A conceptual model for semantically-based e-government portals

Issues of semantic interoperability and service integration for e-government portals are the domain of interest of the present paper. We propose a Conceptual Model for One-Stop e-Government Portals based on the Semantic Web Service technology. We describe our research into building the three basic ontologies and their integration with standard ontologies. The result is a project-independent reusable model. At the same time, we outline a simple methodology for applying the proposed conceptual model into a specific scenario

Urban comix: Subcultures, infrastructures and “the right to the city” in Delhi

This article argues that comics production in India should be configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces. Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their collaborative production processes and socialized consumption practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric

Into the Unknown: Navigating Spaces, Terra Incognita and the Art Archive

This paper is a navigation across time and space – travelling from 16th century colonial world maps which marked unknown territories as Terra Incognita, via 18th century cabinets of curiosities; to the unknown spaces of the Anthropocene Age, in which for the first time we humans are making a permanent geological record on the earth’s ecosystems. This includes climate change. The recurring theme is loss and becoming lost. I investigate what happens when someone who is lost attempts to navigate and find parallels between Terra Incognita and the art archive, and explore the points where mapping, archiving and collecting intersect. Once something is perceived to be at risk, the fear of loss and the impulse to preserve emerges. I investigate why in the Anthropocene Age we have a stronger impulse to the archive and look to the past, rather than face the unknowable effects of climate change. This is counterpointed by artists, whose hybrids practices engage with re-imaging and re-imagining today’s world, thereby moving us forward into the unknown. ‘Becoming’ is therefore another central theme. The art archive is explored from multiple perspectives – as an artist, an art archive user and an archivist – noting that the subject, the consumer and the archivist all have very differing agendas. I question who uses physical archives today and how we can retain our sense of curiosity. I conclude with a link to an interactive artwork, which visualises, synthesises and expands this research

Managing Cultural Diversity in the Multinational Corporate Workplace: Solution or Symptom?

The aim of this paper is to show the critical relevance of post-structuralist political theory to cross-cultural management studies. By emphasizing the key role that questions of identity, difference, and struggle play in the multinational corporate context, we argue for a shift in our understandings away from essentialist conceptions of culture to an explicitly critical and political understanding of the way culture and cultural difference is invoked. Of crucial importance in understanding the nature of the shift of perspective we advocate is the affirmation of a negative ontology for which the radical contingency of social relations is axiomatic

Exploring ‘events’ as an information systems research methodology

This paper builds upon existing research and commentary from a variety of disciplinary sources including Information Systems, Organisational and Management Studies, and the Social Sciences that focus upon the meaning, significance and impact of ‘events’ in both an organisational and a social sense. The aim of this paper is to define how the examination of the event is an appropriate, viable and useful Information Systems methodology. Our argument is that focusing on the ‘event’ enables the researcher to more clearly observe and capture the complexity, multiplicity and mundaneity of everyday lived experience. The use and notion of ‘event’ has the potential to reduce the methodological dilemmas associated with the micromanagement of the research process – an inherent danger of traditional and ‘virtual' ethnographic approaches. Similarly, this paper addresses the over-emphasis upon managerialist, structured and time-fixated praxis that is currently symptomatic of Information Systems research. All of these concerns are pivotal points of critique found within eventoriented literature. An examination of event-related theory within interpretative disciplines directs the focus of this paper towards the more specific realm of the ‘event scene’. The notion of the ‘event scene’ originated in the action based (and anti-academy) imperatives of the Situationists and emerged in an academic sense as critical situational analysis. Event scenes are a focus for contemporary critical theory where they are utilised as a means of representing theoried inquiry in order to loosen the restrictions that historical and temporally bound analysis imposes upon most interpretative approaches. The use of event scenes as the framework for critiquing established conceptual assumptions is exemplified by their use in CTheory. In this journal's version and articulation of the event scene poetry, commentary, multi-vocal narrative and other techniques are legitimated as academic forms. These various forms of multi-dimensional expression are drawn upon to enrich the understandings of the ‘event’, to extricate its meaning and to provide a sense of the moment from which the point of analysis stems. The objective of this paper is to advocate how Information Systems research can (or should) utilize an event scene oriented methodology

Prediction, Recommendation and Group Analytics Models in the domain of Mashup Services and Cyber-Argumentation Platform

Mashup application development is becoming a widespread software development practice due to its appeal for a shorter application development period. Application developers usually use web APIs from different sources to create a new streamlined service and provide various features to end-users. This kind of practice saves time, ensures reliability, accuracy, and security in the developed applications. Mashup application developers integrate these available APIs into their applications. Still, they have to go through thousands of available web APIs and chose only a few appropriate ones for their application. Recommending relevant web APIs might help application developers in this situation. However, very low API invocation from mashup applications creates a sparse mashup-web API dataset for the recommendation models to learn about the mashups and their web API invocation pattern. One research aims to analyze these mashup-specific critical issues, look for supplemental information in the mashup domain, and develop web API recommendation models for mashup applications. The developed recommendation model generates useful and accurate web APIs to reduce the impact of low API invocations in mashup application development. Cyber-Argumentation platform also faces a similarly challenging issue. In large-scale cyber argumentation platforms, participants express their opinions, engage with one another, and respond to feedback and criticism from others in discussing important issues online. Argumentation analysis tools capture the collective intelligence of the participants and reveal hidden insights from the underlying discussions. However, such analysis requires that the issues have been thoroughly discussed and participant’s opinions are clearly expressed and understood. Participants typically focus only on a few ideas and leave others unacknowledged and underdiscussed. This generates a limited dataset to work with, resulting in an incomplete analysis of issues in the discussion. One solution to this problem would be to develop an opinion prediction model for cyber-argumentation. This model would predict participant’s opinions on different ideas that they have not explicitly engaged. In cyber-argumentation, individuals interact with each other without any group coordination. However, the implicit group interaction can impact the participating user\u27s opinion, attitude, and discussion outcome. One of the objectives of this research work is to analyze different group analytics in the cyber-argumentation environment. The objective is to design an experiment to inspect whether the critical concepts of the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE) are valid in our argumentation platform. This experiment can help us understand whether anonymity and group sense impact user\u27s behavior in our platform. Another section is about developing group interaction models to help us understand different aspects of group interactions in the cyber-argumentation platform. These research works can help develop web API recommendation models tailored for mashup-specific domains and opinion prediction models for the cyber-argumentation specific area. Primarily these models utilize domain-specific knowledge and integrate them with traditional prediction and recommendation approaches. Our work on group analytic can be seen as the initial steps to understand these group interactions

Interactive Audience and the Internet

This dissertation takes up a question posed by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford in 2009: “In a world of participatory media—of Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Del.icio.us—what relevance does the term audience hold?” Using a case study methodology (e.g., Dyson and Genishi; Stake; Yin), I examine how three popular internet writers—all writers who engage with political issues in different venues—conceptualize their audiences and respond to audience feedback. Using established scholarship about audience, including Ede and Lunsford’s work, as well as newer digital scholarship (e.g., Arola, Carnegie, Edbauer Rice), I extend the existing conversation on audience to the context of digital textual production. Rather than understanding participatory audiences as monolithic, my dissertation breaks up the concept of participation in order to represent its dynamic effects on the broader notion of audience. Drawing upon my case studies of current web writers, I introduce three important concepts: audience emerging, audience managed, and audience oriented. The first, audience emerging, shows us the unexplored relationship between Ede and Lunsford’s canonical terms, addressed and invoked. Understanding the nature of this oscillating relationship situates writer awareness of audience as an emerging, recursive process, much like other elements in the contemporary understanding of the writing process. Audience managed illuminates ways that a web-writer can marshal members into a community and initiate discursive norms. Her writing in this community, funneled through the template, then creates the community’s expectations and conventions. Audience oriented shows the ways in which a writer can guide their audience toward the formation of a public. Overall, this research highlights the way writers imagine and experience their audience in ongoing, continuous ways

Asymmetry in Online Social Networks

Varying degrees of symmetry can exist in a social network's connections. Some early online social networks (OSNs) were predicated on symmetrical connections, such as Facebook 'friendships' where both actors in a 'friendship' have an equal and reciprocal connection. Newer platforms -- Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook's 'Pages' inclusive -- are counterexamples of this, where 'following' another actor (friend, celebrity, business) does not guarantee a reciprocal exchange from the other. This paper argues that the basic asymmetric connections in an OSN leads to emergent asymmetrical behaviour in the OSN's overall influence and connectivity, amongst others. This paper will then draw on empirical examples from popular sites (and prior network research) to illustrate how asymmetric connections can render individuals 'voiceless'. The crux of this paper is an argument from the existentialist viewpoint on how the above asymmetric network properties lead to Sartrean bad faith (Sartre, 1943). Instead of genuine interpersonal connection, one finds varying degrees of pressure to assume the Sartrean 'in-itself' (the en soi) mode-of-being, irregardless of the magnitude of 'followers' one has. Finally, this paper poses an open question: what other philosophical issues does this inherent asymmetry in modern social networking give rise to

Comparison of DCOM and CORBA distributed computing

The movement of distributed applications from 2-tier to n-tier architectures have enabled systems to be scaled to meet the demands of an ever increasing population of users. Two middleware architectures have come to the forefront: Microsoft\u27s DCOM and the OMG\u27s CORBA. These are not the only possible architectures for n-tier distributed applications, but they are currently the only two which offer a degree of platform independence and the flexibility of using different programming languages for development. CORBA provides platform independence because it provides a middle layer between the client and the server and services client requests using its internal naming service to identify server objects and then expose methods to the client through it\u27s object adapter (POA). CORBA is a self contained middleware that operates independent of the underlying operating system. CORBA offers the potential of ease of maintainability since server objects can be changed and the new methods can be discovered at runtime by the client using CORBAs Dynamic Invocation Interface. Client code would therefore not have be recompiled as it would using static IDL mappings and client and server stubs. DCOM, in contrast is a platform dependent solution that can only be used on Windows machines, although ports for other platforms are in the works. It relies on the Windows registry to identify objects and the operating system to assist in runtime control of objects. Because DCOM is nothing more of a remote extension to the already established Common Object Model which all contemporary Windows operating systems and applications are built upon, it may provide the easiest path to distributed applications for Windows developers that are already familiar with the Common Object Model