236,842 research outputs found
Facilitating evolution during design and implementation
The volumes and complexity of data that companies need to handle are increasing at an accelerating rate. In order to compete effectively and ensure their commercial sustainability, it is becoming crucial for them to achieve robust traceability in both their data and the evolving designs of their systems. This is addressed by the CRISTAL software which was originally developed at CERN by UWE, Bristol, for one of the particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, and has been subsequently transferred into the commercial world. Companies have been able to demonstrate increased agility, generate additional revenue, and improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness with which they develop and implement systems in various areas, including business process management (BPM), healthcare and accounting applications. CRISTALâs ability to manage data and its provenance at the terabyte scale, with full traceability over extended timescales, together with its description-driven approach, has provided the flexible adaptability required to future proof dynamically evolving software for these businesses
Spatial clustering of SARS in Hong Kong.
1. Geographic information system (GIS) can be applied during an acute infectious disease outbreak to reveal new geospatial information in addition to standard field epidemiological analyses. 2. When applied in real time during the onset and evolution of an epidemic, GIS can monitor and enhance understanding of the transmission dynamics of an infectious agent, thereby facilitating the design, implementation and evaluation of potential intervention strategies.published_or_final_versio
Designing transition paths for the diffusion of sustainable system innovations. A new potential role for design in transition management?
Copyright @ 2008 Umberto AllemandiIt is a shared opinion that the transition towards sustainability will be a continuous and articulated learning process, which will require radical changes on multiple levels (social, cultural, institutional and technological). It is also shared that, given the nature and the dimension of those changes, a system discontinuity is needed, and that therefore it is necessary to act on a system innovation level. The challenge now is to understand how it is possible to facilitate and support the introduction and diffusion of such innovations. Bringing together insights from both Design for sustainability and Transition management literatures, the paper puts forward a model, called Transition model of evolutionary co-design for sustainable (product-service) system innovations, aimed at facilitating and speed-up the process of designing, experimentation, niche introduction and branching of sustainable such innovations
Supporting collaboration within the eScience community
Collaboration is a core activity at the heart of large-scale co-
operative scientific experimentation. In order to support the
emergence of Grid-based scientific collaboration, new models of
e-Science working methods are needed.
Scientific collaboration involves production and manipulation of
various artefacts. Based on work done in the software
engineering field, this paper proposes models and tools which
will support the representation and production of such artefacts.
It is necessary to provide facilities to classify, organise, acquire,
process, share, and reuse artefacts generated during collaborative
working. The concept of a "design space" will be used to
organise scientific design and the composition of experiments,
and methods such as self-organising maps will be used to support
the reuse of existing artefacts.
It is proposed that this work can be carried out and evaluated in
the UK e-Science community, using an "industry as laboratory"
approach to the research, building on the knowledge, expertise,
and experience of those directly involved in e-Science
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The role of intermediaries in facilitating e-government diffusion in Saudi Arabia
Recent studies of e-government activity have highlighted adoption and diffusion issues as important subjects for rating e-government success. However in developing countries inadequate resources and limited citizensâ capabilities regarding new e-government have resulted in low diffusion and adoption of e-government services. This paper examines the role of intermediaries, which can be played by a third party; in bridging the gap between e-government implementation and social reality, and looks at the roles a third party can add within the e-government services mechanism. This paper uses a case study approach in order to reflect e-government progress within the context of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) as one developing country. The result of this paper shows that intermediaries play an important role in the diffusion of e-services in relation to improving the availability, accessibility and enhancing privacy and security
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The SLIM (Social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale) Final Report
Background: SLIM stands for 'Socuak Learning for the Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale'. It is a multi-country research project funded by the European Commission (DG RESEARCH - 5th Framework Programme for research and technological development, 1998-2002). Its main theme is the investigation of the socio-economic aspects of the sustainable use of water. Within this theme, its main focus of interest lies in understanding the application of social learning as a conceptual framework, an operational principle, a policy instrument and a process of systemic change
Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications
Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a
challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This
challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the
intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture
for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test
the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design
language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive
computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of
area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This
language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application,
following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing
domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing
separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design
artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming
framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely
implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a
wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach
through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity
Supporting collaborative grid application development within the escience community
The systemic representation and organisation of software artefacts, e.g. specifications, designs, interfaces, and implementations, resulting from the development of large distributed systems from software components have been addressed by our research within the Practitioner and AMES projects [1,2,3,4]. Without appropriate representations and organisations, large collections of existing software are not amenable to the activities of software reuse and software maintenance, as these activities are likely to be severely hindered by the difficulties of understanding the software applications and their associated components. In both of these projects, static analysis of source code and other development artefacts, where available, and subsequent application of reverse engineering techniques were successfully used to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the software applications under study [5,6]. Later research addressed the maintenance of a component library in the context of component-based software product line development and maintenance [7]. The classic software decompositions, horizontal and vertical, proposed by Goguen [8] influenced all of this research. While they are adequate for static composition, they fail to address the dynamic aspects of composing large distributed software applications from components especially where these include software services. The separation of component co-ordination concerns from component functionality proposed in [9] offers a partial solution
On the Feasibility of "Twofold Transformation". Can Institutions of Sustainability Evolve in Transition Countries?
This paper aims at explaining the role and importance of the evolution of institutions for sustainable agri-environments during the transition process by referring to agrienvironmental problems faced in Central and Eastern European countries. A central question therefore is whether the required institutional arrangements for achieving sustainability in the area of agri-environmental resource management can be built more easily in periods of transition as they fill institutional gaps, or whether processes of transition make institution building a more difficult and far more time consuming task than previously thought. Above all, we want to find out, how these two processes of institution building at different scales affect the sustainable management of resources such as water and biodiversity in agriculture. It will become clear that the agri-environmental problem areas faced during transition are complex and dynamic and require adequate institutions both by political design and from the grassroots, to be developed by the respective actors involved. Transition from centrally planned to pluralistic systems has to be considered as a particular and in some respect nontypical process of institutional change. Popular theories of institutional change do not necessarily apply. The privatisation experience from many CEE countries will serve as an example. Finally, we will emphasis the problem of missing or insufficient interaction between political actors or agencies and people in CEE countries. Substantial investments into social and human capital, particularly regarding informal institutions are needed for institutions of sustainability to evolve.Institutional and Behavioral Economics,
Living labs as a driver for change in regional television
Traditional television production and distribution organizations are increasingly being challenged by a rapidly changing technological environment. These evolutions force the television industry to leave their comfort zone. This context in mind, regional television broadcasters often lack the resources, knowledge and organizational flexibility to cope with this external pressure. In this paper, we discuss the use of Living Labs as âinnovation intermediariesâ and âchange facilitatorsâ that foster and enable user-centric innovation development processes, both inside and outside the organization. This phenomenon is approached from both an open innovation and a user innovation point of view. This paper considers Living Labs as open innovation ecosystems, enabling organizations to reach out and collaborate with their (potential) audience and other external actors, but also as an open âbattle arenaâ for the organization itself. The Living Lab process governs different expectations and enables conflicting opinions to come together and to steadily grow towards a mutual solution. Moreover, the innovation development process in the Living Lab seems to have innovation spill-over effects on the organizational level, catalyzing a broader organizational change
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