Large High Resolution Displays for Co-Located Collaborative Intelligence Analysis

Large, high-resolution vertical displays carry the potential to increase the accuracy of collaborative sensemaking, given correctly designed visual analytics tools. From an exploratory user study using a fictional intelligence analysis task, we investigated how users interact with the display to construct spatial schemas and externalize information, as well as how they establish shared and private territories. We investigated the spatial strategies of users partitioned by tool type used (document- or entity-centric). We classified the types of territorial behavior exhibited in terms of how the users interacted with the display (integrated or independent workspaces). Next, we examined how territorial behavior impacted the common ground between the pairs of users. Finally, we recommend design guidelines for building co-located collaborative visual analytics tools specifically for use on large, high-resolution vertical displays

Space for Two to Think: Large, High-Resolution Displays for Co-located Collaborative Sensemaking

Large, high-resolution displays carry the potential to enhance single display groupware collaborative sensemaking for intelligence analysis tasks by providing space for common ground to develop, but it is up to the visual analytics tools to utilize this space effectively. In an exploratory study, we compared two tools (Jigsaw and a document viewer), which were adapted to support multiple input devices, to observe how the large display space was used in establishing and maintaining common ground during an intelligence analysis scenario using 50 textual documents. We discuss the spatial strategies employed by the pairs of participants, which were largely dependent on tool type (data-centric or function-centric), as well as how different visual analytics tools used collaboratively on large, high-resolution displays impact common ground in both process and solution. Using these findings, we suggest design considerations to enable future co-located collaborative sensemaking tools to take advantage of the benefits of collaborating on large, high-resolution displays

Computer-based library or computer-based learning?

Traditionally, libraries have played the role of repository of published information resources and, more recently, gateway to online subscription databases. The library online catalog and digital library interface serve an intermediary function to help users locate information resources available through the library. With competition from Web search engines and Web portals of various kinds available for free, the library has to step up to play a more active role as guide and coach to help users make use of information resources for learning or to accomplish particular tasks. It is no longer sufficient for computer-based library systems to provide just search and access functions. They must provide the functionality and environment to support learning and become computer-based learning systems. This paper examines the kind of learning support that can be incorporated in library online catalogs and digital libraries, including 1) enhanced support for information browsing and synthesis through linking by shared meta-data, references and concepts; 2) visualization of related information; 3) adoption of Library 2.0 and social technologies; 4) adoption of Library 3.0 technologies including intelligent processing and text mining

Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

Hypotheses, evidence and relationships: The HypER approach for representing scientific knowledge claims

Biological knowledge is increasingly represented as a collection of (entity-relationship-entity) triplets. These are queried, mined, appended to papers, and published. However, this representation ignores the argumentation contained within a paper and the relationships between hypotheses, claims and evidence put forth in the article. In this paper, we propose an alternate view of the research article as a network of 'hypotheses and evidence'. Our knowledge representation focuses on scientific discourse as a rhetorical activity, which leads to a different direction in the development of tools and processes for modeling this discourse. We propose to extract knowledge from the article to allow the construction of a system where a specific scientific claim is connected, through trails of meaningful relationships, to experimental evidence. We discuss some current efforts and future plans in this area

German and Israeli Innovation: The Best of Two Worlds

This study reviews – through desk research and expert interviews with Mittelstand companies, startups and ecosystem experts – the current status of the Israeli startup ecosystem and the Mittelstand region of North Rhine- Westphalia (NRW), Germany. As a case study, it highlights potential opportunities for collaboration and analyzes different engagement modes that might serve to connect the two regions. The potential synergies between the two economies are based on a high degree of complementarity. A comparison of NRW’s key verticals and Israel’s primary areas of innovation indicates that there is significant overlap in verticals, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), sensors and cybersecurity. Israeli startups can offer speed, agility and new ideas, while German Mittelstand companies can contribute expertise in production and scaling, access to markets, capital and support. The differences between Mittelstand companies and startups are less pronounced than those between startups and big corporations. However, three current barriers to fruitful collaboration have been identified: 1) a lack of access, 2) a lack of transparency regarding relevant players in the market, and 3) a lack of the internal resources needed to select the right partners, often due to time constraints or a lack of internal expertise on this issue. To ensure that positive business opportunities ensue, Mittelstand companies and startups alike have to be proactive in their search for cooperation partners and draw on a range of existing engagement modes (e.g., events, communities, accelerators). The interviews and the research conducted for this study made clear that no single mode of engagement can address all the needs and challenges associated with German-Israeli collaboration

Network support for integrated design

A framework of network support for utilization of integrated design over the Internet has been developed. The techniques presented also applicable for Intranet/Extranet. The integrated design system was initially developed for local application in a single site. With the network support, geographically dispersed designers can collaborate a design task through out the total design process, quickly respond to clients’ requests and enhance the design argilty. In this paper, after a brief introduction of the integrated design system, the network support framework is presented, followed by description of two key techniques involved: Java Saverlet approach for remotely executing a large program and online CAD collaboration

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web