14,275 research outputs found

    To Greener Pastures: An Action Research Study on the Environmental Sustainability of Humanitarian Supply Chains

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    Purpose: While humanitarian supply chains (HSCs) inherently contribute to social sustainability by alleviating the suffering of afflicted communities, their unintended adverse environmental impact has been overlooked hitherto. This paper draws upon contingency theory to synthesize green practices for HSCs, identify the contingency factors that impact on greening HSCs and explore how focal humanitarian organizations (HOs) can cope with such contingency factors. Design/methodology/approach: Deploying an action research methodology, two-and-a-half cycles of collaboration between researchers and a United Nations agency were completed. The first half-cycle developed a deductive greening framework, synthesizing extant green practices from the literature. In the second and third cycles, green practices were adopted/customized/developed reflecting organizational and contextual contingency factors. Action steps were implemented in the HSC for prophylactics, involving an operational mix of disaster relief and development programs. Findings: First, the study presents a greening framework that synthesizes extant green practices in a suitable form for HOs. Second, it identifies the contingency factors associated with greening HSCs regarding funding environment, stakeholders, field of activity and organizational management. Third, it outlines the mechanisms for coping with the contingency factors identified, inter alia, improving the visibility of headquarters over field operations, promoting collaboration and resource sharing with other HOs as well as among different implementing partners in each country, and working with suppliers for greener packaging. The study advances a set of actionable propositions for greening HSCs. Practical implications: Using an action research methodology, the study makes strong practical contributions. Humanitarian practitioners can adopt the greening framework and the lessons learnt from the implementation cycles presented in this study. Originality/value: This is one of the first empirical studies to integrate environmental sustainability and HSCs using an action research methodology

    A semantic ontology for disaster trail management system

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    Disasters, whether natural or human-made, leave a lasting impact on human lives and require mitigation measures. In the past, millions of human beings lost their lives and properties in disasters. Information and Communication Technology provides many solutions. The issue of so far developed disaster management systems is their inefficiency in semantics that causes failure in producing dynamic inferences. Here comes the role of semantic web technology that helps to retrieve useful information. Semantic web-based intelligent and self-administered framework utilizes XML, RDF, and ontologies for a semantic presentation of data. The ontology establishes fundamental rules for data searching from the unstructured world, i.e., the World Wide Web. Afterward, these rules are utilized for data extraction and reasoning purposes. Many disaster-related ontologies have been studied; however, none conceptualizes the domain comprehensively. Some of the domain ontologies intend for the precise end goal like the disaster plans. Others have been developed for the emergency operation center or the recognition and characterization of the objects in a calamity scene. A few ontologies depend on upper ontologies that are excessively abstract and are exceptionally difficult to grasp by the individuals who are not conversant with theories of the upper ontologies. The present developed semantic web-based disaster trail management ontology almost covers all vital facets of disasters like disaster type, disaster location, disaster time, misfortunes including the causalities and the infrastructure loss, services, service providers, relief items, and so forth. The objectives of this research were to identify the requirements of a disaster ontology, to construct the ontology, and to evaluate the ontology developed for Disaster Trail Management. The ontology was assessed efficaciously via competency questions; externally by the domain experts and internally with the help of SPARQL queries

    Proceedings of the 2nd Computer Science Student Workshop: Microsoft Istanbul, Turkey, April 9, 2011

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    Challenges in Complex Systems Science

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    FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT. The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having: many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities; interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics; combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context, science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT agenda
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