Pharos, a Collaborative Infrastructure for Web Knowledge Sharing

Projet SORFinding relevant information is one of the biggest problems that Web users experience. This article describes Pharos, a new service that has been developped to help groups of Web users share their knowledge about interesting documents. Pharos relies on a collaborative infrastructure which allows user groups to index and evaluate documents on specific topics. This informati- on, possibly subjective, is synthesized to produce personalized recommendation- s. Scalability is handled by distributing servers and replicating their databases. Pharos has been implemented in Java and is currently being evaluated

Using Analytic Narratives in Policy Analysis: An Explanation of the Implementation of the Water Reform in Italy (1994-2002)

Various critiques have been made of the analytic narrative, which is a methodological approach that combines historically oriented research with rational choice models. This paper discusses strengths and limitations of the approach and provides some suggestions for its inclusion in the repertoire of methodological tools at disposal for comparative policy studies. The argument is supported by evidence provided by the case study of the implementation of the water reform in Italy in the period 1994-2002. The case study shows how the interplay of game theoretic modeling and historical analysis results in the formulation of tentative hypotheses for explaining variation in the observed trajectory of policy reform implementation across time and space