Working Document on Gloss Ontology

This document describes the Gloss Ontology. The ontology and associated class model are organised into several packages. Section 2 describes each package in detail, while Section 3 contains a summary of the whole ontology

Digital places: location-based digital practices in higher education using Bluetooth Beacons

The physical campus is a shared space that enables staff and students, industry and the public, to collaborate in the acquisition, construction and consolidation of knowledge. However, its position as the primary place for learning is being challenged by blended modes of study that range from learning experiences from fully online to more traditional campus-based approaches. Bluetooth beacons offer the potential to combine the strengths of both the digital world and the traditional university campus by augmenting physical spaces to enhance learning opportunities, and the student experience more generally. This simple technology offers new possibilities to extend and enrich opportunities for learning by exploiting the near-ubiquitous nature of personal technology. This paper provides a high-level overview of Bluetooth beacon technology, along with an indication of some of the ways in which it is developing, and ways that it could be used to support learning in higher education

Taking the High Road: Protecting Open Space Along America's Highways

Examines the environmental impacts of road construction and the spiraling of land prices along new roads, and promotes best practices for linking land use and road construction. Includes success stories and recommendations for policymakers

The information retrieval challenge of human digital memories

Today people are storing increasing amounts of personal information in digital format. While storage of such information is becoming straight forward, retrieval from the vast personal archives that this is creating poses significant challenges. Existing retrieval techniques are good at retrieving from non-personal spaces, such as the World Wide Web. However they are not sufficient for retrieval of items from these new unstructured spaces which contain items that are personal to the individual, and of which the user has personal memories and with which has had previous interaction. We believe that there are new and exciting possibilities for retrieval from personal archives. Memory cues act as triggers for individuals in the remembering process, a better understanding of memory cues will enable us to design new and effective retrieval algorithms and systems for personal archives. Context data, such as time and location, is already proving to play a key part in this special retrieval domain, for example for searching personal photo archives, we believe there are many other rich sources of context that can be exploited for retrieval from personal archives

The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America

As the United States slowly emerges from the great recession, a remarkable shify is occurring in the spatial geogrpahy of innovation. For the past 50 years, the landscape of innovation has been dominated by places like Silicon Valley - suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing, and recreation. A new complementary urban model is now emerging, giving rise to what we and others are calling "innovation districts." These districts, by our definition, are geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators, and accelerators. They are also physically compact, transit-accessible, and technicall

Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

Inner-suburban neighbourhoods, activist research and the social space of the commercial street

This paper tracks the transition of “creative city” planning from the gentrified downtown to the disinvested inner-suburbs. It attends particularly to contradictory notions of community mobilized by proponents of inner-suburban revitalization and by residents and business owners who daily inhabit inner-suburban commercial streets where cultural planning interventions are typically targeted. It further argues that those contradictory notions indicate immanent displacement pressure. The argument builds around data gleaned from an action research project in Toronto’s Mount Dennis neighbourhood, a former manufacturing neighbourhood that is now home to a large number of precariously employed new immigrants. We contend that community engaged research not only allows for an analysis of the race and class dimensions of creative city planning, it consolidates marginalized perspectives and opens up alternative possibilities for planning and development. We also claim that the relational, exploratory and sometimes fraught process of sharing knowledge with community-based researchers enriches critical research on the exclusionary politics of redevelopment planning