Beyond Cryptocurrencies - A Taxonomy of Decentralized Consensus Systems

The advent of Bitcoin in 2009 has not only introduced Cryptocurrencies and lead to a new digitization movement in the financial, especially payments industry but also made way for a new breed of innova-tive technologies based on decentralized digital currencies. Generally, decentralized consensus sys-tems could change the very nature of how companies, organizations and individuals are built and in-teract with each other. Decentralized consensus systems, decentralized applications and smart con-tracts provide the conceptual framework as well as the technological basis to establish predefined, incorruptible protocols and contracts to organize human behavior and interconnectedness. However, the technical protocols and implementations are quite complex and practitioners as well as interdisci-plinary researchers not familiar with cryptography, network protocols or decentralized networks are struggling to find access to these concepts and grasp their potential. To fill this gap, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy of decentralized consensus systems in order to provide a tool for researchers and practitioners alike to facilitate classification and analysis of emerging technologies in the field of Crypto 2.0 , the next level of innovation beyond cryptocurrencies

A tree extension for CoNLL-RDF

The technological bridges between knowledge graphs and natural language processing are of utmost importance for the future development of language technology. CoNLL-RDF is a technology that provides such a bridge for popular one-word-per-line formats as widely used in NLP (e.g., the CoNLL Shared Tasks), annotation (Universal Dependencies, Unimorph), corpus linguistics (Corpus WorkBench, CWB) and digital lexicography (SketchEngine): Every empty-line separated table (usually a sentence) is parsed into an graph, can be freely manipulated and enriched using W3C-standardized RDF technology, and then be serialized back into in a TSV format, RDF or other formats. An important limitation is that CoNLL-RDF provides native support for word-level annotations only. This does include dependency syntax and semantic role annotations, but neither phrase structures nor text structure. We describe the extension of the CoNLL-RDF technology stack for two vocabulary extensions of CoNLL-TSV, the PTB bracket notation used in earlier CoNLL Shared Tasks and the extension with XML markup elements featured by CWB and SketchEngine. In order to represent the necessary extensions of the CoNLL vocabulary in an adequate fashion, we employ the POWLA vocabulary for representing and navigating in tree structures

An ontology for CoNLL-RDF: formal data structures for TSV formats in language technology

In language technology and language sciences, tab-separated values (TSV) represent a frequently used formalism to represent linguistically annotated natural language, often addressed as "CoNLL formats". A large number of such formats do exist, but although they share a number of common features, they are not interoperable, as different pieces of information are encoded differently in these dialects. CoNLL-RDF refers to a programming library and the associated data model that has been introduced to facilitate processing and transforming such TSV formats in a serialization-independent way. CoNLL-RDF represents CoNLL data, by means of RDF graphs and SPARQL update operations, but so far, without machine-readable semantics, with annotation properties created dynamically on the basis of a user-defined mapping from columns to labels. Current applications of CoNLL-RDF include linking between corpora and dictionaries [Mambrini and Passarotti, 2019] and knowledge graphs [Tamper et al., 2018], syntactic parsing of historical languages [Chiarcos et al., 2018; Chiarcos et al., 2018], the consolidation of syntactic and semantic annotations [Chiarcos and Fäth, 2019], a bridge between RDF corpora and a traditional corpus query language [Ionov et al., 2020], and language contact studies [Chiarcos et al., 2018]. We describe a novel extension of CoNLL-RDF, introducing a formal data model, formalized as an ontology. The ontology is a basis for linking RDF corpora with other Semantic Web resources, but more importantly, its application for transformation between different TSV formats is a major step for providing interoperability between CoNLL formats

A New Approach to Map and Quantify Representative Claims and Measure Their Validation: A Case Study Analysis

Relying on the theory of Saward (2010) and Disch (2015), we study political representation through the lens of representative claim-making. We identify a gap between the theoretical concept of claim-making and the empirical (quantitative) assessment of representative claims made in the real world’s representative contexts. Therefore, we develop a new approach to map and quantify representative claims in order to subsequently measure the reception and validation of the claims by the audience. To test our method, we analyse all the debates of the German parliament concerned with the introduction of the gender quota in German supervisory boards from 2013 to 2017 in a two-step process. At first, we assess which constituencies the MPs claim to represent and how they justify their stance. Drawing on multiple correspondence analysis, we identify different claim patterns. Second, making use of natural language processing techniques and logistic regression on social media data, we measure if and how the asserted claims in the parliamentary debates are received and validated by the respective audience. We come to the conclusion that the constituency as ultimate judge of legitimacy has not been comprehensively conceptualized yet

places and non places

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Design and Analysis of Cognitive Interviews for Comparative Multinational Testing

This article summarizes the work of the Comparative Cognitive Testing Workgroup, an international coalition of survey methodologists interested in developing an evidence-based methodology for examining the comparability of survey questions within cross-cultural or multinational contexts. To meet this objective, it was necessary to ensure that the cognitive interviewing (CI) method itself did not introduce method bias. Therefore, the workgroup first identified specific characteristics inherent in CI methodology that could undermine the comparability of CI evidence. The group then developed and implemented a protocol addressing those issues. In total, 135 cognitive interviews were conducted by participating countries. Through the process, the group identified various interpretive patterns resulting from sociocultural and language-related differences among countries as well as other patterns of error that would impede comparability of survey data

Managing Diversity : The Challenges of Inter-University Cooperation in Sustainability Education

One of the main challenges in sustainability discourse is its multifaceted nature often requiring that many different disciplines must cooperate in order to achieve progress. This issue also concerns sustainability education. In the article, we highlighted the experiences from the international cooperation of university teachers and researchers with highly diverse professional backgrounds who worked together on developing educational materials for university students in sustainability-oriented courses. The study is based on qualitative, participatory evaluation research, applying two rounds of open-ended questionnaires distributed to the same respondents (n = 18). For the analysis, we used the open-coding procedure for identifying the main categories. The results show some of the opportunities and barriers that emerged in the process of this cooperation. In particular, we discuss the issues related to the high heterogeneity of the group, such as the clashes of the different perspectives on the topics covered, group dynamics issues, trust, facilitation challenges, and also opportunities that such heterogeneity offers. We highlight the importance of open reflectivity in sustainability-oriented educational projects as the key to their successful implementation. Finally, we believe that results of this participatory study are useful in designing new projects aiming at further improvement of academic education in sustainability and sustainable development