Bridging the gap between digital libraries and e-learning

Digital Libraries (DL) are offering access to a vast amount of digital content, relevant to practically all domains of human knowledge, which makes it suitable to enhance teaching and learning. Based on a systematic literature review, this article provides an overview and a gap analysis of educational use of DLs.The research work presented in this paper is partially supported by the FP7 Grant 316087 AComIn ”Advanced Computing for Innovation”, funded by the European Commission in the FP7 Capacity Programme in 2012-2016.peer-reviewe

"Last-Mile" preparation for a potential disaster

Extreme natural events, like e.g. tsunamis or earthquakes, regularly lead to catastrophes with dramatic consequences. In recent years natural disasters caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, destruction of infrastructure, disruption of economic activity and loss of billions of dollars worth of property and thus revealed considerable deficits hindering their effective management: Needs for stakeholders, decision-makers as well as for persons concerned include systematic risk identification and evaluation, a way to assess countermeasures, awareness raising and decision support systems to be employed before, during and after crisis situations. The overall goal of this study focuses on interdisciplinary integration of various scientific disciplines to contribute to a tsunami early warning information system. In comparison to most studies our focus is on high-end geometric and thematic analysis to meet the requirements of small-scale, heterogeneous and complex coastal urban systems. Data, methods and results from engineering, remote sensing and social sciences are interlinked and provide comprehensive information for disaster risk assessment, management and reduction. In detail, we combine inundation modeling, urban morphology analysis, population assessment, socio-economic analysis of the population and evacuation modeling. The interdisciplinary results eventually lead to recommendations for mitigation strategies in the fields of spatial planning or coping capacity

Multi-service management in a multi-provider environment

As the spread of digital networks makes access to data communications globally available, the interest of communication service providers is switching away from the provision of these bearer networks and towards the provision of the value added services that will operate over them. At the same time the liberalisation of telecommunication markets is precipitating a dramatic change in the profile of communication service providers. In this complex telecommunications markets the open management, not only of the networks, but of the services themselves will become increasingly important. The large number and diversity of roles of the market players makes the management of inter-organisational relationships fundamentally important to the management of services. The ITU's series of recommendations on the telecommunication management network (TMN) provides a basis for inter-domain management, however, this and other standards have so far concentrated on the management of individual network components and of networks operated by single organisations. This paper provides an initial example of how the management of multiple services in a complex multi-player market can be modelled using TMN techniques for implementation on existing management platforms. The paper begins by briefly outlining current work in this field before describing aspects of this multi-player multi-service management problem and how they can be modelled and implemented in a real system