Specifying and implementing social Web services operation using commitments

This paper discusses the specification and development of social Web services using commitments. Social Web services establish and maintain networks of contacts, count on their (privileged) contacts when needed, form with other peers strong and long lasting collaborative groups, and know with whom to partner so that ontology reconciliation is minimized. To guarantee the proper execution of these operations, social Web services need to comply with the regulations of the social networks in which they have signed up. This compliance is verified using commitments. Two types of commitments are identified: social and business. The former connect Web services to social networks. And the latter connect social Web services to composite social Web services. A proof-of-concept system to detect commitment violations is, also, discussed in this paper. © 2012 ACM

An Approach to Transform Public Administration into SOA-based Organizations

Nowadays, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is widely spread in private organizations. However, when transferring this knowledge to Public Administration, it is realized that it has not been transformed in terms of its legal nature into organizations capable to operate under the SOA paradigm. This fact prevents public administration bodies from offering the efficient services they have been provided by different boards of governments. A high-level framework to perform this transformation is proposed. Taking it as starting point, an instance of a SOA Target Meta-Model can be obtained by means of an iterative and incremental process based on the analysis of imperatives and focused on the particular business context of each local public administration. This paper briefly presents a practical experience consisting in applying this process to a Spanish regional public administration.Junta de Andalucía TIC-578

A canonical theory of dynamic decision-making

Decision-making behavior is studied in many very different fields, from medicine and eco- nomics to psychology and neuroscience, with major contributions from mathematics and statistics, computer science, AI, and other technical disciplines. However the conceptual- ization of what decision-making is and methods for studying it vary greatly and this has resulted in fragmentation of the field. A theory that can accommodate various perspectives may facilitate interdisciplinary working. We present such a theory in which decision-making is articulated as a set of canonical functions that are sufficiently general to accommodate diverse viewpoints, yet sufficiently precise that they can be instantiated in different ways for specific theoretical or practical purposes. The canons cover the whole decision cycle, from the framing of a decision based on the goals, beliefs, and background knowledge of the decision-maker to the formulation of decision options, establishing preferences over them, and making commitments. Commitments can lead to the initiation of new decisions and any step in the cycle can incorporate reasoning about previous decisions and the rationales for them, and lead to revising or abandoning existing commitments. The theory situates decision-making with respect to other high-level cognitive capabilities like problem solving, planning, and collaborative decision-making. The canonical approach is assessed in three domains: cognitive and neuropsychology, artificial intelligence, and decision engineering

Enhancing the environmental sustainability of IT

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring green I

Toward establishing a universal basic health norm.

Vast improvements in human health have been made during the past century. Indeed, gains in increased life expectancy and reduced physical impediments for much of the population were greater than in any previous century. Yet the gains were not uniform across the world or even within individual countries. The variations in health status among people cannot for the most part be explained through genetic differences. Instead, in most instances the variations in the last century and at the turn of the current century correspond to the variations in the distribution of control over material resources.</jats:p

Proliferation and fragmentation: Transactions costs and the value of aid

The problem of the proliferation of the number of aid donors and aid channels continues to worsen. It is widely and plausibly believed that this significantly; reduces the value of aid by increasing direct and indirect transactions costs. We contribute to the existing literature by: (a) categorising the apparent adverse effects of proliferation; (b) producing a reliable and fair indicator of the relative degree to which the main bilateral donors proliferate or concentrate their aid; (c) giving some explanation of why some donors proliferate more than others; (d) constructing a reliable measure of the extent to to which recipients suffer from the problem of fragmentation in the sources of their aid; and (e) demonstrating that the worst proliferators among the aid donors are especially likely); to be suppliers of aid to recipients suffering most from fragmentation. There are significant implications for aid policy

Big Governance Research: Institutional Constraints, the Validity Gap and BIM

The pressing questions about governance today require research on a scale, and of a complexity, that the existing institutional environment for research has great difficulty supporting. This article identifies some of the current institutional constraints on governance research, and examines a set of institutional innovations that enable a form of 'big governance research' that begins to meet the information and knowledge requirements of contemporary governance questions. It presents the organisation and methodology of the multi-country study 'Modes of Service Delivery, Collective Action and Social Accountability in Brazil, India and Mexico' (henceforth BIM, for Brazil, India and Mexico). The authors argue that the organisational and funding model that this study has created permits the type of interdisciplinary, process-oriented, and multi-country or multi-region research needed to answer governance questions of international concern

China's Post Accession WTO Stance

We discuss China's stance in the WTO post-accession, noting the many issues with implementation of China's accession terms by 2007. We evaluate how much benefit China can realistically receive from WTO membership given current problems with dumping actions against China and trade restrictions against textile and apparel exports. We discuss emerging WTO and non-WTO trade disputes involving China, and China's now extensive regional trade initiatives which raise issues of multilateral regional balance on China's trade policy strategy.