25,954 research outputs found

    WikiRate.org - leveraging collective awareness to understand companies' environmental, social and governance performance

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    Abstract. WikiRate is a Collective Awareness Platform for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPS) project with the aim of \crowdsourcing better companies" through analysis of their Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) performance. Research to inform the design of the platform involved surveying the current corporate ESG information landscape, and identifying ways in which an open approach and peer production ethos could be e ffectively mobilised to improve this landscape's fertility. The key requirement identi ed is for an open public repository of data tracking companies' ESG performance. Corporate Social Responsibility reporting is conducted in public, but there are barriers to accessing the information in a standardised analysable format. Analyses of and ratings built upon this data can exert power over companies' behaviour in certain circumstances, but the public at large have no access to the data or the most infuential ratings that utilise it. WikiRate aims to build an open repository for this data along with tools for analysis, to increase public demand for the data, allow a broader range of stakeholders to participate in its interpretation, and in turn drive companies to behave in a more ethical manner. This paper describes the quantitative Metrics system that has been designed to meet those objectives and some early examples of its use

    Urban Farming in Inner-City Multi-Storey Car-Parking Structures: Adaptive Reuse Potential

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    The future direction of transport and new global concepts of low-carbon mobility are likely to increase the number of obsolete inner-city multi-storey car-parking structures. The adaptive reuse of these garages is challenged through the continuity of urban change and the need for new mixed-use typologies. The development of technologically advanced farming in these structures could become an innovative strategy that as an interim solution justifies renovation versus demolition and new construction. The paper presents findings from the first stage of the multiple-site case study research on car-parking structures strategically selected in 3 UK cities (Portsmouth, Bristol and Brighton). In order to develop a better understanding of the conditions that enable the implementation of urban hydroponic farming in selected structures planning and technical limitations and opportunities have been identified through the analysis of policies, exploration of layouts using Revit software, field observation and photography. The analysis demonstrated that there is a range of possible uses that may be developed in the process of up-cycling of inner-city car-parking structures, of which one might be hydroponics. Looking at three multi-storey garages has shown that these have similar problems for adaptive reuse, which can be overcome with appropriate architectural strategies. Converting these structures for farming could support addressing social, environmental and economic problems. However, the proposed development requires innovations in planning documents. Further analysis needs to be conducted to assess whether the amount of food that could be produced in such a structure is efficient and comparable with other means of achieving it

    Knowledge web: realising the semantic web... all the way to knowledge-enhanced multimedia documents

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    The semantic web and semantic web services are major efforts in order to spread and to integrate knowledge technology to the whole web. The Knowledge Web network of excellence aims at supporting their developments at the best and largest European level and supporting industry in adopting them. It especially investigates the solution of scalability, heterogeneity and dynamics obstacles to the full development of the semantic web. We explain how Knowledge Web results should benefit knowledge-enhanced multimedia applications

    Digging by Debating: Linking massive datasets to specific arguments

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    We will develop and implement a multi-scale workbench, called "InterDebates", with the goal of digging into data provided by hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, of digitized books, bibliographic databases of journal articles, and comprehensive reference works written by experts. Our hypotheses are: that detailed and identifiable arguments drive many aspects of research in the sciences and the humanities; that argumentative structures can be extracted from large datasets using a mixture of automated and social computing techniques; and, that the availability of such analyses will enable innovative interdisciplinary research, and may also play a role in supporting better-informed critical debates among students and the general public. A key challenge tackled by this project is thus to uncover and represent the argumentative structure of digitized documents, allowing users to find and interpret detailed arguments in the broad semantic landscape of books and articles

    Revisiting the archival finding aid

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    Archivists have been creating finding aids for generations, and in the last three decades they have done this work via a succession of standardized formats. However, like many other disciplines, they have carried out such work in violation of systems analysis. Although purporting to have the users of finding aids systems first and foremost in their mind, archivists have carried out their descriptive work apart from and with little knowledge of how researchers find and use archival sources. In this article, questions are raised about the utility of archival finding aids and how they will stand the test of time. Indeed, archivists, purportedly concerned with considering how records function and will be used over time, ought to apply the same kind of analysis and thinking to their finding aids. In this article, we explore three ways archival finding aids might be examined by outsiders, namely, those concerned with museum exhibitions, design experts, and accountability advocates. Doing this should assist archivists to reevaluate their next wave of experimentation with descriptive standards and the construction of finding aids. Archivists should expand the notion of what we are representing in archival representation. © 2007 by The Haworth Press

    Is Stack Overflow Overflowing With Questions and Tags

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    Programming question and answer (Q & A) websites, such as Quora, Stack Overflow, and Yahoo! Answer etc. helps us to understand the programming concepts easily and quickly in a way that has been tested and applied by many software developers. Stack Overflow is one of the most frequently used programming Q\&A website where the questions and answers posted are presently analyzed manually, which requires a huge amount of time and resource. To save the effort, we present a topic modeling based technique to analyze the words of the original texts to discover the themes that run through them. We also propose a method to automate the process of reviewing the quality of questions on Stack Overflow dataset in order to avoid ballooning the stack overflow with insignificant questions. The proposed method also recommends the appropriate tags for the new post, which averts the creation of unnecessary tags on Stack Overflow.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables Presented at Third International Symposium on Women in Computing and Informatics (WCI-2015

    Spartan Daily February 10, 2010

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    Volume 134, Issue 8https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1224/thumbnail.jp
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