117,600 research outputs found

    Social exclusion and transport policy

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    This paper is a review of social inclusion in the specification by central government of policy instruments for local government. It forms part of the scooping study on Accessibility and User Needs in Transport (AUNT) funded by the EPSRC Sustainable Urban Environment programme. The aim of the study is to produce rigorous methodologies to develop and test sustainable policies and practices that will deliver effective socially inclusive design and operation in urban transport and the public realm from the macro down to the micro level. In particular, this paper forms part of a work package to develop a tool and modelling techniques that can be used to identify the areas and sectors that have high levels of social exclusion, and then facilitate the testing of policy options to assess the extent to which they meet user needs and increase social inclusion. The paper begins with a review of key government documents regarding social exclusion and transport, before going on to discuss how social inclusion is incorporated into local government transport policy

    The Cathedral and the bazaar: (de)centralising certitude in river basin management

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    Use of nonintrusive sensor-based information and communication technology for real-world evidence for clinical trials in dementia

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    Cognitive function is an important end point of treatments in dementia clinical trials. Measuring cognitive function by standardized tests, however, is biased toward highly constrained environments (such as hospitals) in selected samples. Patient-powered real-world evidence using information and communication technology devices, including environmental and wearable sensors, may help to overcome these limitations. This position paper describes current and novel information and communication technology devices and algorithms to monitor behavior and function in people with prodromal and manifest stages of dementia continuously, and discusses clinical, technological, ethical, regulatory, and user-centered requirements for collecting real-world evidence in future randomized controlled trials. Challenges of data safety, quality, and privacy and regulatory requirements need to be addressed by future smart sensor technologies. When these requirements are satisfied, these technologies will provide access to truly user relevant outcomes and broader cohorts of participants than currently sampled in clinical trials

    EcoGIS – GIS tools for ecosystem approaches to fisheries management

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    Executive Summary: The EcoGIS project was launched in September 2004 to investigate how Geographic Information Systems (GIS), marine data, and custom analysis tools can better enable fisheries scientists and managers to adopt Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management (EAFM). EcoGIS is a collaborative effort between NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and four regional Fishery Management Councils. The project has focused on four priority areas: Fishing Catch and Effort Analysis, Area Characterization, Bycatch Analysis, and Habitat Interactions. Of these four functional areas, the project team first focused on developing a working prototype for catch and effort analysis: the Fishery Mapper Tool. This ArcGIS extension creates time-and-area summarized maps of fishing catch and effort from logbook, observer, or fishery-independent survey data sets. Source data may come from Oracle, Microsoft Access, or other file formats. Feedback from beta-testers of the Fishery Mapper was used to debug the prototype, enhance performance, and add features. This report describes the four priority functional areas, the development of the Fishery Mapper tool, and several themes that emerged through the parallel evolution of the EcoGIS project, the concept and implementation of the broader field of Ecosystem Approaches to Management (EAM), data management practices, and other EAM toolsets. In addition, a set of six succinct recommendations are proposed on page 29. One major conclusion from this work is that there is no single “super-tool” to enable Ecosystem Approaches to Management; as such, tools should be developed for specific purposes with attention given to interoperability and automation. Future work should be coordinated with other GIS development projects in order to provide “value added” and minimize duplication of efforts. In addition to custom tools, the development of cross-cutting Regional Ecosystem Spatial Databases will enable access to quality data to support the analyses required by EAM. GIS tools will be useful in developing Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) and providing pre- and post-processing capabilities for spatially-explicit ecosystem models. Continued funding will enable the EcoGIS project to develop GIS tools that are immediately applicable to today’s needs. These tools will enable simplified and efficient data query, the ability to visualize data over time, and ways to synthesize multidimensional data from diverse sources. These capabilities will provide new information for analyzing issues from an ecosystem perspective, which will ultimately result in better understanding of fisheries and better support for decision-making. (PDF file contains 45 pages.

    ATM automation: guidance on human technology integration

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    © Civil Aviation Authority 2016Human interaction with technology and automation is a key area of interest to industry and safety regulators alike. In February 2014, a joint CAA/industry workshop considered perspectives on present and future implementation of advanced automated systems. The conclusion was that whilst no additional regulation was necessary, guidance material for industry and regulators was required. Development of this guidance document was completed in 2015 by a working group consisting of CAA, UK industry, academia and industry associations (see Appendix B). This enabled a collaborative approach to be taken, and for regulatory, industry, and workforce perspectives to be collectively considered and addressed. The processes used in developing this guidance included: review of the themes identified from the February 2014 CAA/industry workshop1; review of academic papers, textbooks on automation, incidents and accidents involving automation; identification of key safety issues associated with automated systems; analysis of current and emerging ATM regulatory requirements and guidance material; presentation of emerging findings for critical review at UK and European aviation safety conferences. In December 2015, a workshop of senior management from project partner organisations reviewed the findings and proposals. EASA were briefed on the project before its commencement, and Eurocontrol contributed through membership of the Working Group.Final Published versio

    Ocean governance: the New Zealand dimension

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      The Oceans Governance project was funded by the Emerging Issues Programme, overseen by the Institute of Policy Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Its primary goal is to provide interested members of the public and policymakers with a general overview and a description of the types of principles, planning tools and policy instruments that can be used to strengthen and improve marine governance in New Zealand. The major findings of this study are that the existing marine governance framework in New Zealand emphasises a traditional sector-by-sector approach to management and planning and that this fragmented governance framework contributes to a number of institutional challenges. In addition, the study identifies a number of factors that influence marine planning and decision-making in the country, including but not limited to; the relationships between economic use of marine resources and the maintenance of marine ecosystem services and goods; Māori interests, perspectives and treaty obligations; the role of international treaties and conventions; the synergistic and cumulative impacts of multiple use and climate disturbance on marine ecosystems, and the role of scientists and science in marine planning and decision-making.The report makes two general recommendations.  First, with respect to the territorial sea (which includes the marine area out to 12 nautical miles) the report recommends that regional councils develop integrative marine plans where conflict between users and users-ecosystems is likely to develop in the future.  Second, the report recommends the adoption of new role for central government to support an ecosystem-based approach to integrative marine planning and decision-making

    Cloud service localisation

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    The essence of cloud computing is the provision of software and hardware services to a range of users in dierent locations. The aim of cloud service localisation is to facilitate the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing their adaption to dierent locales. We address the lingual localisation by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to dierent languages and regulatory localisation by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards and regulations. The aim is to support and enforce the explicit modelling of aspects particularly relevant to localisation and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localisation dimensions. We focus here on an ontology-based conceptual information model that integrates locale specication in a coherent way

    Context modeling and constraints binding in web service business processes

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    Context awareness is a principle used in pervasive services applications to enhance their exibility and adaptability to changing conditions and dynamic environments. Ontologies provide a suitable framework for context modeling and reasoning. We develop a context model for executable business processes { captured as an ontology for the web services domain. A web service description is attached to a service context profile, which is bound to the context ontology. Context instances can be generated dynamically at services runtime and are bound to context constraint services. Constraint services facilitate both setting up constraint properties and constraint checkers, which determine the dynamic validity of context instances. Data collectors focus on capturing context instances. Runtime integration of both constraint services and data collectors permit the business process to achieve dynamic business goals
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