Knowledge Representation with Ontologies: The Present and Future

Recently, we have seen an explosion of interest in ontologies as artifacts to represent human knowledge and as critical components in knowledge management, the semantic Web, business-to-business applications, and several other application areas. Various research communities commonly assume that ontologies are the appropriate modeling structure for representing knowledge. However, little discussion has occurred regarding the actual range of knowledge an ontology can successfully represent

Bilingualism in Bolzano-Bozen: a nexus analysis

This study is about discourses of bilingualism in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, and what they reveal about language, identity, hegemony and the production of social space. The theoretical and methodological framework I use is Nexus Analysis and Geosemiotics: approaches developed by Scollon and Wong Scollon (2004 and 2003, respectively). These approaches have revealed how and why place names, their public placement, Fascist-era monuments and bilingual education maintained a constant presence, under broader discourses on bilingualism, during the research period. Nexus Analysis focuses on social action and Geosemiotics pays meticulous attention to fundamental aspects of signs, including where they are in the material world, and how social actors interact with them. This has led to an investigation of the historical past, and how this is represented, understood and indexed in the present by those who align (or not) to ideologies of language and nation. In the complex multilingual context of this study, this approach has revealed how such ideologies are mobilized to contest ownership of geographic place and to make social space. I have traced discourses across disparate discursive genres, to reveal the complex interrelationships between language and other social semiotic data in discourses on bilingualism in Bolzano-Bozen through time, and across space

Being a South Tyrolean: Examining Identity in Conversation and Linguistic Landscapes

In this dissertation, I examine the role of language in the enacting of identity in the German-speaking community in the province of South Tyrol, Italy. Within this province on the border between Austria and Italy, the languages of German, Italian, and Ladin are recognized as official languages, and the vast majority of the population there is multilingual. Group and cultural identities in this province are strongly connected to language. Despite the close proximity of these language groups, there is relatively little mixing between them. This dissertation focuses on the German-speaking community in South Tyrol and examines conversation and publicly-displayed signs in order to offer a better understanding of how this community enacts and negotiates these identities. I follow Zimmerman’s (1998) approach to identity, which holds that how identities are made relevant in a particular stretch of talk-in-interaction can reveal information about the interlocutors’ “transportable identities” and the larger social order. Blommaert (2005) echoes this notion, arguing that identities extend beyond the practices that both construct them and are influenced by them. Using this methodological approach, I use both interactional data from interviews with German-speaking South Tyroleans and the linguistic practices found in the linguistic landscape of South Tyrol to examine aspects of identity. Using the evidence found in these two data sets, I show that broader Discourses (Gee, 2014) can be found in these examples of day-to-day interactions and practices. Using the tools of interactional linguistics, I analyze transcribed interview data to show how my interview participants construct membership categories for the food traditions and the geography of South Tyrol. For these participants, “being South Tyrolean” is something that is greater than the sum of the parts, as well as contradictory at times. I show through selected examples from the linguistic landscape of South Tyrol how an official Discourse is displayed and reinforced on not only government-produced signs, but also on private signs. Fundamental to this Discourse is the viewpoint that the German language and language group are to be equal to the Italian language and language group, a viewpoint that has helped to protect the German language, but has also contributed to more rigid boundaries between the two groups. These Discourses can offer a more fine-grained understanding of group and cultural identities. Further, they can inform political and language policy decisions not only in the province of South Tyrol but also in the broader context of the country of Italy and the European Union

Social work in a border region. 20 years of social work education at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

This volume collects contributions to an international conference held on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the degree programme in Social Work at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. The conference aimed at the reflexive assessment of the challenges for social work education, practice, and research highlighting the importance of both context and cultural sensitivity as well as the outreach through dialogue, exchange, and learning in a comparative and European perspective. The contributions intend to foster such a dialogue as well as the development of a common and critical understanding of social work as a profession and discipline which engages with its historical and political contexts and keeps alive the debate about its scientific foundations, values, professional standards and criteria of appropriateness and accountability in different practice fields and in changing welfare arrangements. (DIPF/Orig.

Evaluating Zotero, SHERPA/RoMEO, and Unpaywall in an Institutional Repository Workflow

East Tennessee State University developed a workflow to add journal publications to their institutional repository and faculty profiles using three tools: Zotero for entering metadata, SHERPA/RoMEO for checking copyright permissions, and Unpaywall for locating full-text documents. This study evaluates availability and accuracy of the information and documents provided by Zotero, SHERPA/RoMEO, and Unpaywall for journal publications in four disciplines. The tools were less successful with works authored by arts and humanities and education faculty in comparison to works authored by medicine and health sciences and social and behavioral sciences faculty. The findings suggest that publisher practices contributed to the disciplinary differences

When skillful participation becomes design : making clothes together

This dissertation investigates the intersection and fluidity of design, use and participation when participatory design (PD) extends its focus to new forms, spaces and community contexts. Whereas early PD aimed to enable user participation in the design of their workplaces, contemporary PD experiences new challenges by expanding to new contexts. These contexts are, for instance, “makerspaces” for “peer production”, dedicated to placing participants with varying knowledge and skill into dialogue while providing spaces, tools, materials, and guidance. When extending PD to such spaces, the roles of the designer/user become blurred, because over time they move along a spectrum of acts of design and use. I investigated this challenge by creating three exemplary sites for designing and making clothes together. By designing together I refer to enabling the garment user to participate in the design and production process through offering local spaces and means for shared making activities. I blend PD, do-it-yourself, and do-it-together activities with concepts from peer production, to explore how participants (designer and user) with different skills are “making clothes together”. Simultaneously, I sensitize the participants to sustainable alternatives to the global mass-production system in fashion, which is traditionally based on fast, cheap and high-volume production in low-labor-cost countries. I carried out three “research through design” experiments, creating different kinds of peer production makerspace settings in Finland, Germany and Italy. These spaces were distinctive in the social diversity of their participants; themes and engagement methods, and in their focus on clothing. This focus offered the participants a familiar repertoire of technical equipment (e.g. household sewing machines) and was thus beneficial for observing the blurring of roles between designer and user. Each experiment consisted of a series of participatory making workshops, each lasting three to six hours. During a total of about 60 workshops with hundreds of participants, I collected rich materials such as design diary notes, observations, photographs, and audio recordings of qualitative interviews. The experiments posed specific questions that led me to emergent conceptualizations of “stuff” (i.e. tools, materials, spaces) and “skills”. These stuff and skills were analyzed in terms of their evolving interdependence and their relation to participation and the blurring of roles. The dissertation is structured as the presentation of the main findings of four peer-reviewed journal articles and an introductory chapter. I outline five main contributions to extended PD research and practice. First, my research illustrated the fluid spectrum that spans design and use, through interrelating conceptions from literature with a substantial amount of materials documented through practice. Second, through systematic analysis of stuff and skills, the research explored the social and material considerations of design and “infrastructuring”. Third, I documented how the participants’ (designer and user) roles changed and how participation is a development process over time. The participants’ roles changed from categories such as beginner to advanced experts and allowed associations between those with different kinds of material engagements from operating to managing to designing. This was seen, for instance, by participants taking over responsibilities and becoming workshop facilitators; or a local visitor who turned out to be a sewing machine repair expert. Fourth, I propose that in the given context, participation can be understood as skillful acts of use. This perspective helped me recognize and document changes in the participants’ roles and types of participation when framed as acts of use, determined by skills. Finally, the developed categories documented the relation between participation and skill, by highlighting interesting dynamics emerging around skills development, materialized through evolving and changing stuff (i.e. social and material infrastructuring). For example, skilled participants developed or brought their own tools for facilitation. This further elucidated how skills are not static but interrelated, and that specific skills are required and can be developed through different social, material and designerly aspects, attuned to such extended PD contexts. The results, therefore, contribute to extended PD research by adding nuances extracted from practice, to highlight how skillful participation changes over time. This suggests a reconceptualization and broadening of traditional PD or co-design perspectives of roles. For practice, the perspective of framing participation as skillful acts of use allows designers to support participants’ skills (development) during participation. Further, my research identified that a focus on user or designer roles is limiting in such contexts. It advocates designing spaces for infrastructuring, which allow changes in participation and anticipate unexpected use: spaces that nourish skills development and encourage the sharing of responsibilities among very different participants which can potentially be sustained over time