (IS): Neurophilosophical approach by Garikoitz Lerma Usabiagaand Francesc Miralles.• Sustainability Communication: A role for IT and IS in relating business and Society by Mark Aakhus andPaul Ziek.• Managing Ambiguity while Reducing Uncertainty by Gianni Jacucci and Mike Martin.• A Pragmatic Conception of Service Encounters by Mikael Lind and Nicklas Salomonson.• Making the Web More Pragmatic: Exploring the Potential Of Some Pragmatic Concepts For IS ResearchAnd Development by Jens Allwood and Mikael Lind.• Introducing Human in Complex System: A Cognitive Pragmatics Based Model by G. Lortal.• The Pragmatic Web: An Application View by Mareike Schoop.• Design Research from a Communicative Perspective: How to Design Things with Words by Hans Weigand.• Representation and Correspondence: On the Validity of the Representation Assumption in InformationSystem Design by Pär J. Ågerfalk and Owen Eriksson.• Habermas’ theory in action by Jan L.G. Dietz.• Challenges to Information Systems Development by Roland Kaschek.The idea behind this inaugural meeting was to bring together people that share an affinity with pragmatist ISresearch and to initiate a scientific discussion about the role of pragmatist research in IS. We certainly hope that thisdiscussion will continue over the years to come. The papers are freely available for download athttp://www.sigprag.org

Understanding Legacy Workflows through Runtime Trace Analysis

abstract: When scientific software is written to specify processes, it takes the form of a workflow, and is often written in an ad-hoc manner in a dynamic programming language. There is a proliferation of legacy workflows implemented by non-expert programmers due to the accessibility of dynamic languages. Unfortunately, ad-hoc workflows lack a structured description as provided by specialized management systems, making ad-hoc workflow maintenance and reuse difficult, and motivating the need for analysis methods. The analysis of ad-hoc workflows using compiler techniques does not address dynamic languages - a program has so few constrains that its behavior cannot be predicted. In contrast, workflow provenance tracking has had success using run-time techniques to record data. The aim of this work is to develop a new analysis method for extracting workflow structure at run-time, thus avoiding issues with dynamics. The method captures the dataflow of an ad-hoc workflow through its execution and abstracts it with a process for simplifying repetition. An instrumentation system first processes the workflow to produce an instrumented version, capable of logging events, which is then executed on an input to produce a trace. The trace undergoes dataflow construction to produce a provenance graph. The dataflow is examined for equivalent regions, which are collected into a single unit. The workflow is thus characterized in terms of its treatment of an input. Unlike other methods, a run-time approach characterizes the workflow's actual behavior; including elements which static analysis cannot predict (for example, code dynamically evaluated based on input parameters). This also enables the characterization of dataflow through external tools. The contributions of this work are: a run-time method for recording a provenance graph from an ad-hoc Python workflow, and a method to analyze the structure of a workflow from provenance. Methods are implemented in Python and are demonstrated on real world Python workflows. These contributions enable users to derive graph structure from workflows. Empowered by a graphical view, users can better understand a legacy workflow. This makes the wealth of legacy ad-hoc workflows accessible, enabling workflow reuse instead of investing time and resources into creating a workflow.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Science 201

Measuring interoperability maturity in government networks

The purpose of this paper is to create a model that describes the development of interorganisational collaboration in government networks that apply eGovernment. Contrary to several models that describe eGovernment from a government-to-citizen perspective, and primarily emphasise on the front office of eGovernment services, this paper focuses on the collaboration that takes place in the back office to enable successful eGovernment services. A maturity model was developed to describe and assess the level of interorganisational collaboration in government networks that apply eGovernment. Through a structured literature review, 19 existing maturity models related to interorganisational collaboration and eGovernment were identified. These models were subsequently analysed on their dimensions and on the stages that were used to define maturity.Furthermore, the authors of this paper studied the characteristics of each stage and the preconditions for increasing maturity. Based on this literature review and their analysis, the authors propose a new maturity model in which existing concepts are integrated and extended from a network perspective. This model describes the levels of interorganisational collaboration in government networks on three dimensions: system, information and process. Five levels of increasing interconnectedness describe how the interorganisational collaboration in government networks unfolds across these three dimensions. The model is empirically applied through case studies of three government networks.Medium- to large-sized networks of municipalities and their cooperating partners that apply eGovernment services in their permit application procedure have been studied. The model appears to be suitable for assessing the development of interorganisational collaboration among government networks that implement eGovernment in their service provisioning. Further research could focus on the use of this model in order to analyse additional growth strategies, aiming to create successful roadmaps

MOVING BEYOND IS IDENTITY: CONCEPTS AND DISCOURSES

The ongoing debate about the identity of the Information Systems (IS) discipline is examined from a new perspective. Two recent studies are contrasted to demonstrate the limits of retrospective analysis for defining the field of IS. A new model for IS research, based on concepts and discourses is suggested. Latent Semantic Analysis is proposed as an approach to identifying concepts which form transdisciplinary discourses. Conceptual mapping across disciplines may elucidate fruitful areas of research and a transdisciplinary approach to research may improve research salience and intellectual contributions. Such an approach may also weaken or dissolve the discipline as an applied business/organizational field focused on the information technology artifact. This has the long term effect of maintaining intellectual plasticity and relevance, while expanding the range of intellectual contributions available to IS researchers. Moving beyond IS identity will require rethinking institutional structures upon which the identity of IS is currently dependent

Diachronic Variation of Temporal Expressions in Scientific Writing Through the Lens of Relative Entropy

The abundance of temporal information in documents has lead to an increased interest in processing such information in the NLP community by considering temporal expressions. Besides domain-adaptation, acquiring knowledge on variation of temporal expressions according to time is relevant for improvement in automatic processing. So far, frequency-based accounts dominate in the investigation of specific temporal expressions. We present an approach to investigate diachronic changes of temporal expressions based on relative entropy – with the advantage of using conditioned probabilities rather than mere frequency. While we focus on scientific writing, our approach is generalizable to other domains and interesting not only in the field of NLP, but also in humanities.This work is partially funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant SFB 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de)

Proceedings of the Fifth Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems: Professional Development Consortium

Collection of position statements of doctoral students and junior faculty in the Professional Development Consortium at the the Fifth Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, Tel Aviv - Yafo