988 research outputs found

    Modeling expert knowledge in the mediation domain: a middle-out approach to design ODR ontologies

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    In this paper we describe the steps taken to model expert knowledge within the mediation domain as the basis for the design of the Mediation Core Ontology (MCO), of which we also offer a first outline of its present stage of development. MCO is created from scratch by eliciting practical knowledge from mediation experts to identify the basic working concepts of the domain. MCO offers initial support towards knowledge acquisition and reasoning and, in later steps, will serve as a general basis for the development of different mediation domain and sub-domain ontologies to be used by the ONTOMEDIA mediation platform, currently also under development

    Coalition based approach for shop floor agility – a multiagent approach

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    Dissertation submitted for a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, speciality of Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaThis thesis addresses the problem of shop floor agility. In order to cope with the disturbances and uncertainties that characterise the current business scenarios faced by manufacturing companies, the capability of their shop floors needs to be improved quickly, such that these shop floors may be adapted, changed or become easily modifiable (shop floor reengineering). One of the critical elements in any shop floor reengineering process is the way the control/supervision architecture is changed or modified to accommodate for the new processes and equipment. This thesis, therefore, proposes an architecture to support the fast adaptation or changes in the control/supervision architecture. This architecture postulates that manufacturing systems are no more than compositions of modularised manufacturing components whose interactions when aggregated are governed by contractual mechanisms that favour configuration over reprogramming. A multiagent based reference architecture called Coalition Based Approach for Shop floor Agility – CoBASA, was created to support fast adaptation and changes of shop floor control architectures with minimal effort. The coalitions are composed of agentified manufacturing components (modules), whose relationships within the coalitions are governed by contracts that are configured whenever a coalition is established. Creating and changing a coalition do not involve programming effort because it only requires changes to the contract that regulates it

    ODR, ontologies, and web 2.0

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    Online communities and institutions create new spaces for interaction, but also open new avenues for the emergence of grievances, claims, and disputes. Consequently, online dispute resolution (ODR) procedures are core to these new online worlds. But can ODR mechanisms provide sufficient levels of reputation, trust, and enforceability for it to become mainstream? This contribution introduces the new approaches to ODR and provides a description of the design and structure of Ontomedia, a web-based platform to facilitate online mediation in different domain

    Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

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    The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

    Concepts and fields of relational justice

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    This paper intends to clarify the broad conceptual background of relational justice. Relational Justice (RJ) is defined as the justice produced through cooperative behavior, agreement, negotiation, or dialogue among actors in a post-conflict situation. We found concepts stemming from at least thirty different fields, going from behavioral sciences (neurology, brain sciences, primatology, social psychology, etc.) to criminology, jurisprudence, and philosophy. One of these contributing fields is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which uses several techniques to grasp the practical knowledge of negotiators and mediators and builds tools to support both negotiation and mediation processes. However, contrary to the legal ontologies field, there are no ontologies of Relational Justice yet representing the conceptual richness of the domain

    Commodification of the Disaster : “Chernobyl” Case

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    30-year experience of studying “Chernobyl narrative” as a (non)fiction response to the explosion at Chernobyl nuclear energy plant (26 April, 1986) reveals that Chernobyl as a real urban Soviet City transferred into the amalgamation of its symbolic images such as a symbol of “Human-Nature” battle, an huge piece of abundant urban area, a Nature’s domination, a protector from “peaceful atom”, a tomb of the Soviet regime, selfdestroying science, a part of “private historical memory”, an unhealthy fascination (by A. Korzeniowska-Bihun), and even as a litmus test that shows the attitude of the authorities towards their own society both in the 1980s and even in the time of 2013/2014, followed by the military events. Nowadays shaped by the unique human-environment relationships, the digital society determines the transmedial transformations of “Chernobyl” perception within the convergent media culture (creating on/off-line activities – computer games S.T.A.L.K.E.R., ZONE; Chernobyl VR Project; Zone-tourism), which made “the Exclusion Zone” a subject of commodification stressing the commercialization of a nuclear disaster. “Chernobyl” extended the limits of real (and even “literary”) zone and changed into a digital place, where the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe hosts virtual characters-players wearing Exoskeletons or classic Monolith suits with gas masks and equipped with powerful weapons and aiming to reach Chernobyl Sarcopaghus and refuse Common Consciousness” Such aspect of the research is focused on studying the transformations of ”Chernobyl” (as a subject/object of commercial relations) within urban studies in the aspect of distinguishing local/global dimensions of “nuclear narrative” while stressing its implementation in shaping the “provincialized” nuclear culture. Studying the commercialized “Chernobyl” in “nuclear humanities” gives an opportunity to distinguish the local/global features of the urban studies in the context of researching ecological memory and nuclear identity in the post-traumatic societies.Peer reviewe

    Organization based multiagent architecture for distributed environments

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    [EN]Distributed environments represent a complex field in which applied solutions should be flexible and include significant adaptation capabilities. These environments are related to problems where multiple users and devices may interact, and where simple and local solutions could possibly generate good results, but may not be effective with regards to use and interaction. There are many techniques that can be employed to face this kind of problems, from CORBA to multi-agent systems, passing by web-services and SOA, among others. All those methodologies have their advantages and disadvantages that are properly analyzed in this documents, to finally explain the new architecture presented as a solution for distributed environment problems. The new architecture for solving complex solutions in distributed environments presented here is called OBaMADE: Organization Based Multiagent Architecture for Distributed Environments. It is a multiagent architecture based on the organizations of agents paradigm, where the agents in the architecture are structured into organizations to improve their organizational capabilities. The reasoning power of the architecture is based on the Case-Based Reasoning methology, being implemented in a internal organization that uses agents to create services to solve the external request made by the users. The OBaMADE architecture has been successfully applied to two different case studies where its prediction capabilities have been properly checked. Those case studies have showed optimistic results and, being complex systems, have demonstrated the abstraction and generalizations capabilities of the architecture. Nevertheless OBaMADE is intended to be able to solve much other kind of problems in distributed environments scenarios. It should be applied to other varieties of situations and to other knowledge fields to fully develop its potencial.[ES]Los entornos distribuidos representan un campo de conocimiento complejo en el que las soluciones a aplicar deben ser flexibles y deben contar con gran capacidad de adaptación. Este tipo de entornos está normalmente relacionado con problemas donde varios usuarios y dispositivos entran en juego. Para solucionar dichos problemas, pueden utilizarse sistemas locales que, aunque ofrezcan buenos resultados en términos de calidad de los mismos, no son tan efectivos en cuanto a la interacción y posibilidades de uso. Existen múltiples técnicas que pueden ser empleadas para resolver este tipo de problemas, desde CORBA a sistemas multiagente, pasando por servicios web y SOA, entre otros. Todas estas mitologías tienen sus ventajas e inconvenientes, que se analizan en este documento, para explicar, finalmente, la nueva arquitectura presentada como una solución para los problemas generados en entornos distribuidos. La nueva arquitectura aquí se llama OBaMADE, que es el acrónimo del inglés Organization Based Multiagent Architecture for Distributed Environments (Arquitectura Multiagente Basada en Organizaciones para Entornos Distribuidos). Se trata de una arquitectura multiagente basasa en el paradigma de las organizaciones de agente, donde los agentes que forman parte de la arquitectura se estructuran en organizaciones para mejorar sus capacidades organizativas. La capacidad de razonamiento de la arquitectura está basada en la metodología de razonamiento basado en casos, que se ha implementado en una de las organizaciones internas de la arquitectura por medio de agentes que crean servicios que responden a las solicitudes externas de los usuarios. La arquitectura OBaMADE se ha aplicado de forma exitosa a dos casos de estudio diferentes, en los que se han demostrado sus capacidades predictivas. Aplicando OBaMADE a estos casos de estudio se han obtenido resultados esperanzadores y, al ser sistemas complejos, se han demostrado las capacidades tanto de abstracción como de generalización de la arquitectura presentada. Sin embargo, esta arquitectura está diseñada para poder ser aplicada a más tipo de problemas de entornos distribuidos. Debe ser aplicada a más variadas situaciones y a otros campos de conocimiento para desarrollar completamente el potencial de esta arquitectura

    Indigenous Resurgence

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    From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community’s protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens

    The political ecology of spatial development initiatives, Indonesia

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    Indonesia is a socially and environmentally diverse nation where people make difficult decisions affecting the sustainability and inclusivity of their development. It contains the world's fourth largest and still rapidly growing population, who are vigorously pursuing increased economic well-being. Indonesia also contains, arguably, the worlds' most biodiverse ecosystems. Institutional complexity is high. Rapidly changing legislation and shifting hierarchies of control have beset the stewardship of natural, economic, and social assets with difficulties. Indonesia's development threats and opportunities, alongside its rich but degrading natural resources present governance challenges, the lessons of which have relevance and implications far beyond Indonesia's borders. My thesis explores the lessons learned from landscapes in Indonesia, where the difficult decisions over resource-use allocations unfold. Using place-based, sustainability science, and a transdisciplinary research approach, I diagnose the social, economic, environmental, and political change underway in landscapes on four islands. These islands span Indonesia's comparatively less developed east, to the more developed west. Landscapes are the unit of analysis due to evidence that they are the most manageable scale to understand and 'enter' systems. The landscapes examined in thesis are recipients of large investments into extractive industries, agriculture, and other spatial development initiatives. I examine these drivers of change in different contexts, including estate crops, gold-mines, infrastructure, and decentralized governance. The thesis addresses three overarching questions, (1) what are leverage points in landscapes for interventions that lead to long-term sustainable development outcomes? (2) What are the impacts of spatial development initiatives on livelihoods and the environment within a landscape? (3) How might research better support co-learning to improve processes and outcomes of landscape change. I collaboratively frame the issues and potential solutions with local people affecting and affected by decisions over resource use and allocation. I experiment with a range of participatory qualitative and quantitative methods including Q Methodology, visualization techniques, theory of change, interviews, and actor network analysis. My results show that governance is the main constraint to sustainable and inclusive development in landscapes. Narratives that shape governance in landscapes emerge from politically diverse vantage points. Science to enhance sustainability and inclusivity must understand these political vantage points and begin to co-generate narratives with the full range of decision-makers in landscapes. Landscape-level network analysis can help identify where knowledge co-generation and integration is opportune and can be more influential. Clear and agreed theories of change should emphasize the need to shift institutional arrangements so that they are more conducive to inclusive and sustainable development. The key lesson from this research is that local governance arrangements evolve to meet the expectations of people in their own contexts, which may be counter-intuitive to external researchers who have preconceptions of what constitutes good, sustainable, and inclusive development. But Indonesia's governance systems face the same adaptation challenges observed globally, where economic and infrastructural developments outpace social adaption rates. Organizations that wish to improve decision-making processes toward enhanced sustainability and inclusivity should seek opportunities to more strategically leverage change. Efforts should be made to bridge gaps between traditional and State management systems. This requires diagnosing the entire social-political-economic-ecological system. To assist, scientists and academia must put more emphasis on the cogeneration and integration of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, into the pre-existing actor-networks that shape landscapes. Lessons from Indonesia contribute insights for broader global sustainable development solutions
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