The outlook for the development of the investment funds in the republic of Croatia

During the nineties, investment funds recorded rapid development in most developed countries and became important agents on the financial markets. In the developing and transitional countries the investment funds industry, although it too has recorded accelerated rates of growth, is still essential lagging behind that of the developed countries. In Croatia the investment funds started developing with the appearance of the private investment funds; however, they did not, contrary to expectations, make a very significant contribution to the development of institutional investors on the capital market. The market is driven primarily by banking or financial conglomerates, which also dominate the investment fund industry. Today the Croatian investment fund market is a very enterprising and dynamic segment of the financial system and hence the establishment of adequate regulation and supervision as well as the development of the capital market must be the main determinants of its further growth and development.financial institutions, investment funds, development, Croatia

Extreme programming and its development practices

Extreme programming (XP) has attracted attention because of its fierce denial of many well-accepted software engineering practices considered as a sound approach to the development of intensive software systems. XP has been declared to be a new way of software development: a lightweight methodology, which is efficient, low-risk, flexible, predictable, scientific, and distinguishable from any other methodology. In the core of XP practices are programming activities, with strong emphasis on oral communications, automated tests, pair programming, storytelling culture and collective code-ownership at any time in the XP project. The paper gives an overview of XP practices and raises some serious concerns regarding their role in conceptual modelling and code generation; which directly affects software architecture solutions. The paper also tackles similarities between rational unified process (RUP) and XP, which have often been juxtaposed by software developers

Realizations of κ\kappa-Minkowski space, Drinfeld twists and related symmetry algebras

Realizations of $\kappa$-Minkowski space linear in momenta are studied for time-, space- and light-like deformations. We construct and classify all such linear realizations and express them in terms of $\mathfrak{gl}(n)$ generators. There are three one-parameter families of linear realizations for time-like and space-like deformations, while for light-like deformations, there are only four linear realizations. The relation between deformed Heisenberg algebra, star product, coproduct of momenta and twist operator is presented. It is proved that for each linear realization there exists Drinfeld twist satisfying normalization and cocycle conditions. $\kappa$-deformed $\mathfrak{igl}(n)$-Hopf algebras are presented for all cases. The $\kappa$-Poincar\'e-Weyl and $\kappa$-Poincar\'e-Hopf algebras are discussed. Left-right dual $\kappa$-Minkowski algebra is constructed from the transposed twists. The corresponding realizations are nonlinear. All known Drinfeld twists related to $\kappa$-Minkowski space are obtained from our construction. Finally, some physical applications are discussed.Comment: 35 pages, improved version accepted for publication in EPJ

COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES USED BY THE NEW ZEALAND DAIRY BOARD TO COMPETE EFFECTIVELY IN THE GLOBAL MARKET FOR DAIRY PRODUCTS

Marketing,

Toward the automation of business process ontology generation

Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) utilises semantic technologies (e.g., ontology) to model and query process representations. There are times in which such models must be reconstructed from existing textual documentation. In this scenario the automated generation of ontological models would be preferable, however current methods and technology are still not capable of automatically generating accurate semantic process models from textual descriptions. This research attempts to automate the process as much as possible by proposing a method that drives the transformation through the joint use of a foundational ontology and lexico-semantic analysis. The method is presented, demonstrated and evaluated. The original dataset represents 150 business activities related to the procurement processes of a case study company. As the evaluation shows, the proposed method can accurately map the linguistic patterns of the process descriptions to semantic patterns of the foundational ontology to a high level of accuracy, however further research is required in order to reduce the level of human intervention, expand the method so as to recognise further patterns of the foundational ontology and develop a tool to assist the business process modeller in the semi-automated generation of process models