Web Services Support for Dynamic Business Process Outsourcing

Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. To meet fast-changing market conditions, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way unrestricted by geographic distance. This requires automated means for both the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships over electronic channels. Due to wide industry support and the underlying model of loose coupling of services, Web services increasingly become the mechanism of choice to connect organizations across organizational boundaries. This paper analyzes to which extent Web services support the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract -based dynamic business process outsourcing to define requirements and then introduce the Web services framework. Based on this, we investigate the match between the two. We observe that the Web services framework requires further support for cross - organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and process-based transaction support and suggest ways to fill those gaps

Economic Development of the Siberian North

Outlines natural resources, industries, transport facilities, and development plans in northwest Siberia. Timber reserves estimated at 190,000 million bd ft, large oil and gas deposits, iron ore, etc are noted in the Ob basin as are coal, iron ore, water power, etc in the Yenisey basin. Industrial centers, utilizing cheap electric power are planned in the Angara-Yenisey region

FRACTAL PROPERTIES OF MICROPLASMA BREAKDOWN AND STRUCTURAL HETEROGENEITY OF SEMICONDUCTOR MATERIALS

This work presents experimental results on the study of current-voltage characteristics and oscillograms of microplasma pulses of the p-n-junction avalanche breakdown. Based on the latter, the pulse duration distributions are determined. As a result, it is shown that microplasma noise has fractal properties. The latter form the basis of avalanche breakdown types developed classification. The correlation between the fractal dimension of microplasma noise and structural inhomogeneities of functional semiconductor structures is revealed

A Framework for Analysis of B2B Electronic Contracting Support

Contracts are fundamental to all economic production and exchange processes. The fast introduction of IT into the business domain both facilitates and requires changes in core business processes and relations between business organizations. In the context of the latter, the use of IT in business-to-business contracting processes aims at optimisation and globalisation of these processes by improving their speed, efficiency and reach. Electronic contracting can thus be used on the one hand to improve existing business relationship paradigms and on the other hand to enable new forms of contractual relationships. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for business-to-business e-contracting support. The framework provides a complete view over the contracting field. It allows positioning research efforts in the e-contracting domain, placing their goals into perspective, and overseeing future research topics and issues. It is the basis for drawing conclusions about basic requirements to contracting systems and can be used for establishing a common terminology and improving mutual understanding among users and domain researchers

The Intonational Phonology of Daco-Romance

Within the field of Romance phonetics and phonology, the intonation of the Daco- Romance languages (Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian) has been a much-neglected topic. In fact, until relatively recently, little was known about the general importance of intonation in speech and about its forms and functions. Intonation in Daco-Romance was investigated only marginally, usually in mainstream Romanian grammar compendia, which doomed it to be a virtually unstudied area. Although there are several short descriptions of Romanian intonation (Dascălu-Jinga 1971, 1998, 2001; Vasiliu 1965; Chițoran, Pârlog and Augerot 1984; Chițoran 2002) they were not conducted in any particular framework and were mainly impressionistic in character. It is apparent that a fresh comprehensive approach to intonation in Romanian and in Eastern Romance in general is needed as a basis for future pedagogical, typological, and comparative research. After a critical account of major intonation theories – the IPO theory, the ‘traditional British’ system and the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) theory – it is argued that the most suitable framework in which this project should be conducted is the AM theory. The main aim of the present thesis is to propose a comprehensive model for intonation in Romanian and the other Daco-Romance varieties based on the Autosegmental-Metrical theory (Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 2008 [1996], Gussenhoven 2004). This will involve the first Romanian ToBI (Ro-ToBI) transcription of intonation and show how focus is realised in the language. After providing an inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones, special attention is given to broad focus and narrow/contrastive focus in yes-no questions and wh-questions, which were reported to be peculiar in Romanian intonation compared with other (Western) Romance languages (Ladd 2008). For this purpose, 12 native speakers of all four Daco-Romance varieties were interviewed, which resulted in a spontaneous corpus (short conversations or short stories), and a semi-spontaneous corpus (questionnaires specially designed to elicit broad, narrow and contrastive focus, as well as other specific types of intonation). Acoustic analyses were performed in PRAAT followed by a comparative study of Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. In order to facilitate research and comparative studies across Romance languages, the data presented in this thesis was obtained using two intonation questionnaires based on the Discourse Completion Test (initially developed by Blum-Kulka et al. 1989) which 4 included some 31 situations designed to elicit a large number of specific sentence types and pragmatic meanings and eight different focus contexts. An analysis of the intonational phonology of Daco-Romance varieties suggests that they tend to align more with each other than with the non-Romance languages with which they are in contact. With respect to focus, the findings presented here suggest that the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR) (Zubizarreta 1998; 2010) applies in Eastern Romance only to a certain extent in broad focus contexts, but not in narrow focus which allows contextual de-accenting. The results presented showed that Daco-Romance has a very rich and diverse intonational phonology as a bridge prosodic system between Slavic and Romance. The outcome of the project will not only have applications for automatic speech recognition (TTS systems) but will also help us to better understand intonational phonology in Romance in general

The Influence of Harvest Period and Fertilisation on the Yield of Some Mixed Grass and Leguminous Species Under the Forest Steppe Conditions of North-East Romania

In the forest steppe area of North-east Romania, temporary grasslands represent an important source of high quality fodder but they have a short period of exploitation, associated with some changes in the floristic composition (Vintu, 2003). Fertiliser application and harvest period have an important role in maintaining high productivity (Hopkins, 1991). The aim of this paper is to determine the influence of harvest period and fertilization on the yield of some grass and leguminous species in the forest steppe conditions of North-east Romania