Interaction protocols for human-driven crisis resolution processes

This work aims at providing a crisis cell with process-oriented tools to manage crisis resolutions. Indeed, the crisis cell members have to define the crisis resolution process, adapt it to face crisis evolutions, and guide its execution. Crisis resolution processes are interaction-intensive processes: they not only coordinate the performance of tasks to be undertaken on the impacted world, but they also support regulatory interactions between possibly geographically distributed crisis cell members. In order to deal with such an interweaving, this paper proposes to use Interaction Protocols to both model formal interactions and ease a cooperative adaptation and guidance of crisis resolution processes. After highlighting the benefits of Interaction Protocols to support this human and collective dimension, the paper presents a protocol meta-model for their specification. It then shows how to suitably integrate specified protocols into crisis resolution processes and how to implement this conceptual framework into a service oriented architecture

OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Food calamities and governance; an inventory of approaches

In normal circumstances a governance structure of the food system has evolved that serves the system so as to reduce transaction costs. While its overarching conditions are often set by the government policy as to the sector, the private sector, with the help of an enabling government, has developed arrangements to its own liking. The question addressed in this review is whether this governance structure of the food system is robust enough to cover extreme events, calamities, that strike unexpectedly and may harm large sections of the system. Do normal arrangements cover part of what should be done in these circumstances, or do they perhaps hinder the application of adequate governance fit for such extreme events

Food safety importers’ strategies and typologies of international fresh fruit and vegetables supply chains

Related to growing concerns about food safety, the present heterogeneity of certifications and types of control adopted in international supply chains has been interacting with a number of private level strategies, having supermarket chains and large distributors as main protagonists, such as the strategic selection of target market or the differentiation strategy of B2B ('Business to Business') and B2C ('Business to Consumer'), which are applicable to food safety in the fresh fruit and vegetable distribution channel. In this paper, on the one hand, we describe the types of international supply chains for fresh products, and on the other hand, the strategies related to food safety of importers and distributors in developed countries. This with the aim of determining how these strategies influence and interact with both the health risk and the management and decision processes along the supply chain. Especially, it is shown how the diversity of effects caused by the introduction and development of risk management systems is reflected in the wide range of inter-related responses performed by the different members of the distribution channel. This paper proposes a summary of the more noteworthy ones in a segmented way according to their strategic purposes. As main conclusions of this paper we have that, due to the need and obligation for the distribution channel´s members to meet the quality and safety levels required by the market, the characteristics of the linkages, which were established until now along the supply chain, have been altered towards a search for higher upstream commitments from retailers to producers, and thus, the operator´s response to the new dimension acquired by food safety within the supply chain has led to the staging of new methods and procedures for its management. It can also be observed that the bulk of the literature in the area of food safety in the fresh fruit and vegetables supply chain is about the government and implementation of quality in products, processes, or with specific protocols, being much less present a pragmatic and management approach oriented to executive staff in their various areas of responsibility, as well as empirical fieldworks

No. 22: South African Government and Civil Society Responses to Zimbabwean Migration

This policy brief discusses a key paradox in relation to Zimbabwean migration into South Africa. While Zimbabwean migration since 2000 has been the largest concentrated flow in South African history, South Africa’s reaction to this movement has been characterised by the attempt to continue with ‘business as usual’ and ‘no crisis’ responses.1 Compared with most other developed and developing countries, where an inflow of tens or hundreds of thousands of people is usually treated as a political crisis, such a non-response to over a million immigrants requires explanation. The lack of commensurate responses is especially noticeable within the various departments of the South African government, but also within much of organised civil society. The scale and range of responses has addressed neither the scale nor the specific nature of Zimbabwean migration.2 In practice, therefore, addressing migrant needs and migration impacts is left to social networks among Zimbabweans, (often poor) South African citizens and local level public service providers such as local clinics. As a result of this fragmented and inadequate set of responses there are two major gaps: firstly between the needs of Zimbabwean migrants and the formal institutional frameworks and services provided to them, and secondly between the impacts of Zimbabwean migration on South African society and its ability to manage these impacts. There has been increasing documentation of Zimbabwean migrants’ welfare needs in South Africa (Bloch 2005; Zimbabwe Torture Victims Project 2005; Makina 2007; CoRMSA 2008; Human Rights Watch 2008). However, in parallel to the lack of coherent government and civil society responses to Zimbabwean migration, there has been a relative dearth of academic or think-tank documentation or analysis of these responses, and indeed of the implications of non-response for South Africa (Polzer 2008). Crucially, there has been no serious research on the dispersed and privatised responses by Zimbabwean networks and South African citizens, even though the aggregate impact of these actors is likely to be at least as significant, if not more so, than formal responses

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

LEARNING ORGANIZATION IN A TIME OF CRISIS: A CASE STUDY OF LOGISTICS AND FREIGHT, LLC AND COVID-19

LEARNING ORGANIZATION IN A TIME OF CRISIS: A CASE STUDY OF LOGISTICS AND FREIGHT, LLC AND COVID-1