A linked data-driven & service-oriented architecture for sharing educational resources

The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable and interoperable and to enable Web-scale sharing of resources across learning communities. Currently, a variety of approaches have been proposed to expose and manage educational resources and their metadata on the Web. These are usually based on heterogeneous metadata standards and schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and diverse repository interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Also, there is still a lack of usage of controlled vocabularies and available data sets that could replace the widespread use of unstructured text for describing resources. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has proven that it offers a set of successful principles that have the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and prototype which is fundamentally based on (a) Linked Data principles and (b) Service-orientation to resolve the integration issues for sharing educational resources

iServe: a linked services publishing platform

Despite the potential of service-orientation and the efforts devoted so far, we are still to witness a significant uptake of service technologies outside of enterprise environments. A core reason for this limited uptake is the lack of appropriate publishing platforms able to deal with the existing heterogeneity in the service technologies landscape and able to provide expressive yet simple and ecient discovery mechanisms. In this paper we describe iServe, a novel and open platform for publishing services which aims to better support their discovery and use. It exposes service descriptions as linked data expressed in terms of a simple vocabulary for describing services of different kinds with annotations in diverse formalisms. In addition to describing iServe, this paper also highlights the set of principles behind iServe, which we believe are essential for other generic repositories of semantic information notably ontology repositories

Internal Services Brand Orientation: Comparing the Perspectives of Managers, Employees, and Customers

Brand orientation plays an important role in creating competitive advantage. The success of a brand depends on the extent of the harmony between managerially advocated brand orientation, effective implementation of the brand orientation by staff, and appreciation of the brand orientation by customers. This requires brand orientation to be implemented during each touch point of the service delivery process, as the delivery of the brand is experienced by consumers in a process of co-creation with the service provider. To have a successful brand orientation, it is necessary to examine the perceptions of management, contact personnel, and consumers to discover if there is a consistent understanding of the brand orientation by these three parties. Perceptions of brand orientation should be aligned among these three groups because inconsistencies might have a negative effect on building a strong brand that would in turn impact brand performance, ultimately leading to a weaker service brand. Drawing from the literature, this research develops scale measurements to examine the relationships among internal brand orientation and its antecedent dimensions from the perspectives of contact personnel, managers, and customers of a service firm. The dimensions included to measure brand orientation are brand commitment, brand citizenship, positive word-of-mouth, affective brand commitment, brand image, attitude toward brand, and customer perceptions of brand performance. A seven-point Likert scale (1=strongly disagree, 7=strongly agree) was utilized. Because the data were collected for a convenience store chain and from its managers, personnel, and customers, the statements were modified accordingly. Positive relationships were hypothesized between the perceptions of brand orientation and its dimensions and perceptions of brand performance and customer outcome. After building a survey instrument and pre-testing it, the researchers administered the final survey to the contact personnel, managers, and customers of the family-owned convenience store chain. The finalized survey for customers was administered online through invitations on the social media channels of the convenience store chain (Facebook and Twitter), which were linked Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings March 2018 2 Copyright of the Author(s) and published under a Creative Commons License Agreement http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ to the survey. Employees were contacted directly with an e-mail invitation and link. A total of 2,738 customer and 232 employee surveys were appropriately completed and used in the data analysis. The SEM-PLS analyses reveal significant relationships among the brand orientation dimensions. Based on the Three Promises and Services Branding Triangle framework that suggested comparisons of perceptions between managers and contact personnel (internal), managers and customers (external), and contact personnel and customers (interactive), an ANOVA test was utilized. The results revealed that external and interactive brand orientation gaps exist in the perceptions of personnel, managers, and customers, but not between managers and personnel. The study helps to fill an existing void in the brand orientation literature

CONSULTING AND INVOLVING PARENTS IN PROVISION OF EDUCATIONAL SERVICES PROCESS FOR FAMILIES IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

The paper focuses on the issues of parents consulting and their involvement in an educational service process for families at schools. The quality of education and the effectiveness of provision of educational services are considered as an integral part of successful learning. To analyze parental opinion (N=530) towards their consulting and involvement in provision of educational service process quantitative  and qualitative method of data collection have been chosen. According to the parental opinion, the content of consulting should be linked with learning achievements and motivation. Parental involvement is considered through the processes of professional orientation, prevention and organizing social events at school. Though, the fields of self-support groups, organizing teaching-learning programs for families, parental involvement in a formal educational process is considered as a challenging issue

Sustainable and traditional product innovation without scale and experience, but only for KIBS!

This study analyzes the ideal strategic trajectory for sustainable and traditional product innovation. Using a sample of 74 Costa Rican high-performance businesses for 2016, we employ fuzzy set analysis (qualitative comparative analysis) to evaluate how the development of sustainable and traditional product innovation strategies is conditioned by the business’ learning capabilities and entrepreneurial orientation in knowledge-intensive (KIBS) and non-knowledge-intensive businesses. The results indicate two ideal strategic configurations of product innovation. The first strategic configuration to reach maximum product innovation requires the presence of KIBS firms that have both an entrepreneurial and learning orientation, while the second configuration is specific to non-KIBS firms with greater firm size and age along with entrepreneurial and learning orientation. KIBS firms are found to leverage the knowledge-based and customer orientations that characterize their business model in order to compensate for the shortage of important organizational characteristics—which we link to liabilities or smallness and newness—required to achieve optimal sustainable and traditional product innovation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Public Service motivation for executive pension trustees: A qualitative study

The purpose of this paper is to establish if there is an element of public service motivation (PSM) in pension trustee roles that extend across public and private boundaries in the UK. The qualitative research indicates that public service is a requirement to enhance social commitment to this executive role but that this is also influenced by the organisational and political context of the trustee representation as employer or employee representatives. The research highlights the multiple motives that encourage trustee participation but also how these can be changed through socialisation within this role utilising element of organisational citizenship and user orientation to serving and helping pension plan members. It is suggested that an orientation to public service should be made explicit in the recruitment process, induction and training of trustees

Identifying Web Tables - Supporting a Neglected Type of Content on the Web

The abundance of the data in the Internet facilitates the improvement of extraction and processing tools. The trend in the open data publishing encourages the adoption of structured formats like CSV and RDF. However, there is still a plethora of unstructured data on the Web which we assume contain semantics. For this reason, we propose an approach to derive semantics from web tables which are still the most popular publishing tool on the Web. The paper also discusses methods and services of unstructured data extraction and processing as well as machine learning techniques to enhance such a workflow. The eventual result is a framework to process, publish and visualize linked open data. The software enables tables extraction from various open data sources in the HTML format and an automatic export to the RDF format making the data linked. The paper also gives the evaluation of machine learning techniques in conjunction with string similarity functions to be applied in a tables recognition task.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Geopolymer lightweight bricks manufactured from fly ash and foaming agent

This paper deals with the development of lightweight geopolymer bricks by using foaming agent and fly ash. The mix parameters analysed through a laboratory experiment with fix ratio of sodium silicate/sodium hydroxide solution mass ratio 2.5, fly ash/alkaline activator solution mass ratio 2.0, foaming agent/paste mass ratio 1:2 and molarity of sodium hydroxide solution used was 12M. Different curing temperature (Room Temperature, 60, 80) and foaming agent/water mass ratio (1:10 and 1:20) were studied. Compressive strength, density analysis, and water absorption has been investigated. The results show that the foamed geopolymer bricks with a lower foam/water mass ratio (1:10)and high curing temperature (80°C) leading to a better properties. Mixtures with a low density of around 1420 kg/m3 and a compressive strength of around 10 MPa were achieved

Stakeholder orientation and organizational performance in an emerging market

There has been research that studies Chinese firms’ stakeholder orientation but fails to identify Chinese firms’ specific stakeholder groups. In addition, little research in this line has been conducted so far to reflect recent Chinese constitutional transition. This study seeks to fill these gaps. It extends previous studies assuming that a fixed set of stakeholders is suitable for firms in different countries context, and identifies Chinese firms’ key stakeholder groups by adopting the descriptive approach of stakeholder theory. Based on this identification, the authors further examine how these stakeholder orientations influence organizational performance and how they interact. Interviews with managers from 107 firms show that customer, employee, shareholder, supplier, and competitors are perceived as Chinese firms’ most important stakeholders; empirical studies using data collected from 307 Chinese firms reveal that orientations towards these stakeholders enhance organizational performance. Moreover, there are synergy effects existing among customer orientation, supplier orientation, and competitor orientation, and between customer orientation and competitor orientation, while shareholder orientation has significant hindering effects upon competitor orientation as a reflection of recent institutional changes taking place in China

Market orientation for better accountability of government-linked companies / Jamaliah Said … [et al.]

This study assesses the status of the current level of market orientation among the Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) in Malaysia. This study collected primary data based on a set of questionnaire survey among 134 executives and managers of GLCs in Malaysia. The data were collected based on the opinions of the ten factors of market orientation practices by using the five-point Likert scale. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. On an average, 86.6% of the respondents agreed that they focus on these factors of market orientation. The federal-owned GLCs placed more emphasis on market orientation than the state owned GLCs. This study suggests improving the practices of market orientation of GLCs in Malaysia by emphasizing on providing close attention to after-sales service, responding rapidly to the threats of competitive actions, regularly discussing the competitors’ strengths and strategies by the top management, and freely communicating successful and unsuccessful customer experiences across all business functions. It is suggested that Malaysian GLCs should seriously invest in market orientation to deliver high accountability outcomes