24th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

In the last three decades information modelling and knowledge bases have become essentially important subjects not only in academic communities related to information systems and computer science but also in the business area where information technology is applied. The series of European – Japanese Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases (EJC) originally started as a co-operation initiative between Japan and Finland in 1982. The practical operations were then organised by professor Ohsuga in Japan and professors Hannu Kangassalo and Hannu Jaakkola in Finland (Nordic countries). Geographical scope has expanded to cover Europe and also other countries. Workshop characteristic - discussion, enough time for presentations and limited number of participants (50) / papers (30) - is typical for the conference. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: 1. Conceptual modelling: Modelling and specification languages; Domain-specific conceptual modelling; Concepts, concept theories and ontologies; Conceptual modelling of large and heterogeneous systems; Conceptual modelling of spatial, temporal and biological data; Methods for developing, validating and communicating conceptual models. 2. Knowledge and information modelling and discovery: Knowledge discovery, knowledge representation and knowledge management; Advanced data mining and analysis methods; Conceptions of knowledge and information; Modelling information requirements; Intelligent information systems; Information recognition and information modelling. 3. Linguistic modelling: Models of HCI; Information delivery to users; Intelligent informal querying; Linguistic foundation of information and knowledge; Fuzzy linguistic models; Philosophical and linguistic foundations of conceptual models. 4. Cross-cultural communication and social computing: Cross-cultural support systems; Integration, evolution and migration of systems; Collaborative societies; Multicultural web-based software systems; Intercultural collaboration and support systems; Social computing, behavioral modeling and prediction. 5. Environmental modelling and engineering: Environmental information systems (architecture); Spatial, temporal and observational information systems; Large-scale environmental systems; Collaborative knowledge base systems; Agent concepts and conceptualisation; Hazard prediction, prevention and steering systems. 6. Multimedia data modelling and systems: Modelling multimedia information and knowledge; Contentbased multimedia data management; Content-based multimedia retrieval; Privacy and context enhancing technologies; Semantics and pragmatics of multimedia data; Metadata for multimedia information systems. Overall we received 56 submissions. After careful evaluation, 16 papers have been selected as long paper, 17 papers as short papers, 5 papers as position papers, and 3 papers for presentation of perspective challenges. We thank all colleagues for their support of this issue of the EJC conference, especially the program committee, the organising committee, and the programme coordination team. The long and the short papers presented in the conference are revised after the conference and published in the Series of “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence” by IOS Press (Amsterdam). The books “Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases” are edited by the Editing Committee of the conference. We believe that the conference will be productive and fruitful in the advance of research and application of information modelling and knowledge bases. Bernhard Thalheim Hannu Jaakkola Yasushi Kiyok

Development of child's home environment indexes based on consistent families of aggregation operators with prioritized hierarchical information

Conferencia: EUROFUSE Workshop on Fuzzy Methods for Knowledge-Based Systems, UTAD Univ, CITAB Res Ctr, Regua, PORTUGAL, SEP 21-23, 2011The interventions aimed at the early childhood are of a main interest in educational policy, since it is in this period when it is possible to produce a major impact in the subsequent human development. The quality of children's social environment is the main influence to consider in achieving sound child development, affecting throughout school life. For this reason, the development of child's environment indexes appears in a natural way in the evaluation of all kind of educational policy research and social programs. However, crisp measures and indexes, based on usual linear techniques, do not ensure an adequate representation of social reality, since this last has a fuzzy nature and a nonlinear behavior. The development of indexes can be seen as an aggregation problem. In this paper, we extend the notions of consistency and strict stability of a family of aggregation operators (FAO), proposed in a previous work of the authors for the case of an aggregation process in which the data have no particular structure, to the case in which the information has a prioritized hierarchical structure. This extended notion of strict stability is then used to address the construction of indexes. Particularly, we apply this approach to develop a construction method of child's home environment indexes in which a stable family of prioritized aggregation operators is used in order to ensure robustness of the aggregation process when the information has a lineal structure. These indexes are built using fuzzy data that fit into a hierarchical structure by means of a stable family of prioritized aggregation operators based on the prioritized operator formulated by Yager, where the order relationship over fuzzy information was defined by experts on child development.Depto. de Estadística e Investigación OperativaFac. de Ciencias MatemáticasTRUEpu

On Shape and Being Shaped - Rethinking the Urban Built Environment as a Catalyst of Childhood Inactivity and Obesity

Childhood obesity, although a preventable condition, remains a major global public health concern. Despite tremendous efforts, researchers and policymakers have been unable to turn the tide on children’s weight gain. In recent years, Health Geographers have increasingly acknowledged the role of place in determining children’s levels of extracurricular physical activity, thereby influencing their body shapes. This recognition has not, however, led to a full understanding of the triad connecting the built environment to children’s physical activity and body composition. My dissertation therefore aimed to fill this gap by comprehensively uncovering the dynamics at work in this triad. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods research design was adopted, combining the strengths of quantitative spatial epidemiology and the qualitative exploration of children’s context-specific lifeworlds in London. The integration of findings obtained through these different research lenses showed that the built environment was severely implicated in determining the body composition of young citizens. This effect, however, was not direct, as out-of-school activity emerged as the crucial pivot mediating the built environmental-body composition relation. Through numbers and narratives, the myriad ways in which the environment, activity and body shape interacted were unveiled. First, I demonstrated the need to disentangle extracurricular physical activity and body mass metrics into their prime components. Having done so, I established that active school travel constitutes a primary pathway in tackling the overweight and obesity epidemic, due to its fat-mass-reducing effect and close associations with the built environment. Integration of quantitative and qualitative evidence showed how proximity to school, traffic safety, the provision of safe and well-maintained pavements and crossroads, and parental perceptions were crucially involved in this relationship. Having contributed to the translation of these findings into policy and practice through concrete policy recommendations, this research constitutes a bold step towards the creation of activity-inciting, leptogenic environments for children.ESRC DTP Scholarship; grant number: ES/J500033/1 Gonville & Caius College Cambridge, Gonville Scholarshi

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Towards an interactive management approach to performance improvement in bureaucratic organization

Bibliography: p. 213-220.Organization science is not a new discipline. However, it persistently attracts many researchers to explore new concepts for coping with the increasing complexity in our society. The exploration is in transition, from mechanistic doctrine to systemic and humanistic notions. The mechanistic view is still prevailing and playing a dominant role, but, owing to its increasing critics, appeals for renovation of mechanistic principle incessantly arise. The tendency induces diversified approaches for intervening in the situation of bureaucratic context. This research investigates the features of organization from three angles - on the one hand, the structure and process (functional) aspects, and on the other, the purposeful behaviour of humans. Many works see the three components as separate, and deal with them accordingly. However, we contend that the three aspects are interrelated and that they should be integrated. The integration suggests that multiple views of organization are adequate because it embodies the attributes of purposeful behaviour and functional characteristics. Problems within an organization can be seen as the mutual influence of these parts. They can mutually aggravate and impede the performance of an organization. On the one hand, we contend that bureaucratic organization is inadequate, owing to its fragility in functional components of processing information to adapt to environment change. On the other hand, its rigid essence causes an inability to deal with human dimension problems. The problematical elements present a systemic relation. In turn, we attempt to explore the essence of organization's complex problems. The exploration concludes that both complexity and problems are cognitive phenomena. The illustrations suggest that the unearthing of organization problems should be grounded in the 'interaction' and 'consensus' 'model interchanging' of stakeholders. Based on this idea, we propose an intervention framework for diagnosing pathological pattern within bureaucratic organization. The framework is applied to one of South Africa's biggest local governments (the City of Tygerberg). The research result shows that the most significant problem within the City of Tygerberg is in the information-processing subsystem- associator. Besides, the 'mental pathology' locates on the 'sink' stage of the structured problem model