Getting a grip on negotiation processes: Addressing trade-offs in mountain biking in Austria, Germany and Switzerland

Space for recreation is an important service provided by forests close to urban and rural areas alike. Mountain biking, as one recreational activity, is increasingly becoming widespread, which can lead to challenging trade-off situations, as some benefits from forests come at the cost of another forest benefit and vice versa. For instance, illegally constructed mountain bike trails lead to trade-offs between environmental protection and other forest utilizations such as wood production. We thus study how such trade-off situations can be negotiated to find an outcome, such as a legal mountain bike trail, which is accepted by stakeholders. In doing so, we select case studies where we expect to find similar trade-off situations that lead to the negotiation process about mountain bike trails. Specifically, we analyse the cases' negotiation processes (action situations) by applying Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development Framework. Our findings show the importance of collective actors, a clear delineation of responsibilities and of compensation and funding measures as well as structured workshops and collective site inspections for addressing trade-offs and for arriving at acceptable outcomes in our cases

Object-oriented programming with class dictionaries

A class dictionary defines all data structures which appear in a program as well as a language for describing data specified by the data structures. We demonstrate that class dictionaries are ideal for simplifying object-oriented programming. Our class dictionary based approach to object-oriented programming is independent of any particular programming language, so it is applicable to a large variety of object-oriented systems. The experience in designing and using over one hundred class dictionaries has resulted in a set of useful design techniques. This novel approach to object-oriented programming makes interesting links between language design, data structure design and data base design

Coupling Mechanisms in Aspect-Oriented Software

The paper describes the need for the study and development of better crosscutting coupling mechanisms in software components to reduce brittleness. A software system consists of multiple crosscutting concerns and it is not only required to cleanly encapsulate and localize those concerns into components but in addition to control the coupling between the encapsulated concerns. Aspect-Oriented Programming has started to move in this direction; Adaptive Programming has since its inception studied crosscutting coupling mechanisms. The innovative claim is new mechanisms to abstract from program concerns and to write the software in terms of those abstractions. This allows us to write programs that are less brittle, and easier to develop and maintain. Technical barriers are how to properly formulate abstractions over program concerns and how to prove useful properties of concerns encapsulated as components that are parameterized by concern abstractions