ICT Adoption and Organizational Change. An Innovative Training System on Industrial Automation Systems for enhancing competitiveness of SMEs

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and discuss the benefits of on-line training on automation and innovation fields and try to explain their organizational impact on small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). Besides it tries to understand what are the main barriers for SMEs with respect to the realisation of their innovative potential and their capacity to improve internal processes by ICT adoption and organizational change. They are becoming particularly important for achieving greater productivity, lower operational costs, and higher revenues (usually characterized by reduced access to external finance, unavailability of wider distribution channels, low internationalization, etc.). The purpose of the paper is also to synthetize the experience done and the benefits of e-learning and of a specific online environment in the training process in this field. The project provides training contents to enhance participants background and some innovative simulations to improve knowledge of employees on industrial automation systems.The purpose of this paper is to introduce and discuss the benefits of on-line training on automation and innovation fields and try to explain their organizational impact on small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). Besides it tries to understand what are the main barriers for SMEs with respect to the realisation of their innovative potential and their capacity to improve internal processes by ICT adoption and organizational change. They are becoming particularly important for achieving greater productivity, lower operational costs, and higher revenues (usually characterized by reduced access to external finance, unavailability of wider distribution channels, low internationalization, etc.). The purpose of the paper is also to synthetize the experience done and the benefits of e-learning and of a specific online environment in the training process in this field. The project provides training contents to enhance participants background and some innovative simulations to improve knowledge of employees on industrial automation systems.Invited Submission

Structuring Guidelines for Web Application Designers - A Meta-model

International audienc

Expert System for Crop Disease based on Graph Pattern Matching: A proposal

Para la agroindustria, las enfermedades en cultivos constituyen uno de los problemas más frecuentes que generan grandes pérdidas económicas y baja calidad en la producción. Por otro lado, desde las ciencias de la computación, han surgido diferentes herramientas cuya finalidad es mejorar la prevención y el tratamiento de estas enfermedades. En este sentido, investigaciones recientes proponen el desarrollo de sistemas expertos para resolver este problema haciendo uso de técnicas de minería de datos e inteligencia artificial, como inferencia basada en reglas, árboles de decisión, redes bayesianas, entre otras. Además, los grafos pueden ser usados para el almacenamiento de los diferentes tipos de variables que se encuentran presentes en un ambiente de cultivos, permitiendo la aplicación de técnicas de minería de datos en grafos, como el emparejamiento de patrones en los mismos. En este artículo presentamos una visión general de las temáticas mencionadas y una propuesta de un sistema experto para enfermedades en cultivos, basado en emparejamiento de patrones en grafos.For agroindustry, crop diseases constitute one of the most common problems that generate large economic losses and low production quality. On the other hand, from computer science, several tools have emerged in order to improve the prevention and treatment of these diseases. In this sense, recent research proposes the development of expert systems to solve this problem, making use of data mining and artificial intelligence techniques like rule-based inference, decision trees, Bayesian network, among others. Furthermore, graphs can be used for storage of different types of variables that are present in an environment of crops, allowing the application of graph data mining techniques like graph pattern matching. Therefore, in this paper we present an overview of the above issues and a proposal of an expert system for crop disease based on graph pattern matching

MapperMania: A Framework for Native Multi-Tenancy Business Object Mapping to a Persistent Data Source

The Software-as-a-Service delivery model bears new challenges for application developers. Especially in the context of enterprise resource planning software targeting the SME market, new problems arise. Most of them agglomerate around the occurrence of multi-tenancy. This paper describes the framework MapperMania which aims to establish an abstraction layer between the persistence layer and the domain model. Leveraging MapperMania, the domain model is able to abstract from multi-tenancy and changes in the underlying infrastructure

Explicitating semantics in Enterprise Information Systems Models

140 pages Report for the Post-Doctorate diploma of the Université Henri Poincaré Supervisors: Hervé Panetto and Alexis AubryInteroperability can be defined as the ability of two or more systems to share, to understand and to consume information (IEEE, 1990). The work (Chen et al., 2006) in the INTEROP NoE project has identified three different levels of barriers for interoperability: technical, conceptual and organisational. Our research focuses on the conceptual level of interoperability, namely the ability to understand the exchanged information. Information may be defined as data linked to knowledge about this data. This research memory will show the results obtained during the Post Doc study referring to the published works. It deals with a first phase from our general research work that focuses on the study of the semantic loss that appears in the exchange of information about business concepts. In order to quantify the semantic gap between interoperating ISs, their semantics needs to be enacted and structured by enriching, normalising and analysing their conceptual models. We propose a conceptualisation approach for explicitation of the finest-grained semantics, embedded into conceptual models in order to facilitate the semantic matching between two different information systems that have to interoperate. The structure of the document represents the different steps and the research domain on which the study focused

Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science

This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities

The impact of technology on small, micro and medium scale enterprises in Gauteng South Africa

Small, Micro and Medium Enterprises play a key role in South Africa’s economy especially in relation to Gross Domestic Product, unemployment as well as poverty eradication. In order to be able to compete globally and to effectively improve their productivity the SMMEs needs to utilize both existing and new technology in their Operations. This study investigates the impact of technological factors affecting productivity in SMMEs. The data used was collected by administering questionnaires to businesses within Gauteng Province selected through probability random sampling method. The data analysis was mainly through descriptive statistics where the results indicated that technological factors have significant impact on SMMEs especially during their early stages of establishment. Recommendation on better usage of Technology to improve productivity in Small, Micro and Medium Enterprises were suggested

Modelling a network of heterogeneous e-learning systems

In recent years emerged several initiatives promoted by educational organizations to adapt Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) to e-learning. These initiatives commonly named eLearning Frameworks share a common goal: to create flexible learning environments by integrating heterogeneous systems already available in many educational institutions. However, these frameworks were designed for integration of systems participating in business like processes rather than on complex pedagogical processes as those related to automatic evaluation. Consequently, their knowledge bases lack some fundamental components that are needed to model pedagogical processes. The objective of the research described in this paper is to study the applicability of eLearning frameworks for modelling a network of heterogeneous eLearning systems, using the automatic evaluation of programming exercises as a case study. The paper surveys the existing eLearning frameworks to justify the selection of the e-Framework. This framework is described in detail and identified the necessary components missing from its knowledge base, more precisely, a service genre, expression and usage model for an evaluation service. The extensibility of the framework is tested with the definition of this service. A concrete model for evaluation of programming exercises is presented as a validation of the proposed approach