2,743 research outputs found

    Resources-Events-Agents Design Theory: A Revolutionary Approach to Enterprise System Design

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    Enterprise systems typically include constructs such as ledgers and journals with debit and credit entries as central pillars of the systems’ architecture due in part to accountants and auditors who demand those constructs. At best, structuring systems with such constructs as base objects results in the storing the same data at multiple levels of aggregation, which creates inefficiencies in the database. At worst, basing systems on such constructs destroys details that are unnecessary for accounting but that may facilitate decision making by other enterprise functional areas. McCarthy (1982) proposed the resources-events-agents (REA) framework as an alternative structure for a shared data environment more than thirty years ago, and scholars have further developed it such that it is now a robust design theory. Despite this legacy, the broad IS community has not widely researched REA. In this paper, we discuss REA’s genesis and primary constructs, provide a history of REA research, discuss REA’s impact on practice, and speculate as to what the future may hold for REA-based enterprise systems. We invite IS researchers to consider integrating REA constructs with other theories and various emerging technologies to help advance the future of information systems and business research

    Measuring User Beliefs and Attitudes towards Conceptual Schemas: Tentative Factor and Structural Equation Model

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    Human factors research in conceptual modeling is scarce. Recently, quality assurance frameworks, methods and tools for conceptual schemas have received increased research attention, but the perception of quality by schema users has largely been ignored in this stream of research. This paper proposes a tentative model of user beliefs and attitudes towards the quality of conceptual schemas. The proposed model is original in the sense that it includes both perceived semantic quality and perceived pragmatic quality measures. The paper also presents a new measurement instrument for the perceived semantic quality of conceptual schemas. This instrument was used in a classroom experiment that tested the proposed user beliefs and attitudes model. It was shown that the perceived semantic quality of a schema is directly related to its perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use and indirectly to the user satisfaction with the schema

    Percieved Evaluability - Development of a Theoretical Model and a Measurement Scale

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    Sound conceptual models are commonly considered as an important factor for successful information systems (IS) development. Due to inaccurate conceptual specifications, IS projects can be delayed or even fail. Thus, thorough evaluation of models is a major concern in IS research. Consequently, theoretical models are required which elucidate the conditions for the successful evaluability of conceptual models. However, IS literature only provides little insights about the prerequisites of effective evaluation. Systematic investigations on the evaluability of conceptual models are missing. Therefore, is paper aims at two research results. Firstly, based on a comprehensive literature review we propose a theoretical model of perceived evaluability. This theoretical model rests on the influence of domain knowledge and the perceived comprehensibility of conceptual models as its two main impact factors. Secondly, to prepare an empirical evaluation of the theoretical model, the development of measurement scales is described. The first steps of this process are exemplified based on an inquiry of modeling experts and implications for testing our hypotheses are provide

    Effectiveness of Domain Ontologies to Facilitate Shared Understanding and Cross-Understanding

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    Shared cognition constructs such as shared understanding and cross-understanding are important factors in team performance. Although research has focused on understanding the effects of these constructs, little emphasis has been placed on improving their development. In Information Systems and related fields shared understanding of a domain is said to be facilitated by the use of a domain ontology, however there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this claim. Accordingly, in this research-in-progress paper, we report our efforts to develop a deep understanding of the benefits of domain ontology use at the group level. Specifically, we propose a model that theorizes the relationships between domain ontology use and the development of shared understanding and cross-understanding of domains. Additionally, we provide details of operationalization and empirical validation of our model, and the current state of this research

    How quickly do we learn conceptual models?

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    In organizations, conceptual models are used for understanding domain concepts. Learning the domain from models is crucial for the analysis and design of information systems that are intended to support the domain. Past research has proposed theories to structure conceptual models in order to improve learning. It has, however, never been investigated how quickly domain knowledge is acquired when using theory-guided conceptual models. Based on theoretical arguments, we hypothesize that theory-guided conceptual models expedite the initial stages of learning. Using the REA ontology pattern as an example of theoretical guidance, we show in a laboratory experiment how an eye-tracking procedure can be used to investigate the effect of using theory-guided models on the speed of learning. Whereas our experiment shows positive effects on both outcome and speed of learning in the initial stages of learning, the real contribution of our paper is methodological, i.e. an eye-tracking procedure to observe the process of learning from conceptual models

    Can A Single Exposure To The Resource-Event-Agent Framework Enhance Data Modeling Performance?

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    Due to the widespread use of technology, it is becoming increasingly critical that accounting students have the ability to document accounting information systems (AIS).  This skill is important for understanding the information system, mapping business processes, and understanding systems’ controls.  The present study reports on an experiment designed to investigate the effects of a single exposure to the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) framework on students’ data modeling performance.  The results of the experiment indicate that accounting students who receive a single, scripted exposure to the REA framework perform better on data modeling tasks than students with no exposure to the REA framework.  This has important implications for accounting educators as they develop classroom instruction and administrators as they contemplate an appropriate emphasis on data modeling in the accounting curriculum

    Intonation And Reading Skills In Fourth-Grade Students

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    The purpose of the current study was to examine the role of intonation skills in the reading comprehension of fourth-grade students. Although, the National Reading Panel\u27s (2000) definition of reading fluency as ...the ability to read a text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression... (p. 3-5) suggests a role for prosody and intonation in reading, these features have not figured prominently in reading research and studies that have examined the relationship between intonation and reading have reported varying results. The current study adopted the view that intonation is one of the many linguistic skills that support children\u27s reading skills. From this perspective, the study examined the relationship between intonation and reading comprehension within the framework of the Simple View of Reading (SVR), a model that describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. Based on previous work by Miller and Schwanenflugel (2006, 2008), the study examined whether children who produced wider or more adult-like final rising intonation contours demonstrated greater reading comprehension than children who produced narrower or less adult-like final rising contours? The current study did not find support for a relationship between children\u27s productions of wider or more adult-like final rising intonation contours and their reading comprehension. The current study also examined whether inclusion of measures of intonation in the SVR accounted for additional variance in reading comprehension. The results supported inclusion of two intonation variables: 1) accuracy in producing appropriate final intonation contour direction to mark questions when reading; and 2) ability on the receptive subtests of the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems-Child assessment procedure (PEPS-C; Peppé & McCann, 2003), a computerized assessment of intonation. Additional statistical analyses indicated that the Chunking Reception and Contrastive Stress Reception subtests of the PEPS-C showed the strongest relationship with reading comprehension. Finally, inclusion of these intonation variables in a SVR framework reduced the significance of the relationship between the decoding and reading comprehension variables

    Prosody beyond pitch and emotion in speech and music: evidence from right hemisphere brain damage and congenital amusia

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    This dissertation examines the relationship of prosodic processing in language and music from a new perspective, considering acoustic features that have not been studied before in the framework of the parallel study of language and music. These features are argued to contribute to the effect of ‘expressiveness’ which is here defined as the combination of the acoustic features (variation in duration, pitch, loudness, and articulation) that results in aesthetic appreciation of the linguistic and the musical acoustic stream and which is distinct from pitch, emotional and pragmatic prosody as well as syntactic structure. The present investigation took a neuropsychological approach, comparing the performance of a right temporo-parietal stroke patient IB; a congenitally amusic individual, BZ; and 24 control participants with and without musical training. Apart from the main focus on the perception of ‘expressiveness’, additional aspects of language and music perception were studied. A new battery was designed that consisted of 8 tasks; ‘speech prosody detection’, ‘expressive speech prosody’, ‘expressive music prosody’, ‘emotional speech prosody’, ‘emotional music prosody, ‘speech pitch’, ‘speech rate’, and ‘music tempo’. These tasks addressed both theoretical and methodological issues in this comparative cognitive framework. IB’s performance on the expressive speech prosody task revealed a severe perceptual impairment, whereas his performance on the analogous music task examining ‘expressiveness’ was unimpaired. BZ also performed successfully on the same music task despite being characterised as congenital amusic by an earlier study. Musically untrained controls also had a successful performance. The data from IB suggest that speech and music stimuli encompassing similar features are not necessarily processed by the same mechanisms. These results can have further implications for the approach to the relationship of language and music within the study of cognitive deficits

    Mapping Acoustic and Semantic Dimensions of Auditory Perception

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    Auditory categorisation is a function of sensory perception which allows humans to generalise across many different sounds present in the environment and classify them into behaviourally relevant categories. These categories cover not only the variance of acoustic properties of the signal but also a wide variety of sound sources. However, it is unclear to what extent the acoustic structure of sound is associated with, and conveys, different facets of semantic category information. Whether people use such data and what drives their decisions when both acoustic and semantic information about the sound is available, also remains unknown. To answer these questions, we used the existing methods broadly practised in linguistics, acoustics and cognitive science, and bridged these domains by delineating their shared space. Firstly, we took a model-free exploratory approach to examine the underlying structure and inherent patterns in our dataset. To this end, we ran principal components, clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses. At the same time, we drew sound labels’ semantic space topography based on corpus-based word embeddings vectors. We then built an LDA model predicting class membership and compared the model-free approach and model predictions with the actual taxonomy. Finally, by conducting a series of web-based behavioural experiments, we investigated whether acoustic and semantic topographies relate to perceptual judgements. This analysis pipeline showed that natural sound categories could be successfully predicted based on the acoustic information alone and that perception of natural sound categories has some acoustic grounding. Results from our studies help to recognise the role of physical sound characteristics and their meaning in the process of sound perception and give an invaluable insight into the mechanisms governing the machine-based and human classifications
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