An ontology supporting planning, analysis, and simulation of evolving Digital Ecosystems

This paper introduces the PERICLES model-driven approach for the long-term preservation of digital objects in evolving ecosystems. It describes the Digital Ecosystem Model (DEM), an ontology to model those complex digital entities (DEs) and the EcoBuilder tool to support scenario experts in modelling aspects of interests of their DEs with the DEM for further investigation and maintenance

PERICLES Deliverable 4.3:Content Semantics and Use Context Analysis Techniques

The current deliverable summarises the work conducted within task T4.3 of WP4, focusing on the extraction and the subsequent analysis of semantic information from digital content, which is imperative for its preservability. More specifically, the deliverable defines content semantic information from a visual and textual perspective, explains how this information can be exploited in long-term digital preservation and proposes novel approaches for extracting this information in a scalable manner. Additionally, the deliverable discusses novel techniques for retrieving and analysing the context of use of digital objects. Although this topic has not been extensively studied by existing literature, we believe use context is vital in augmenting the semantic information and maintaining the usability and preservability of the digital objects, as well as their ability to be accurately interpreted as initially intended.PERICLE

Extracting Non-Functional Requirements from Unstructured Text

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) of a software system describe desired quality attributes rather than specific user-visible features; NFRs model stakeholder expectations about pervasive system properties such as performance, security, reliability, and usability. Failing to meet these expectations can result in systems that, while functionally complete, may lead to user dissatisfaction and ultimately to the failure of the product. While NFRs may be documented, tracked, and evaluated in a variety of ways during development, there is no single common approach to doing so. In this work, we investigate extracting information about NFRs that may be contained in source code and source code comments, since they are often considered to be the ultimate source of ground truth about a software system. Specifically, we examine how often NFRs are mentioned explicitly or implicitly in source code comments by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and we evaluate how effectively they can be identified using machine learning (ML). We modeled the problem as a text classification problem in which the goal is to identify comments about NFRs, and we evaluated the classifiers using example systems from the electronic health records (EHR) domain. The best performance was achieved using SVM classifier, with an F1 measure of 0.86. Our results indicate that using supervised method for our problem outperforms unsupervised methods which try to find common NFR patterns in comments. Comparing our results to previous studies shows that NFRs can be extracted more accurately from source code comments compared to other software artifacts (e.g., SRS or RFP documents). Moreover, we found that bag-of-words features are more effective compared to more complicated features (i.e., doc2vec) for the problem of extracting NFRs from source code comments

Civic Care: The Value of Disagreement as Care in Plato's Gorgias

Democratic theorists like Rawls and Habermas identify pervasive disagreements as "facts" of pluralistic political life. Along with other social contract theorists, they propose strategies for mitigating or altogether avoiding especially recalcitrant disagreements. In contrast, critical and agonistic theorists like Chantal Mouffe, Iris Marion Young, and Amy Gutmann suggest that disagreements are not only pervasive but desirable for democratic politics. These criticisms suffer from their own shortcomings, some of which are addressed in this paper. Specifically, the paper explicates the value of disagreement within a democratic context, proposing that a disagreement's worth should be measured by its reasonableness rather than its termination in agreement between adversarial interlocutors. Plato's Gorgias illustrates such worthwhile disagreement. The dialogue suggests ways for interlocutors to approach and sustain disagreement while articulating Socrates' conception of disagreement as a form of civic care. By sustaining reasoned disagreements, citizens thus care for and about democracy and each otherMaster of Art

Res Antiquitatis. Journal of Ancient History

FC

Election by Lot and the Democratic Diarchy

This thesis argues that ‘democracy’ can better be understood in terms of a conceptual diarchy of ‘isonomia’ (equal political rights) and ‘isegoria’ (equal speech rights), rather than the conventional diarchy of ‘will’ and ‘opinion’ that originated in the era of absolute monarchy. As the proposed diarchy has its origin in classical Greece, the thesis starts with a brief overview of the institutional changes in sixth-, fifth- and fourth-century Athenian democracy that implemented the distinction in different ways, and examines some of its dysfunctions. The particular aspect of Athenian democracy under focus is sortition – the random selection of citizens for public office – viewed in antiquity as democratic, whereas election was viewed as an aristocratic or oligarchic selection mechanism. The thesis takes issue with Bernard Manin’s claim that the ‘triumph of election’ was on account of the natural right theory of consent, arguing that sortition-based proxy representation is a better way of indicating (hypothetical) consent than preference election. The thesis then seeks to clarify the concept(s) of representation – essential to the implementation of the democratic diarchy in modern large-scale societies – and to study how the diarchy has been reincarnated in modern representative democracies, along with an examination of the pathologies thereof. Consideration is given as to what the deliberative style of assemblies selected by lot should be, alongside evaluation of the epistemic potential of cognitive diversity and the ‘wisdom of crowds’. Given the need for both isonomia and isegoria to assume a representative form in large modern states, Michael Saward’s Representative Claim is adopted as a theoretical model to extend the reach of political representation beyond elections. The thesis concludes with tentative proposals as to how the fourth-century reforms (delegation of the final lawmaking decision to randomly-selected nomothetic courts) might be used as a template for modern institutions to resolve some of the problems of mass democracy