Accessing RDF(S) data resources in service-based Grid infrastructures

We describe the results of the RDF(S) activity within the Open Grid Forum (http://www.ogf.org) (OGF) Database Access and Integration Services (DAIS) Working Group (http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/dais-wg) whose objective is to develop standard service-based grid access mechanisms for data expressed in RDF and RDF Schema. We produce two specifications, focused on the provision of SPARQL querying capabilities for accessing RDF data and a set of RDF Schema ontology handling primitives for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting RDF data. In this paper we present a set of use cases that justify this work and an overview of these specifications, which will enter in editorial process at OGF25. We conclude by outlining the future work that will be made in the context of this standardization process

Programas intergeracionais de partilha de casa: uma peça do puzzle “envelhecer no local”?

Os programas de partilha de casa levam duas ou mais pessoas que não estão ligadas por laços familiares a viver sob o mesmo teto, partilhando espaços domésticos e atividades de vida diária. Os programas intergeracionais de coabitação combinam um proprietário idoso (ou uma pessoa com um contrato de arrendamento) que precisa de companhia e de alguma ajuda com uma pessoa mais jovem que procura alojamento a preços acessíveis. Este artigo fornece uma visão geral da partilha de casa intergeracional, através do rastreio dos seus mecanismos e características relevantes, para além de explicar a variedade tipológica observada. Com base no trabalho de campo realizado principalmente através de entrevistas a gestores de programas de partilha de casa e a decisores políticos durante o período de 2015-2019, este artigo clarifica várias dimensões que caracterizam os programas de partilha de casa como um acordo potencialmente capaz de aliviar a solidão e as questões de isolamento social na velhice e de gerar formas preventivas e leves de cuidados. O estudo analisa os principais aspetos críticos da partilha de casa, bem como algumas das suas dinâmicas de evolução e transformação nos últimos anos

Creating a 21st Century national innovation system for a 21st Century Latvian economy

The Latvian economy made great strides in recovering from the economic shock of the early transition and the adverse aftereffects of the 1998 Russian financial crisis. Nevertheless, Latvia faces serious challenges to its future growth and prosperity despite these impressive achievements and the outward appearance of macroeconomic stability and economic progress. A wide variety of recent studies suggest that the Latvian economy is not particularly competitive and, even more worrisome, they indicate that Latvia is not well positioned to gain ground in the race for global competitiveness, prosperity, and rising standards of living. Most of Latvia's growth to date has come from one-off gains generated by structural reforms, privatization, and reallocating resources, not inexhaustible reservoirs of growth. Latvian enterprises will be able to sustain economic growth and create high wage jobs only by becoming internationally competitive, innovating, accumulating new knowledge and technology, and finding a high value added niche in the European and global division of labor. This paper is designed to help Latvian leaders develop a clear diagnosis of the innovation and competitiveness challenges facing Latvia as it prepares to enter the EU and, more important, design and implement policies and programs to ensure that Latvia reaps the maximum possible benefits from EU structural funds. Section II analyzes the current structure of Latvia's production, imports, and exports. Section III uses data from a number of competitiveness reports to benchmark Latvia's current progress against a number of comparator countries and to pinpoint Latvia's strengths and weaknesses as an innovative economy. Section IV offers a detailed list of potential policies and programs that could improve the competitiveness of Latvian enterprises and the efficiency of the Latvian National Innovation System. The recommendations include specific policies and programs to improve (1) the production of knowledge in Latvia, (2) the commercialization of technology produced by Latvian scientists, small companies, and research institutes, and (3) local firms'capacity to absorb, adapt, and adopt existing knowledge produced outside Latvia for use inside Latvia.ICT Policy and Strategies,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,ICT Policy and Strategies,Banks&Banking Reform

The architecture of discovery net : towards grid-based discovery services

Imperial Users onl

A semantic description framework for web services descriptions and matchmaking

In the M.Sc thesis, the project focuses on the problems of semantic-based representing and retrieving Web services based on the capabilities of services. Service description is critical to application development in Web service environments. There are a number of motivated research developed for representing Web services by different research organisations such as WSDL and UDDI. Both of them are existing standards for Web services. WSDL is designed to provide descriptions of message transport and interface used by each service. UDDI provides a registration structure for businesses and services, and describes businesses and services using their physical attributes in terms of names, addresses, human-understandable business descriptions and service descriptions. Both WSDL and UDDI lack semantic-based description information and a number of essential factors of service capabilities are out of the current description frameworks such as the degrees of service capabilities, relationships between users and services. Moreover, the discovery mechanism provided by UDDI is "exact match” search on the business or service names and descriptions. Actually, service providers and service consumers may have very different background and knowledge, so they do not usually share the same description information for the same item in their minds. It is difficult to locate the proper Web services if users do not express their requirements exactly same with the service provider advertisements. With the consideration of above problems, the development of techniques to semantically represent Web services is necessary for the Web service description and matchmaking. To address the above problems, we identify several requirements and essential factors that a Web service description framework should have and propose a semantic rich modelling framework to integrate these factors to describe Web services capabilities in unambiguous and computer-understandable forms with ontology. The novel description framework is the Business-Service-User (BSU) framework which provides a semantic based description information for business, service and user. Another important goal for the BSU framework is to integrate with current Semantic Web markup languages so that the framework can be easily accessed and understood by the computer. In this thesis, we use the semantic web language OWL to represent the BSU framework and the new semantic description language is called OWL-BSU, which is a computer-interpretable description of the business, service and user. Moreover, a simple and effective matching algorithm is designed to calculate the semantic relationships between service consumers requirements and service descriptions. To make our approach work in the real world, we develop a semantic Web services search engine, which integrates OWL-BSU and the matching algorithm on the top of UDDI registry. The evaluation experimental results have shown that our approach can achieve a great improvement on retrieval performance in terms of recall and precision, comparable to the existing UDDI registry

A thousand blooming flowers through innovation matchmaking between the research institutions and firms : Barriers and Potential for Collaborative Networked Matchmaking Research Innovation

The academic literature has a widespread agreement that knowledge, learning and innovation are the key to economic development and competitiveness for firms, regions and nations. Innovation in present business environment might be seen as a powerful way of securing competitive advantage as the factor of a firm’s strategy for survival. Due to complexity of innovations characteristics, change of business environment and uncertainty it is very difficult to make a recipe for “the best practice scenario”. Therefore some understanding of collaborative activities between the businesses and universities and their potentially powerful interactions for innovation should be understood better. The 21 st century brought the idea of knowledge sharing and open innovation that might prevail and / or overtake closed and costly research and development process. Overall, such platform for the research and development can increase the interactions between businesses and the universities with more economically suitable and renewable breakthrough innovations. For such scenario the idea of open, networked and matched innovation is necessary. Networking can be understood as the most important policy for any organization focused on the process of innovation. The management of innovation through matchmaking and knowledge sharing is very complex and thus requires more effort. The purpose of this M.Sc. thesis is to investigate how innovation might be made, managed and sustained through different set of interactions between universities and businesses trough networking and matchmaking with understanding the obstacles formed with the businesses – universities links and interactions. This M.Sc. thesis describes a literature review of existing knowledge on regional, national and global level of innovation activities within networking and matchmaking platform suggestions. It also describes the results obtained through pilot and the main study done within the university scientists and interviews performed with R&D responsible persons in start-up firm, SME and large company. The empirical study was performed to understand what the obstacles are for interactions between the university scientists and businesses and what would be the acceptable innovation tools and platform for networked matchmaking innovation policy governed by university’s technology transfer office. In this thesis script the empirical studies (qualitative and quantitative) are described, the results are executed, explained and discussed. Finally, some suggestions on the best-practices for matchmaking innovation process were given and conclusions were drawn. This scientific M.Sc. thesis work is not conducted with an aim to reveal what are the reasons for low collaboration between the university members and businesses but to find what can be the optimal performances that can expose best practices for both innovation actors through the innovation that will be focused on the research matchmaking activities. This study is only exploratory and all the conclusions made by author are solely suggestive

Deliverable D6.2. Gap analysis draft report

The document describes the work carried out so far in ConnectinGEO concerning the development of an approach to gap analysis, the actual gap analyses, and considerations for a best practice in prioritizing gaps in terms of addressing and closing them. The report also provides guidance for the completion of the gap analysis and the development of a prioritized list of gaps. The document includes the report of Workshop 6 (Gap Analysis Workshop), which was held in collocation with Workshop 7 (ENEON Plenary) on October 10-11, 2016 in Laxenburg, Austria at the premises of IIASA

Reference Model and Architecture for the Post-Platform Economy

The primary goal of this thesis is to propose a reference model and an accompanying software system architecture, which together can serve as a guiding framework for the analysis, design, and implementation of distributed market spaces. The benefit of such a framework is considered two-fold: On the one hand, it provides insights essential for understanding various aspects and elements of self-organized and strictly decentralized online structures to facilitate the emergence of the post-platform economy. On the other hand, it serves as a blueprint for designing and implementing a distributed marketplace instance for a specific application context. It thus allows consumers and providers to set up and expand market spaces themselves, in which they can engage directly and reliably with complex product scenarios

Topologies of agents interactions in knowledge intensive multi-agentsystems for networked information services

Agents in a multi-agent system (mAS) could interact and cooperate in many different ways. The topology of agent interaction determines how the agents control and communicate with each other, what are the control and communication capabilities of each agent and the whole system, and how efficient the control and communications are. In consequence, the topology affects the agents’ ability to share knowledge, integrate knowledge, and make efficient use of knowledge in MAS. This paper presents an overview of four major MAS topologic models, assesses their advantages and disadvantages in terms of agent autonomy, adaptation, scalability, and efficiency of cooperation. Some insights into the applicability for each of the topologies to different environment and domain specific applications are explored. A design example of the topological models to an information service management application is attempted to illustrate the practical merits of each topology