21,049 research outputs found
LO-MATCH: A semantic platform for matching migrants' competences with labour market's needs
Citizens' mobility and employability are receiving ever more attention by the European legislation. Various instruments have been defined to overcome lexical and semantic differences in the descriptions of qualifications, résumés and job profiles. However, the above differences still represent a significant constraint when abilities of non-European people have to be validated either for education and training or occupation purposes. In this work, a web platform that exploits semantic technologies to address such heterogeneity issues is presented. The platform allows migrants to annotate their knowledge, skills and competences in a shared format based on the European tools. The resulting knowledge base is then used to enable the automatic matchmaking of job seekers' abilities with companies' needs. The platform can additionally be used to support students and workers in the identification of their competence gap with respect to a given education or occupation opportunity, so that to personalize their further trainin
Disability, citizenship and uncivilized society: the smooth and nomadic qualities of self-advocacy
People with the label of "intellectual disabilities"1 are often objectified and devalued by master narratives of deviance, tragedy and lack. In this paper, we draw on poststructuralist and feminist resources (e.g. Deleuze & Guattari 1987 and Braidotti 1994, 2002, 2006a) to argue that a disabling society is uncivilized in ways that block the becomings of citizenship. We draw upon our work with self-advocacy groups in England and Belgium where self-advocates open up different life worlds. We shed light on their politics of resistance and resilience, and map how they, as politicized citizen subjects, move in a web of oppressive disability discourses. However, we suggest, as nomads, they set foot on the landmarks of their lives in a never-ending search for smooth spaces in which something different might happen
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Global integration of public sector information
This paper deals with technological methods for consolidating assets lists of available public sector information (PSI) for re-use. In this direction, the effort is to review the state of the art in delivering access to PSI throughout the world and to prioritize the necessary engagements for joining available PSI catalogues. We propose an architectural framework grounded on Semantic Web technologies to deliver a global platform for federated searching. A speculative survey of available PSI portals is presented, and the initial implementation, results, and analysis of the proposed architecture are covered in detail
Knowledge representation and evaluation an ontology-based knowledge management approach
Competition between Higher Education Institutions is increasing at an alarming rate, while changes of
the surrounding environment and demands of labour market are frequent and substantial. Universities
must meet the requirements of both the national and European legislation environment. The Bologna
Declaration aims at providing guidelines and solutions for these problems and challenges of European
Higher Education. One of its main goals is the introduction of a common framework of transparent and
comparable degrees that ensures the recognition of knowledge and qualifications of citizens all across the
European Union. This paper will discuss a knowledge management approach that highlights the importance
of such knowledge representation tools as ontologies. The discussed ontology-based model supports the
creation of transparent curricula content (Educational Ontology) and the promotion of reliable knowledge
testing (Adaptive Knowledge Testing System)
Business Ontology for Evaluating Corporate Social Responsibility
This paper presents a software solution that is developed to automatically classify companies by taking into account their level of social responsibility. The application is based on ontologies and on intelligent agents. In order to obtain the data needed to evaluate companies, we developed a web crawling module that analyzes the companyâs website and the documents that are available online such as social responsibility report, mission statement, employment structure, etc. Based on a predefined CSR ontology, the web crawling module extracts the terms that are linked to corporate social responsibility. By taking into account the extracted qualitative data, an intelligent agent, previously trained on a set of companies, computes the qualitative values, which are then included in the classification model based on neural networks. The proposed ontology takes into consideration the guidelines proposed by the âISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibilityâ. Having this model, and being aware of the positive relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and financial performance, an overall perspective on each companyâs activity can be configured, this being useful not only to the companyâs creditors, auditors, stockholders, but also to its consumers.corporate social responsibility, ISO 26000 Standard for Social Responsibility, ontology, web crawling, intelligent agent, corporate performance, POS tagging, opinion mining, sentiment analysis
(Re)negotiations:towards a transformative geopolitics of fear and otherness
No abstract availabl
Testing Powers of Engagement: Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability of Involvement
This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between these two phenomena. While socio-material practices are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of âbeing intimate in publicâ to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement
Comparative Philosophies in Intercultural Information Ethics
The following review explores Intercultural Information Ethics in terms of comparative philosophy, supporting IIE as the most relevant and significant development of the field of Information Ethics. The focus of the review is threefold. First, it will review the core presumption of the field of IIE, that being the demand for an intermission in the pursuit of a founding philosophy for IE in order to first address the philosophical biases of IE by western philosophy. Second, a history of the various philosophical streams of IIE will be outlined, including its literature and pioneering contributors. Lastly, a new synthesis of comparative philosophies in IIE will be offered, looking towards a future evolution of the field. Examining the interchange between contemporary information ethicists regarding the discipline of IIE, the review first outlines the previously established presumptions of the field of IIE that posit the need for an IE as grounded in western sensibilities. The author then addresses the implications of the foregoing presumption from several non-western viewpoints, arguing that IIE does in fact find roots in non-western philosophies as established in the concluding synthesis of western and eastern philosophical traditions
Growing Environmental Activists: Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Childrenâs Fiction.
We explore how story has the potential to encourage environmental engagement and a sense of agency provided that critical discussion takes place. We illuminate this with reference to the philosophies of John Macmurray on personal agency and social relations; of John Dewey on the primacy of experience for philosophy; and of Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics, dialogue, dialectics and narrative. We view the use of fiction for environmental understanding as hermeneutic, a form of conceptualising place which interprets experience and perception. The four writers for young people discussed are Ernest Thompson Seton, Kenneth Grahame, Michelle Paver and Philip Pullman. We develop the concept of critical dialogue, and link this to Crick's demand for active democratic citizenship. We illustrate the educational potential for environmental discussions based on literature leading to deeper understanding of place and environment, encouraging the belief in young people that they can be and become agents for change. We develop from Zimbardo the key concept of heroic resister to encourage young people to overcome peer pressure. We conclude with a call to develop a greater awareness of the potential of fiction for learning, and for writers to produce more focused stories engaging with environmental responsibility and activism
Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model
According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizensâ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processesâ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value
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