945 research outputs found

    Quality-aware mashup composition: issues, techniques and tools

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    Web mashups are a new generation of applications based on the composition of ready-to-use, heterogeneous components. In different contexts, ranging from the consumer Web to Enterprise systems, the potential of this new technology is to make users evolve from passive receivers of applications to actors actively involved in the creation of their artifacts, thus accommodating the inherent variability of the users’ needs. Current advances in mashup technologies are good candidates to satisfy this requirement. However, some issues are still largely unexplored. In particular, quality issues specific for this class of applications, and the way they can guide the users in the identification of adequate components and composition patterns, are neglected. This paper discusses quality dimensions that can capture the intrinsic quality of mashup components, as well as the components’ capacity to maximize the quality and the userperceived value of the overall composition. It also proposes an assisted composition process in which quality becomes the driver for recommending to the users how to complete mashups, based on the integration of quality assessment and recommendation techniques within a tool for mashup development

    Evaluating Mobile-Centric Readiness of Higher Education Institutions: The Case of Institutional Policies and Information Systems Students

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    Many higher education students live and operate in mobile-centric environments. The question is whether the policies of higher education institutions (HEI) are aligned with students’ readiness for mobile technology information access and interaction. To investigate this question from a policy perspective, nine policies from the open and distance learning (ODL) university in South Africa were analysed for providing institutional mobile-centric support. Policy document analysis was used to evaluate five information and communication technology (ICT) polices and four teaching and learning policies. The analysis focused on how the policies support the provision of mobile infrastructure, technical support and learning resources. To investigate from the students’ perspective, quantitative data was captured on Information Systems students’ readiness through a survey of a total of 129 respondents from the same university. The mobile-centric readiness of students was evaluated based on factors that could affect the readiness of students in accessing and interacting with mobile-centric services. The factors investigated were infrastructure ownership, knowledge of mobile phone features and mobile phone Internet activities. The findings revealed that Information Systems students are ready to use mobile phones as tools for information access and interaction, but some inadequacies were observed in the way the policies support the students’ needs. This study proposes some recommendations on how the policies could better support students’ mobile phone information access and interaction

    Sociomaterial Texts, Spaces and Devices: Questioning ‘Digital Dualism’ in Library and Study Practices

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    Work on students' study practices posits the digital and material as separate domains, with the ‘digital’ assumed to be disembodied, decontextualised and free-floating, and spaces in the material campus positioned as prototypically ‘traditional’ and analogue. Libraries in particular are often characterised as symbolic of predigital literacy practices and forms of meaning making. This binary oversimplifies student engagement, particularly in relation to their creation of and interactions with texts. Two studies illustrate this: an investigation of student and staff textual practices that explored the complex and emergent networks they created, adapted and maintained; and one that explored perceptions and use of library spaces (digital and physical). A sociomaterial analysis shows the ongoing importance of institutional, personal and public spaces. This demonstrates that in order to enhance the student experience, a more nuanced understanding of the complex, emergent relationships between digital and print, device and user, and author and text is required

    El papel de la metáfora como eje vertebrador de los cinco últimos programas electorales del Partido Conservador británico y la conceptualización de sus políticas en las ilustraciones editoriales de la prensa conservadora británica

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    Tesis de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filología, leída el 11/04/2019In the last decades there has been a growing interest in multimodality applied to specific discourses within Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). The present dissertation analyses metaphorical conceptualisation used by the British Conservative Party and the editorial cartoons in the British conservative press for the general elections in 1997, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2015. This is done in an integrative approach which combines cognitive approaches, Critical Discourse Analysis (Charteris- Black’s (2014) Critical Metaphor Analysis and Musolff’s (2016) scenario-based approach) and corpus techniques. For this dissertation, two corpora were collected: (1) the manifesto corpus of 136,817 words, made up of the last five general elections; and (2) a cartoon corpus made 246 editorial cartoons published in The Daily Telegraph and The Times in the election years. Each corpus was divided into four sections according to the general election, except for the fact that the 2001 and 2005 general election belong to the same section. This study focuses on four main areas: (1) leadership; (2) economic issues; (3) British national interest; and (4) domestic issues. For the analysis of the manifesto corpus, different tools included in Antconc 4.3.3. (Anthony, 2014) were used. The analysis offers quantitative and qualitative data which reveals that metaphorical conceptualisation is an essential tool in the ideological evolution of the Conservative Party, which, under Cameron, produced a change of conceptualisation strategy on certain issues covered by the study, such as the the economy and society. However, the alleged ideological evolution is not reflected in the relationship between the UK and the EU. The results obtained in each section are contrasted to the conceptualisation made by The Times and The Daily Telegraph about the same issues, in search for synchronic patterns of similarity and differences in the source domains used to portray the same issues. This dissertation intends to serve as a starting point of multi-national contrastive studies to improve political communication and the knowledge about national and social identities.En las últimas décadas ha habido un creciente interés en estudios de multimodalidad aplicados a discursos específicos en el marco de la Teoría de la Metáfora Conceptual (Lakoff y Johnson 1980). La presente tesis analiza la conceptualización metafórica del Partido Conservador británico y las ilustraciones editoriales de la prensa conservadora inglesa en las elecciones generales de 1997, 2001, 2005, 2010 y 2015. Esto se hace mediante un enfoque integrador que combina aproximaciones que combinan enfoques cognitivos y de Análisis Crítico del Discurso (Análisis Crítico de la Metáfora de Charteris-Black, 2014 y el enfoque basado en escenarios de Musolff, 2016) junto con técnicas de corpus. En esta tesis se han creado dos corpus: (1) un corpus de programas electorales hecho con los programas electorales de las últimas cinco elecciones generales, y (2) un corpus con 246 ilustraciones editoriales del The Daily Telegraph y The Times en los años de las elecciones. Cada corpus está dividido en 4 secciones, correspondientes a cada uno de los años en los que las elecciones tuvieron lugar con la salvedad de que las secciones de los años 2001 y 2005 se analizan conjuntamente. La investigación está centrada en 4 grandes áreas: (1) liderazgo; (2) economía; (3) interés nacional británico, y (4) política interior. El corpus de programas electorales ha sido analizado utilizando distintas herramientas del paquete de Antconc 4.3.3. (Anthony, 2014). El análisis ofrece datos cuantitativos y cualitativos que demuestran que la conceptualización metafórica es una herramienta esencial en la evolución del Partido Conservador británico que, bajo el liderazgo de Cameron, realizó un cambio en la estrategia de conceptualización en las áreas estudiadas, como la economía o la sociedad. Sin embargo, esta evolución no se refleja en otros aspectos como la conceptualización de la relación del Reino Unido con la UE. Los resultados obtenidos en cada sección se contrastan con la conceptualización realizada por The Daily Telegraph y The Times, de manera que se ofrecen patrones de similitudes y diferencias en la conceptualización realizada sobre los mismos asuntos. Esta tesis pretende ser un punto de partida para la profundización de estudios contrastivos sobre comunicación política y la creación de identidades nacionales.Fac. de FilologíaTRUEunpu

    Sociomaterial texts, spaces, and devices

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    Work on students' study practices posits the digital and material as separate domains, with the ‘digital’ assumed to be disembodied, decontextualised and free-floating, and spaces in the material campus positioned as prototypically ‘traditional’ and analogue. Libraries in particular are often characterised as symbolic of predigital literacy practices and forms of meaning making. This binary oversimplifies student engagement, particularly in relation to their creation of and interactions with texts. Two studies illustrate this: an investigation of student and staff textual practices that explored the complex and emergent networks they created, adapted and maintained; and one that explored perceptions and use of library spaces (digital and physical). A sociomaterial analysis shows the ongoing importance of institutional, personal and public spaces. This demonstrates that in order to enhance the student experience, a more nuanced understanding of the complex, emergent relationships between digital and print, device and user, and author and text is required

    Automated Deductive Content Analysis of Text: A Deep Contrastive and Active Learning Based Approach

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    Content analysis traditionally involves human coders manually combing through text documents to search for relevant concepts and categories. However, this approach is time-intensive and not scalable, particularly for secondary data like social media content, news articles, or corporate reports. To address this problem, the paper presents an automated framework called Automated Deductive Content Analysis of Text (ADCAT) that uses deep learning-based semantic techniques, ontology of validated construct measures, large language model, human-in-the-loop disambiguation, and a novel augmentation-based weighted contrastive learning approach for improved language representations, to build a scalable approach for deductive content analysis. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to identify firm innovation strategies from their 10-K reports to obtain inferences reasonably close to human coding

    Sixty years of cybernetics: cybernetics still alive

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    summary:This informal essay, written on the occasion of 60th anniversary of Wienerian cybernetics, presents a series of themes and ideas that has emerged during last several decades and which have direct or indirect relationships to the principal concepts of cybernetics. Moreover, they share with original cybernetics the same transdisciplinary character

    Conceptual development of custom, domain-specific mashup platforms

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    Despite the common claim by mashup platforms that they enable end-users to develop their own software, in practice end-users still don't develop their own mashups, as the highly technical or inexistent user bases of today's mashup platforms testify. The key shortcoming of current platforms is their general-purpose nature, that privileges expressive power over intuitiveness. In our prior work, we have demonstrated that a domainspecific mashup approach, which privileges intuitiveness over expressive power, has much more potential to enable end-user development (EUD). The problem is that developing mashup platforms - domain-specific or not - is complex and time consuming. In addition, domain-specific mashup platforms by their very nature target only a small user basis, that is, the experts of the target domain, which makes their development not sustainable if it is not adequately supported and automated. With this article, we aim to make the development of custom, domain-specific mashup platforms costeffective. We describe a mashup tool development kit (MDK) that is able to automatically generate a mashup platform (comprising custom mashup and component description languages and design-time and runtime environments) from a conceptual design and to provision it as a service. We equip the kit with a dedicated development methodology and demonstrate the applicability and viability of the approach with the help of two case studies. © 2014 ACM

    Research Perspectives: Design Theory Indeterminacy: What Is it, How Can it Be Reduced, and Why Did the Polar Bear Drown?

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    Design science research strives to be practical and relevant. Yet few researchers have examined the extent to which practitioners can meaningfully utilize theoretical knowledge produced by design science research in solving concrete real-world problems. Are design theories developed by scientists readily amenable to application by practitioners? Does the application of a theory by practitioners always lead to the outcomes predicted (by the scientists)? We examine a particularly difficult challenge—ensuring that the development and deployment of an IT artifact by practitioners based on a design theory result in appropriate changes in the environment predicted by the design theory. As we show in our paper, a gulf exists between theoretical propositions and concrete issues faced in practice—a challenge we refer to as design theory indeterminacy. Design theory indeterminacy might result in considerable ambiguity when implementing a design theory in practice and reduce the potential relevance of information systems knowledge. In this paper, we articulate the problem of design theory indeterminacy, examine factors that contribute to it, and suggest fruitful directions for future research to help reduce it

    A Process Framework for Managing Quality of Service in Private Cloud

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    As information systems leaders tap into the global market of cloud computing-based services, they struggle to maintain consistent application performance due to lack of a process framework for managing quality of service (QoS) in the cloud. Guided by the disruptive innovation theory, the purpose of this case study was to identify a process framework for meeting the QoS requirements of private cloud service users. Private cloud implementation was explored by selecting an organization in California through purposeful sampling. Information was gathered by interviewing 23 information technology (IT) professionals, a mix of frontline engineers, managers, and leaders involved in the implementation of private cloud. Another source of data was documents such as standard operating procedures, policies, and guidelines related to private cloud implementation. Interview transcripts and documents were coded and sequentially analyzed. Three prominent themes emerged from the analysis of data: (a) end user expectations, (b) application architecture, and (c) trending analysis. The findings of this study may help IT leaders in effectively managing QoS in cloud infrastructure and deliver reliable application performance that may help in increasing customer population and profitability of organizations. This study may contribute to positive social change as information systems managers and workers can learn and apply the process framework for delivering stable and reliable cloud-hosted computer applications
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