Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Sustainable and Responsible Design Education: Tensions in Transitions

Sustainable and Responsible Design (SRD) harnesses design’s potential to address eco-social problems and in doing so challenge the status quo of design education by reframing the social and ecological consequences, boundaries and agencies of design. This critical and transdisciplinary approach frays the edges of traditional design disciplines with embedded and reflexive modes of learning. We describe characteristics of SRD education and present theories of learning to empower students in this complex terrain. The learning associated with SRD education is ecologically engaged, participative, critical, expansive and designerly. We recount case studies of our own experiences advancing sustainable and responsible undergraduate design education in the UK. We identify path constraints such as disciplinary fragility, appropriation, and power dynamics in the design school. The push for a revision of priorities generates tensions where there is often greenwashing rhetoric of sustainability and inclusivity. We describe strategies and tactics to address these tensions. We highlight the agency we have as educators and designers and argue that design education can only meaningfully participate in response to the challenges presented by climate change, other types of ecocide, and social problems when educators make substantive commitments to supporting sustainability literacies and design approaches that serve the interests of diverse stakeholders

Towards a machine enabled semantic framework for the distributed engineering design

The overall aim of this thesis is to identify and propose a suitable architectural framework for supporting cooperation processes and therefore enabling semantics within the distributed engineering design environment. The proposed architecture is intended to\ud characterize a software-based management of design related data, information and knowledge flows in the distributed engineering design organization. The aim is to provide a computational context for implementing ICT tools that would: (i) Minimise the effect of user and resource dispersion (particularly temporal and geographical dispersion), the misunderstandings that might be generated by the\ud (otherwise beneficial) functional and semantic distribution, the time spent for searching and retrieval of information, the effort of information translation between different tools and the administrational and organisational efforts not directly related to the design process (e.g. revision control) (ii) Maximise the quality of information (i.e. relevant information at relevant and appropriate times), knowledge sharing and reuse among distributed design\ud actors, the flexibility of the user interfaces and the designer’s time spent in the actual designing process.\ud In order to achieve the overall aim, the research work supporting this thesis was carried out along the following objectives:\ud 1. To investigate and characterize the engineering design process performed in a distributed environment and its problematic aspects;\ud 2. To research and study alternative theories for thinking and modelling the distributed engineering design process;\ud 3. To investigate current research in information and knowledge management for identifying supporting technologies for a possible solution to the identified\ud problematic aspects (from point 1);\ud 4. To analyze the requirement needs for a solution according to the findings from previous objectives, i.e. the driving problems (from point 1), the research and\ud therefore the thinking approach (from point 2), and available supporting technologies (from point 3);\ud 5. To synthesize the architectural framework along the identified supporting technologies (from point 3);\ud 6. To instantiate a software system along the underlying computational context as described by the architectural framework (from point 5)

Enhancing Automation and Interoperability in Enterprise Crowdsourcing Environments

The last couple of years have seen a fascinating evolution. While the early Web predominantly focused on human consumption of Web content, the widespread dissemination of social software and Web 2.0 technologies enabled new forms of collaborative content creation and problem solving. These new forms often utilize the principles of collective intelligence, a phenomenon that emerges from a group of people who either cooperate or compete with each other to create a result that is better or more intelligent than any individual result (Leimeister, 2010; Malone, Laubacher, & Dellarocas, 2010). Crowdsourcing has recently gained attention as one of the mechanisms that taps into the power of web-enabled collective intelligence (Howe, 2008). Brabham (2013) defines it as “an online, distributed problem-solving and production model that leverages the collective intelligence of online communities to serve specific organizational goals” (p. xix). Well-known examples of crowdsourcing platforms are Wikipedia, Amazon Mechanical Turk, or InnoCentive. Since the emergence of the term crowdsourcing in 2006, one popular misconception is that crowdsourcing relies largely on an amateur crowd rather than a pool of professional skilled workers (Brabham, 2013). As this might be true for low cognitive tasks, such as tagging a picture or rating a product, it is often not true for complex problem-solving and creative tasks, such as developing a new computer algorithm or creating an impressive product design. This raises the question of how to efficiently allocate an enterprise crowdsourcing task to appropriate members of the crowd. The sheer number of crowdsourcing tasks available at crowdsourcing intermediaries makes it especially challenging for workers to identify a task that matches their skills, experiences, and knowledge (Schall, 2012, p. 2). An explanation why the identification of appropriate expert knowledge plays a major role in crowdsourcing is partly given in Condorcet’s jury theorem (Sunstein, 2008, p. 25). The theorem states that if the average participant in a binary decision process is more likely to be correct than incorrect, then as the number of participants increases, the higher the probability is that the aggregate arrives at the right answer. When assuming that a suitable participant for a task is more likely to give a correct answer or solution than an improper one, efficient task recommendation becomes crucial to improve the aggregated results in crowdsourcing processes. Although some assumptions of the theorem, such as independent votes, binary decisions, and homogenous groups, are often unrealistic in practice, it illustrates the importance of an optimized task allocation and group formation that consider the task requirements and workers’ characteristics. Ontologies are widely applied to support semantic search and recommendation mechanisms (Middleton, De Roure, & Shadbolt, 2009). However, little research has investigated the potentials and the design of an ontology for the domain of enterprise crowdsourcing. The author of this thesis argues in favor of enhancing the automation and interoperability of an enterprise crowdsourcing environment with the introduction of a semantic vocabulary in form of an expressive but easy-to-use ontology. The deployment of a semantic vocabulary for enterprise crowdsourcing is likely to provide several technical and economic benefits for an enterprise. These benefits were the main drivers in efforts made during the research project of this thesis: 1. Task allocation: With the utilization of the semantics, requesters are able to form smaller task-specific crowds that perform tasks at lower costs and in less time than larger crowds. A standardized and controlled vocabulary allows requesters to communicate specific details about a crowdsourcing activity within a web page along with other existing displayed information. This has advantages for both contributors and requesters. On the one hand, contributors can easily and precisely search for tasks that correspond to their interests, experiences, skills, knowledge, and availability. On the other hand, crowdsourcing systems and intermediaries can proactively recommend crowdsourcing tasks to potential contributors (e.g., based on their social network profiles). 2. Quality control: Capturing and storing crowdsourcing data increases the overall transparency of the entire crowdsourcing activity and thus allows for a more sophisticated quality control. Requesters are able to check the consistency and receive appropriate support to verify and validate crowdsourcing data according to defined data types and value ranges. Before involving potential workers in a crowdsourcing task, requesters can also judge their trustworthiness based on previous accomplished tasks and hence improve the recruitment process. 3. Task definition: A standardized set of semantic entities supports the configuration of a crowdsourcing task. Requesters can evaluate historical crowdsourcing data to get suggestions for equal or similar crowdsourcing tasks, for example, which incentive or evaluation mechanism to use. They may also decrease their time to configure a crowdsourcing task by reusing well-established task specifications of a particular type. 4. Data integration and exchange: Applying a semantic vocabulary as a standard format for describing enterprise crowdsourcing activities allows not only crowdsourcing systems inside but also crowdsourcing intermediaries outside the company to extract crowdsourcing data from other business applications, such as project management, enterprise resource planning, or social software, and use it for further processing without retyping and copying the data. Additionally, enterprise or web search engines may exploit the structured data and provide enhanced search, browsing, and navigation capabilities, for example, clustering similar crowdsourcing tasks according to the required qualifications or the offered incentives.:Summary: Hetmank, L. (2014). Enhancing Automation and Interoperability in Enterprise Crowdsourcing Environments (Summary). Article 1: Hetmank, L. (2013). Components and Functions of Crowdsourcing Systems – A Systematic Literature Review. In 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI). Leipzig. Article 2: Hetmank, L. (2014). A Synopsis of Enterprise Crowdsourcing Literature. In 22nd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). Tel Aviv. Article 3: Hetmank, L. (2013). Towards a Semantic Standard for Enterprise Crowdsourcing – A Scenario-based Evaluation of a Conceptual Prototype. In 21st European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). Utrecht. Article 4: Hetmank, L. (2014). Developing an Ontology for Enterprise Crowdsourcing. In Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI). Paderborn. Article 5: Hetmank, L. (2014). An Ontology for Enhancing Automation and Interoperability in Enterprise Crowdsourcing Environments (Technical Report). Retrieved from http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa-155187

Exploring sources of competitive advantage in e-business applications: A cross-industries case study in mainland China

A review of existing literature revealed that little theoretical framework exists to capture e-business-enabled value creation through an integrated approach that includes the environmental view and resource-based view (RBV). Furthermore, little empirical research has been conducted to test these theoretical frameworks, in particular in the Chinese business context. The aim of this research is to extend the theoretical and practical understanding of e-business-enabled sources of competitive advantage (SCA) in China. The value chain (VC) concept, virtual value chain (VVC) framework and RBV were identified from the literature as the key constructs to underpin the theoretical basis. The research design used a qualitative research methodology consisting of indepth case studies of nine leading Chinese companies in three industries - housing development, manufacturing, and B2C. The principle finding is the formulation of a theoretical framework for investigating ebusiness value creations which integrates the key constructs of the VVC, online information capabilities (OIC), value system and RVB. This research also proposes a typology of five generic types of key e-business applications which states clearly the relationships between key e-business applications and SCA. Finally, this research demonstrates that e-business value creation features differently between two groups: Internet pragmatist and Internet pioneers. The research offers a number of contributions to the field of e-business value creation. Firstly, it introduces the concepts of OIC and value system to the VVC. It also provides empirical test of the analytical framework. In addition, this research provides an indepth understanding of the relationships between types of e-business applications and key SCA. Finally, this research identifies and explains the key differences and similarities between the three industries, within each industry, and between the two key groups

Cultural Heritage on line

The 2nd International Conference "Cultural Heritage online – Empowering users: an active role for user communities" was held in Florence on 15-16 December 2009. It was organised by the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Library of Congress, through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program - NDIIP partners. The conference topics were related to digital libraries, digital preservation and the changing paradigms, focussing on user needs and expectations, analysing how to involve users and the cultural heritage community in creating and sharing digital resources. The sessions investigated also new organisational issues and roles, and cultural and economic limits from an international perspective

You are the controller: the ubiquitous interface and interactive digital media art installations

This is the Proceedings Book of the 2nd Interface Politics International Conference (After Post-Truth) organised at BAU College of Design in Barcelona which includes most of papers and keynotes held during the conference that took place in BAU, HANGAR and MACBA on 29, 29 and 30 of November 2018. The conference was organized by GREDITS (Research Group in Design and Social Transformation) with the contribution of HANGAR, MACBA and Artnodes Journal which published a special issue on the Conference. // Interface Politics is an International Conference originally created by GREDITS / BAU in 2016 with the aim of analyzing and discussing the role of interfaces as a communicational and linguistic mechanism, and as a device with political, commercial and labor agency. An interface can be defined as a communication system that serves to translate physical realities into technical languages and viceversa, or to make compatible different technical languages. // The second Conference was devoted to explore the relationships between interfaces and the Post-Truth regime