The multidimensional housing deprivation: Local dynamics of inequality, policies and challenges for the future

Within the framework of the activities of the H2020 MICADO (Migrant Integration Cockpits and Dashboards) project, this volume brings together a set of contributions on contemporary housing, which represents one of the areas, although not the only one, in which migrants experience a condition of major vulnerability compared to the native population and that hinders their full integration in their new living context and full social participation. Migrants’ request for housing is part of the broader context of housing-related problems still unresolved in our country: although they share most of the difficulties encountered by the most vulnerable segments of the native population, at the same time they face a set of additional disadvantages induced by the institutional system, linked to their precarious legal status, and by the market. This contribution, organized in three thematic sessions (Local models and processes of ethnic residential segregation; From housing deprivation to housing policies. Distinctive elements in the territory; Housing rights, migrant integration, and the role of ICT solutions), analyzes housing needs both from a theoretical point of view, to prompt insights into the distinctive features of the new housing issue, but also by reporting the findings of empirical research that can provide elements of evaluation and methodological indications on the topic

Semantic Integration of heterogeneous data sources in the MOMIS Data Transformation System

In the last twenty years, many data integration systems following a classical wrapper/mediator architecture and providing a Global Virtual Schema (a.k.a. Global Virtual View - GVV) have been proposed by the research community. The main issues faced by these approaches range from system-level heterogeneities, to structural syntax level heterogeneities at the semantic level. Despite the research effort, all the approaches proposed require a lot of user intervention for customizing and managing the data integration and reconciliation tasks. In some cases, the effort and the complexity of the task is huge, since it requires the development of specific programming codes. Unfortunately, due to the specificity to be addressed, application codes and solutions are not frequently reusable in other domains. For this reason, the Lowell Report 2005 has provided the guideline for the definition of a public benchmark for information integration problem. The proposal, called THALIA (Test Harness for the Assessment of Legacy information Integration Approaches), focuses on how the data integration systems manage syntactic and semantic heterogeneities, which definitely are the greatest technical challenges in the field. We developed a Data Transformation System (DTS) that supports data transformation functions and produces query translation in order to push down to the sources the execution. Our DTS is based on MOMIS, a mediator-based data integration system that our research group is developing and supporting since 1999. In this paper, we show how the DTS is able to solve all the twelve queries of the THALIA benchmark by using a simple combination of declarative translation functions already available in the standard SQL language. We think that this is a remarkable result, mainly for two reasons: firstly to the best of our knowledge there is no system that has provided a complete answer to the benchmark, secondly, our queries does not require any overhead of new code

La bibliothèque au-delà de la bibliothèque: Un espace public

The public library of Casalecchio di Reno, a small town near Bologna (Italy), is an articulated and multifunctional space, a reference point not only for the municipality but also for the surrounding areas. This library is characterized by multiple spaces and functions, some of which are well-defi ned whilst others less, and diff erent groups of population use it. Together, its low level of regulatory framework, its geographical location and its confi guration as a «public space» make this library both a place of culture and a place of hospitality and friendliness in urban space. By analysing the everyday practices and the concrete actions performed by the subjects, the present study focused on the redefinition of space and on the practices of re-signifi cation, as well as on the manifest or latent needs that underlie such practices.The public library of Casalecchio di Reno, a small town near Bologna (Italy), is an articulated and multifunctional space, a reference point not only for the municipality but also for the surrounding areas. This library is characterized by multiple spaces and functions, some of which are well-defi ned whilst others less, and diff erent groups of population use it. Together, its low level of regulatory framework, its geographical location and its confi guration as a «public space» make this library both a place of culture and a place of hospitality and friendliness in urban space. By analysing the everyday practices and the concrete actions performed by the subjects, the present study focused on the redefinition of space and on the practices of re-signifi cation, as well as on the manifest or latent needs that underlie such practices.The public library of Casalecchio di Reno, a small town near Bologna (Italy), is an articulated and multifunctional space, a reference point not only for the municipality but also for the surrounding areas. This library is characterized by multiple spaces and functions, some of which are well-defi ned whilst others less, and diff erent groups of population use it. Together, its low level of regulatory framework, its geographical location and its confi guration as a «public space» make this library both a place of culture and a place of hospitality and friendliness in urban space. By analysing the everyday practices and the concrete actions performed by the subjects, the present study focused on the redefinition of space and on the practices of re-signifi cation, as well as on the manifest or latent needs that underlie such practices

Per un’analisi socio-spaziale del territorio. Un’introduzione

Il volume nasce nell’ambito di un insegnamento di Sociologia urbana all’interno del quale era stata prevista un’attività seminariale che intendeva rispondere ad un’esigenza didattica prioritaria: mostrare agli studenti la poliedricità di studi e ricerche che si collocavano nell’ambito della disciplina e al contempo evidenziarne la comune opzione euristica, andando oltre la prima impressione di un cumularsi magmatico di filoni di ricerca. Coinvolgendo giovani ricercatori, l’attività seminariale non intendeva pertanto focalizzarsi su uno specifico oggetto di ricerca, da approfondire nei diversi incontri previsti, ma richiamare l’attenzione sulla valenza esplicativa della dimensione territoriale nella comprensione di una molteplicità di fenomeni sociali anche laddove questa non era immediatamente evidente e spesso non adeguatamente riconosciuta. Si trattava, per gli studenti coinvolti, di cogliere il filo rosso che univa i diversi contributi presentati nel seminario e ora pubblicati in questo volume. Oltre a testimoniare la pluralità e ricchezza degli studi territoriali, le ricerche illustrate nel volume hanno il pregio e il merito di concentrarsi sugli aspetti spaziali e territoriali delle diverse forme sociali studiate cogliendone la dimensione materiale contribuendo al contempo ad una spazializzazione della teoria sociologica. In questa lettura il territorio non emerge come mero sfondo e contenitore di un insieme di processi sociali ma come socialmente strutturato dalle forze in campo e al contempo strutturante le stesse. Nello spazio non si proietta semplicemente la vita sociale che su di esso si appoggia, ma esso stesso è “fattore attivo”

Bistren cryptands and cryptates: versatile receptors for anion inclusion and recognition in water

Bistren cryptands can act as selective anion receptors in water in two distinct versions: as hexaprotonated cages and as dicopper(ii) cryptates. Both classes of receptors exert geometrical selectivity, but dimetallic cryptates establish the strongest interactions with the anion

Melis: an incremental method for the lexical annotation of domain ontologies

In this paper, we present MELIS (Meaning Elicitation and Lexical Integration System), a method and a software tool for enabling an incremental process of automatic annotation of local schemas (e.g. relational database schemas, directory trees) with lexical information. The distinguishing and original feature of MELIS is the incremental process: the higher the number of schemas which are processed, the more background/domain knowledge is cumulated in the system (a portion of domain ontology is learned at every step), the better the performance of the systems on annotating new schemas.MELIS has been tested as component of MOMIS-Ontology Builder, a framework able to create a domain ontology representing a set of selected data sources, described with a standard W3C language wherein concepts and attributes are annotated according to the lexical reference database.We describe the MELIS component within the MOMIS-Ontology Builder framework and provide some experimental results of ME LIS as a standalone tool and as a component integrated in MOMIS

MOMIS: Exploiting agents to support information integration

Information overloading introduced by the large amount of data that is spread over the Internet must be faced in an appropriate way. The dynamism and the uncertainty of the Internet, along with the heterogeneity of the sources of information are the two main challenges for today's technologies related to information management. In the area of information integration, this paper proposes an approach based on mobile software agents integrated in the MOMIS (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) infrastructure, which enables semi-automatic information integration to deal with the integration and query of multiple, heterogeneous information sources (relational, object, XML and semi-structured sources). The exploitation of mobile agents in MOMIS can significantly increase the flexibility of the system. In fact, their characteristics of autonomy and adaptability well suit the distributed and open environments, such as the Internet. The aim of this paper is to show the advantages of the introduction in the MOMIS infrastructure of intelligent and mobile software agents for the autonomous management and coordination of integration and query processing over heterogeneous data sources