Proximal business intelligence on the semantic web

This is the post-print version of this article. The official version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 Springer.Ubiquitous information systems (UBIS) extend current Information System thinking to explicitly differentiate technology between devices and software components with relation to people and process. Adapting business data and management information to support specific user actions in context is an ongoing topic of research. Approaches typically focus on providing mechanisms to improve specific information access and transcoding but not on how the information can be accessed in a mobile, dynamic and ad-hoc manner. Although web ontology has been used to facilitate the loading of data warehouses, less research has been carried out on ontology based mobile reporting. This paper explores how business data can be modeled and accessed using the web ontology language and then re-used to provide the invisibility of pervasive access; uncovering more effective architectural models for adaptive information system strategies of this type. This exploratory work is guided in part by a vision of business intelligence that is highly distributed, mobile and fluid, adapting to sensory understanding of the underlying environment in which it operates. A proof-of concept mobile and ambient data access architecture is developed in order to further test the viability of such an approach. The paper concludes with an ontology engineering framework for systems of this type – named UBIS-ONTO

THE ROLE OF THE ACCOUNTANCY PROFESSIONAL BODIES IN DEVELOPING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING

In March 2010, the European Commission renewed its strategy to promote Corporate Social Responsibility in order to ensure long term employee and consumer trust. Corporate Social Responsibility is considered more relevant in the context of the economic crisis because it can help to build (and rebuild) trust in business and to identify new forms of value creation based on addressing societal challenges, which may represent a way out of the crisis. A priority area is repesented by companies' transparency on environmental and social issues. This research aims to assess the involvement of the professional accountancy bodies in the development of social and environmental reporting. After a review of research studies on corporate social and environmental disclosure and the role of the accounting profession in this context, the research identifies the strategies, policies and actions taken by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and of the Federation of European Expert Accountants (FEE) based on content analysis of public documents issued by the two bodies. The cases were selected having the influence exerted by the two organisms on other professional bodies and their ability to trace the strategic lines of the accounting profession at the international and European level. The basis upon which the accounting profession was founded and continues to exist is public trust, which is the degree to which the public has confidence in the services provided by the accounting profession. Society is currently expressing high demands on the discipline of accounting and therefore the profession is under pressure to expand its horizons to better reflect these demands. The research revealed that both accounting bodies had an intense activity and initiated political actions in the corporate social and environmental reporting field including sustainability in their strategic objectives. The following areas of involvement have been identified: issuance of assurance, education and ethics standards (in the case of IFAC which is also regulator), educational and web materials, participation in working parties, cooperation with other organisations in the development of reporting and assurance standards, research projects to support decision making, encouraging member bodies to develop similar policies, public statements inviting responsible parties to act. Based on its conclusions the study identifies some research directions to be developed. Academic and professional curricula of Romanian accountants could be analysed in order to determine how they could be improved in order to respond better to these societal requirements.This study identifies the political actions of main profesional bodies (IFAC and FEE) that might influence the actions of other bodies and future profile of accountants.Social and environmental reporting, accountancy profession, professional bodies

Online Sustainability Disclosure: Assessing Customer’s Influence And The Use Of Web As A Medium Of Communication Among The Public Listed Companies In Malaysia

Sejak dekad yang lalu, pelbagai isu alam sekitar, sosial dan ekonomi yang disebabkan oleh syarikat korporat telah menjejaskan kehidupan pelbagai pihak yang berkepentingan. Over the past decade, various environmental, social and economic issues caused by the corporate companies are affecting various stakeholders

UK Research Information Shared Service (UKRISS) Final Report, July 2014

The reporting of research information is a complex and expensive activity for research organisations (ROs). There is little alignment between funders of the reporting requests made to institutions and requests made to individual researchers about their research outputs and outcomes. This inevitably results in duplication and increased costs across the sector, whilst limiting the potential sharing and reuse of the information. The UK Research Information Shared Service (UKRISS) project conducted a feasibility and scoping study for the reporting of research information at a national level based on CERIF (Common European Research Information Format), with the objective of increasing efficiency, productivity and quality across the sector. The aim was to define and prototype solutions which are compelling, easy to use, have a low entry barrier, and support innovative information sharing and benchmarking. CERIF has emerged as the preferred format for expressing research information across Europe. To date, CERIF has been piloted for specific applications, but not as a format for reporting requirements across all UK ROs. The final report presents the work carried out by the UKRISS project, including requirements gathering, modelling and prototyping, as well as recommendation for sustainability. UKRISS was divided into two phases. Phase 1, mapping the reporting landscape, ran from March 2012 to December 2012. Phase 2, exploring delivery of potential solutions, began in February 2013 and ended in December 2013

Exploring the use of online corporate sustainability information

Whilst the supply, exclusivity and prominence of online corporate sustainability information has increased in recent years, comparatively little is known about what information is used by whom. This paper explores which user groups access online corporate sustainability information, and assesses the relative use of sustainability reports and other forms of social and environmental information disseminated on corporate Websites. To collect the necessary empirical data, the paper analyses 4,652,471 successful requests for information made by the users of 10 UK FTSE 350 corporate websites. \ud \ud The paper finds that the majority of requests for online sustainability information originate from the reporting company indicative of an inward focus to sustainability reporting. In examining access to different online information sets, distinct profiles of corporate Website users begin to emerge. Requests from employees, private individuals, ISPs and consultants represent the vast majority of the online sustainability reporting audience and the corporate website in general. Contrastingly, a professional financially-orientated profile of users characterised by professional investors, creditors, accounting firms and lawyers make significantly more use of the Annual Report but significantly less use of sustainability reporting information and other online disclosures. Although prior literature notes how companies have yet to utilise the potential of the online medium in disseminating corporate sustainability information, disclosures are found to attract approximately a tenth of all corporate website requests. Environmental and ethical disclosures outside the Annual Report are the most popular sources of online corporate sustainability information whilst ‘standalone’ Sustainability and/or Ethics Reports attract comparatively few requests

Integrating E-Commerce and Data Mining: Architecture and Challenges

We show that the e-commerce domain can provide all the right ingredients for successful data mining and claim that it is a killer domain for data mining. We describe an integrated architecture, based on our expe-rience at Blue Martini Software, for supporting this integration. The architecture can dramatically reduce the pre-processing, cleaning, and data understanding effort often documented to take 80% of the time in knowledge discovery projects. We emphasize the need for data collection at the application server layer (not the web server) in order to support logging of data and metadata that is essential to the discovery process. We describe the data transformation bridges required from the transaction processing systems and customer event streams (e.g., clickstreams) to the data warehouse. We detail the mining workbench, which needs to provide multiple views of the data through reporting, data mining algorithms, visualization, and OLAP. We con-clude with a set of challenges.Comment: KDD workshop: WebKDD 200

Web-Based Corporate Environmental Reporting in Nigeria: A Study of Listed Companies

This paper basically examined the utilization of the Internet for communicating corporate environmental information by listed financial and non-financial companies in Nigeria. The sample for the study consists of 30 firms listed on the Nigerian stock exchange. While the content analysis technique was used as a basis for eliciting data from the corporate websites of the selected firms, the student t-test statistics was used to find out whether there is a significant difference in the level of web-based corporate environmental disclosure between financial and non-financial firms in Nigeria. In addition, the linear regression method of data analysis was employed to investigate whether there is a relationship between the financial performance of firms and the level of corporate environmental disclosures of the selected listed firms in Nigeria. The paper as part of its findings observed that there is no significant difference in the level of web-based corporate environmental disclosure between listed financial and non-financial firms in the Nigeria stock exchang

Implementing State Health Reform: Lessons for Policymakers

Drawing on five states' experiences, discusses questions and considerations, including the need to coordinate state agencies' work and share data, simplify eligibility and enrollment procedures, and involve community groups and businesses in outreach

Driving continuous improvement

The quality of improvement depends on the quality of leading and lagging performance indicators. For this reason, several tools, such as process mapping, cause and effect analysis and FMEA, need to be used in an integrated way with performance measurement models, such as balanced scorecard, integrated performance measurement system, performance prism and so on. However, in our experience, this alone is not quite enough due to the amount of effort required to monitor performance indicators at operational levels. The authors find that IT support is key to the successful implementation of performance measurement-driven continuous improvement schemes