On retracts, absolute retracts, and folds in cographs

Let G and H be two cographs. We show that the problem to determine whether H is a retract of G is NP-complete. We show that this problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the size of H. When restricted to the class of threshold graphs or to the class of trivially perfect graphs, the problem becomes tractable in polynomial time. The problem is also soluble when one cograph is given as an induced subgraph of the other. We characterize absolute retracts of cographs.Comment: 15 page

Managing creative eco-innovation: Structuring outputs from eco-innovation projects

Increasing legislative pressures and consumer awareness of environmentally efficient products are causing businesses to look at Sustainable Product Design (SPD) as an opportunity to improve their products and processes. Business and academia have identified a need for strategic approaches to SPD that will result in ‘step-change’ improvements in the design of products and services. Eco-innovation aims to develop new products and processes which provide customer and business value but significantly decrease environmental impact. Eco-innovation considers environmental aspects of the product at early stages of the New Product Development process. The research presented in this paper looks at the use of eco-innovation tools and focuses on idea generation within ecoinnovation processes. Two novel tools were developed to help review the results from previously conducted eco-innovation workshops: the Standard Design Process Form and the Product Ideas Tree (PIT) diagram. This paper shows the development of these two tools and demonstrates their potential to assist in structuring and documenting ideas throughout the eco-innovation process. The paper discusses the benefits of using such documentation and how it may subsequently improve the management of eco innovation throughout the design process

Holistic corpus-based dialectology

This paper is concerned with sketching future directions for corpus-based dialectology. We advocate a holistic approach to the study of geographically conditioned linguistic variability, and we present a suitable methodology, 'corpusbased dialectometry', in exactly this spirit. Specifically, we argue that in order to live up to the potential of the corpus-based method, practitioners need to (i) abandon their exclusive focus on individual linguistic features in favor of the study of feature aggregates, (ii) draw on computationally advanced multivariate analysis techniques (such as multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis), and (iii) aid interpretation of empirical results by marshalling state-of-the-art data visualization techniques. To exemplify this line of analysis, we present a case study which explores joint frequency variability of 57 morphosyntax features in 34 dialects all over Great Britain

Identifying communities of practice: analysing ontologies as networks to support community recognition

Communities of practice are seen as increasingly important for creating, sharing and applying organisational knowledge. Yet their informal nature makes them difficult to identify and manage. In this paper we set out ONTOCOPI, a system that applies ontology-based network analysis techniques to target the problem of identifying such communities