Delay causes analysis in complex construction projects; a Semantic Network Analysis approach

Delays are among the most crucial adversaries to the success and performance of construction projects, making delay analysis and management a critical task for project managers. This task will be highly complicated in large-scale projects such as construction, which usually consist of a complex network of heterogeneous entities in continuous interaction. Traditional approaches and methods for the analysis of delays and their causes have been criticised for their ability to handle complex projects, and for considering the interrelationships between delay causes. Addressing this gap, this research introduces an alternative approach for delay causes analysis by adopting Semantic Network Analysis (SNA) method. The paper reports the results from an investigation of delays in construction projects in the Oil-Gas-Petrochemical sector using SNA. The method’s capacity to identify and rank delay causes, which can assist managers in selecting appropriate measures for eliminating them, are empirically examined and discussed. The paper argues that SNA leads to a more comprehensive understanding of the main causes of delay in large and complex projects, allowing a better identification and mapping of the interrelationships between these discrete factors

Construcción Participativa de Alternativas para la Gobernanza Ambiental en la Interacción Entre la Institución Educativa Nuestra Señora de la Macarena Sede Juan León - Vereda Brisas del Guayabero y el Parque Nacional Natural Tinigua

82 hojasLa declaración y manejo de áreas protegidas en el país se genera mediante normas e instrumentos legales que delimitan territorios de acuerdo a criterios biofísicos en pro de la preservación de zonas de alta importancia para la conservación y restauración ambiental. Sin embargo, con frecuencia la declaración de estas áreas se realiza sin considerar factores sociales y la complejidad de los conflictos socioambientales que se pueden generar. Se trata de una situación en la que se establecen mecanismos de protección ambiental, obviando la presencia y por tanto las interacciones, dinámicas y necesidades de las comunidades que habitan el territorio (Díaz, 2008). Ante este escenario, es común que las comunidades que han habitado tradicionalmente los territorios destinados para la conservación sean desplazadas de forma forzada o voluntaria, fracturando el tejido social y exacerbando sus condiciones de pobreza y vulnerabilidad. El desplazamiento voluntario es una cuestión compleja, pues resulta más práctico y económico que los procesos de reubicación, que implican el cumplimiento de requisitos mínimos de acceso a bienes y servicios básicos (Schmidt-Soltau & Kai, 2000); adicionalmente, pese a que este tipo de traslado se puede generar mediante procesos de concienciación con las comunidades, puede ser logrado también a través de la restricción de condiciones básicas para el bienestar, como la educación, la salud, la seguridad y un soporte económico.MaestríaMaestrias en Gestión Ambiental Sostenibl

Efficient Semantic Network Construction with Application to PubMed Search

Exploring PubMed to find relevant information is challenging and time-consuming because PubMed typically returns a long list of articles as a result of query. Semantic network helps users to explore a large document collection and to capture key concepts and relationships among the concepts. The semantic network also serves to broaden the user's knowledge and extend query keyword by detecting and visualizing new related concepts or relations hidden in the retrieved documents. The problem of existing semantic network techniques is that they typically produce many redundant relationships, which prevents users from quickly capturing the underlying relationships among concepts. This paper develops an online PubMed search system, which displays semantic networks having no redundant relationships in real-time as a result of query. To do so, we propose an efficient semantic network construction algorithm, which prevents producing redundant relationships during the network construction. Our extensive experiments on actual PubMed data show that the proposed method (COMPACT) is significantly faster than the method removing redundant relationships afterward. Our method is implemented and integrated into a relevance-feedback PubMed search engine, called RefMed, "http://dm.postech.ac.kr/refmed". (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.X1157sciescopu