Semantic data integration in a newspaper content management system

A newspaper content management system has to deal with a very heterogeneous information space as the experience in the Diari Segre newspaper has shown us. The greatest problem is to harmonise the different ways the involved users (journalist, archivists...) structure the newspaper information space, i.e. news, topics, headlines, etc. Our approach is based on ontology and differentiated universes of discourse (UoD). Users interact with the system and, from this interaction, integration rules are derived. These rules are based on Description Logic ontological relations for subsumption and equivalence. They relate the different UoD and produce a shared conceptualisation of the newspaper information domain.This work is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, grants FIT-150500- 2003-511, TIC2002-1948, and TIN2005-0540

UNMAS Annual Report 2019

The work of UNMAS makes a difference in the lives of people. In its role as United Nations mine action coordinator, UNMAS enables and accelerates many of the core activities of the United Nations — from humanitarian action and peacekeeping to sustainable development and peacebuilding. In 2019, the clearance of landmines, explosive remnants of war (ERW) and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) paved the way for food distribution centres, playing fields and schools. Roads were made safe, ensuring that people could travel to markets, humanitarian workers could deliver assistance, and peacekeepers could go on patrol. UNMAS, guided by the United Nations Mine Action Strategy 2019-2023, placed a strong focus on victim assistance by providing direct services to survivors and their families, and by coordinating with national institutions to strengthen referral pathways. In light of the urbanization of conflict and the growing threat posed by IEDs, risk education was scaled up, with outreach to 2.9 million people in 2019, marking an increase of almost 40 per cent from 2018. This annual report outlines the work of UNMAS in 2019. Highlights include: Finalizing the framework for a United Nations inter-agency taskforce on IED threat mitigation, with the first meeting scheduled for January 2020 — part of the ongoing work of UNMAS to respond to the Secretary-General’s call for the development of a “whole-of-system” response to IEDs. Focusing on strengthening links between humanitarian planning and mine action through UNMAS coordination of the Mine Action Area of Responsibility, as part of the UNHCR-led Global Protection Cluster. Leading the update of the Gender Guidelines for Mine Action Programmes, aimed at increasing gender mainstreaming across mine action programming, which coincided with United Nations-wide preparations for the 20th anniversary of the adoption of Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) in 2020. Contributing concretely to the Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) initiative, most notably by training uniformed personnel and troop-contributing countries in IED threat mitigation, which improved the safety and security of the Blue Helmets. Supporting the United Nations system as a whole by expanding, at the request of United Nations senior leadership, UNMAS operations in Burkina Faso and deploying expertise to the United Nations Mission to Support the Hodeidah Agreement, in Yemen. 75 years on from its creation, the United Nations continues to be driven by the needs of people. Mine action not only saves lives, it allows States, communities, families and individuals to chart their own future in safety and with dignity. I want to thank those who support UNMAS, in particular Member States and the wider mine action sector. Moreover, I want to acknowledge all those who work for, or engage with, UNMAS on the ground. This report is testimony to their commitment

The Problem with Progressive Pedagogy: Systemic Challenges Enacting Environmental Sustainability Education

This outlines theories for building a coordinated interdisciplinary school-wide energy sustainability program in a Toronto high school, and barriers to its success. It explores the intersection of eco and social justice, systems thinking, pedagogy in schools, and sustainable practices in business. To say it is a challenge solving real-world justice problems in a high school is an understatement. It requires ongoing support, communication and collaboration from all levels of the education system, which is tricky to coordinate, even in a small school. The aim was to prove that through progressive pedagogy, students learn curricular content and skills needed for a sustainable future by innovating ways to solve real life sustainability problems in energy in the local community. Local support existed in theory, but on a practical level there was a lack of time, budget, scheduling, communication and resources needed to put theory into practice, despite interest and willingness on the part of students, staff, and administration. This paper, then, is an outline of what not to do when designing progressive pedagogies, what to keep in mind for best practices, and options for designing integrated project and problem based pedagogy that teaches skills for the future. It outlines basic theories of systems thinking, sustainable business and justice work that focuses for this project on energy. It defines current policies on different levels of the education system in terms of sustainability in schools. It reveals the success and barriers of creating an interdisciplinary program through an educator’s journal. And it outlines the key findings of the study, articulating multiple barriers on multiple levels of the system. It proposes communication linked to multiple viewpoints and systems thinking, and offers an example of adapting to barriers to make small gains despite them. It also offers recommendations for how stakeholders throughout the education system can advocate for systemic reform to integrate learning and innovating for a sustainable future within schools

Queering the Canadian labour movement: LGBTQ2S+ advocacy within the British Columbia Government and Service Employees\u27 Union (BCGEU)

This thesis presents findings and analysis drawn from semi-structured qualitative interviews with eleven members, staff, and leaders within the BC Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGEU) on their understandings and experiences of LGBTQ2S+ advocacy within the union. I situate this data within a critical framework that draws together concepts of social unionism and queer theory, asking how accessibility and power is understood in these literatures. The data reveals that LGBTQ2S+ specific education and training is needed within the BCGEU, that the BCGEU needs a LGBTQ2S+ advocate, and the structure of the union must become more accessible to increase more meaningful involvement from diverse workers, including LGBTQ2S+ workers. I conclude by emphasizing the need for more research in this area, particularly in the Canadian labour movement, and offer suggestions on how to ensure future research accounts for diverse perspectives

Resolving semantic conflicts through ontological layering

We examine the problem of semantic interoperability in modern software systems, which exhibit pervasiveness, a range of heterogeneities and in particular, semantic heterogeneity of data models which are built upon ubiquitous data repositories. We investigate whether we can build ontologies upon heterogeneous data repositories in order to resolve semantic conflicts in them, and achieve their semantic interoperability. We propose a layered software architecture, which accommodates in its core, ontological layering, resulting in a Generic ontology for Context aware, Interoperable and Data sharing (Go-CID) software applications. The software architecture supports retrievals from various data repositories and resolves semantic conflicts which arise from heterogeneities inherent in them. It allows extendibility of heterogeneous data repositories through ontological layering, whilst preserving the autonomy of their individual elements. Our specific ontological layering for interoperable data repositories is based on clearly defined reasoning mechanisms in order to perform ontology mappings. The reasoning mechanisms depend on the user‟s involvments in retrievals of and types of semantic conflicts, which we have to resolve after identifying semantically related data. Ontologies are described in terms of ontological concepts and their semantic roles that make the types of semantic conflicts explicit. We contextualise semantically related data through our own categorisation of semantic conflicts and their degrees of similarities. Our software architecture has been tested through a case study of retrievals of semantically related data across repositories in pervasive healthcare and deployed with Semantic Web technology. The extensions to the research results include the applicability of our ontological layering and reasoning mechanisms in various problem domains and in environments where we need to (i) establish if and when we have overlapping “semantics”, and (ii) infer/assert a correct set of “semantics” which can support any decision making in such domains