Bridging the theory and practise gap in emergency services research: the case for a new journal

Purpose - The paper aims to provide the rationale underpinning this new journal in addressing the apparent gap and fragmented nature of the emergency services research, to introduce the papers in this inaugural issue and encourage readers and potential contributors to support the International Journal of Emergency Services (IJES). Design/methodology/approach - The paper introduces the new journal to outline the current "silos approach" which isolates the academic and practitioner community. It also outlines the editorial intentions for the journal linking to the theme and selected papers for the inaugural issue and future direction of travel. Findings- Emergency function resides with a host of agencies including the three "blue light" services (police fire and ambulance). IJES is an opportunity to publish up-to-date and original research contributions for the benefit of scholars, policy makers and practitioners in these areas, including the interface happening at national, regional and global level. Originality/value - Articulating the IJES vision in addressing the apparent gaps in the emergency services research including the theory-practise divide, the paper provides useful knowledge to potential readers who are interested but may have insufficient knowledge in the emergency services research. It also highlights some potential areas for research

Introduction to the Special Issue: The AgentLink III Technical Forums

This article introduces the special issue of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems devoted to research papers arising from the three Technical Forum Group meetings held in 2004 and 2005 that were organized and sponsored by the European FP6 Coordination Action AgentLink III

Back to practice, a decade of research in E-government

E-government is a multidisciplinary field of research based initially on empirical insights from practice. Efforts to theoretically found the field have opened perspectives from multiple research domains. The goal of this chapter is to review evolution of the e-government field from an institutional and an academic point of view. Our position is that e-government is an emergent multidisciplinary field of research in which focus on practice is a prominent characteristic. Each chapter of the book is then briefly presented and is positioned according to a vision of the e-government domain of research.E-government, Case study, E-administration, Public domain

RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) project: final report

RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) was a 18-month partnership between UCL (University College London), Imperial College London, and the Universities Glasgow, Cambridge and Cornell. The project was funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK). The project team worked with the Astrophysics community investigate aspects of overlay journals. For the purposes of the project, an overlay was defined as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides more open access repositories. The project had both technical aims and supporting, non-technical aims. The primary technical deliverable from the project was a toolkit for the creation and maintenance overlay journals. The toolkit supports the exchange of data between a repository and piece of journal software. It supports functions such as author validation, metadata extraction from the source repository, and submission tracking. The toolkit is platform-neutral and could, in theory, be employed by any journal using content from any number repositories, in any discipline. The project also implemented a demonstrator overlay applying the RIOJA toolkit to the arXiv subject repository, and a demonstrator implementation of the RIOJA tool for GNU EPrints. Aside from creating the demonstrator and its underlying tools, the project aimed to acceptibility and feasibility of the overlay model. First, a large-scale survey of the Astrophysics community was undertaken. The survey collected data about research publishing practices within this community, and probed its reaction to the principle publishing. Second, the views of editors and publishers in this discipline were sought through interviews. These views were added to findings from the literature and summarised in a more general report on issues around the sustainability of an overlay journal

Libraries and Information Systems Need XML/RDF... but Do They Know It?

This article presents an approach to the uses of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and Semantic Web technologies in the field of information services, focusing mainly on the creation and management of digital libraries compared to traditional libraries, while paying special attention to the concept and application of metadata, and RDF based integration

The global graduate: developing the global careers service

Graduate employability is an international issue. Students seek a higher education experience with added value in terms of employability and an international perspective. How do careers services meet the expectations that accompany these aspirations? The University of Nottingham, an established global university with campuses in Malaysia and China, attracts students from across the world. These students have diverse and culturally-specific career development needs, requiring skilled practitioners with knowledge of the global graduate opportunity structure. This article explores ways in which the Careers and Employability Services are being developed to meet a global market through support for staff and internationalised employer engagement

Enhancing Simulation Composability and Interoperability Using Conceptual/Semantic/Ontological Models

(First paragraph) Two emerging trends in Modeling and Simulation (M&S) are beginning to dovetail in a potentially highly productive manner, namely conceptual modeling and semantic modeling. Conceptual modeling has existed for several decades, but its importance has risen to the forefront in the last decade (Taylor and Robinson, 2006; Robinson, 2007). Also, during the last decade, progress on the Semantic Web has begun to influence M&S, with the development of general modeling ontologies (Miller et al, 2004), as well as ontologies for modeling particular domains (Durak, 2006). An ontology, which is a formal specification of a conceptualization (Gruber et al, 1993), can be used to rigorously define a domain of discourse in terms of classes/concepts, properties/relationships and instances/individuals. For the Semantic Web, ontologies are typically specified using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Although, conceptual modeling is broader than just semantics (it includes additional issues such as pragmatics (Tolk et al, 2008)), progress in the Semantic Web and ontologies is certainly beneficial to conceptual modeling. Benefits are accrued in many ways including the large knowledge bases being placed on the Web in numerous fields in which simulation studies are conducted and the powerful reasoning algorithms based on description logic being developed that allow the consistency of large specifications to be checked