Lightweight information integration through partial mapping and query reformulation

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Adaptive ontology re-use: Finding and re-using sub-ontologies

Purpose - The discovery of the "right" ontology or ontology part is a central ingredient for effective ontology re-use. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach for supporting a form of adaptive re-use of sub-ontologies, where the ontologies are deeply integrated beyond pure referencing. Design/methodology/approach - Starting from an ontology draft which reflects the intended modeling perspective, the ontology engineer can be supported by suggesting similar already existing sub-ontologies and ways for integrating them with the existing draft ontology. This paper's approach combines syntactic, linguistic, structural and logical methods into an innovative modeling-perspective aware solution for detecting matchings between concepts from different ontologies. This paper focuses on the discovery and matching phase of this re-use process. Findings - Owing to the combination of techniques presented in this general approach, the work described performs in the general case as well as approaches tailored for a specific usage scenario. Research limitations/implications - The methods used rely on lexical information obtained from the labels of the concepts and properties in the ontologies, which makes this approach appropriate in cases where this information is available. Also, this approach can handle some missing label information. Practical implications - Ontology engineering tasks can take advantage from the proposed adaptive re-use approach in order to re-use existing ontologies or parts of them without introducing inconsistencies in the resulting ontology. Originality/value - The adaptive re-use of ontologies by finding and partially re-using parts of existing ontological resources for building new ontologies is a new idea in the field, and the inclusion of the modeling perspective in the computation of the matches adds a new perspective that could also be exploited by other matching approaches. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Experiencias de trabajadores del retail en Chile. Aproximación desde la sociología de Dubet

The article presents the main findings of a research on the social experience of the workers of the Department Stores in the retail sector in Chile, an economic field that has experienced a profound process of modernization and productive restructuring in Latin America since 1990. The research was driven by the theoretical approach of François Dubet’s sociology of experience and resorted to a qualitative methodology that included 31 interviews with sale workers of the three major department stores in the country and six interviews with key actors in retail, which were analyzed through the codification procedures of the Grounded theory. The results describe the logics of action (integration, strategy and subjectivation) and the specific modalities in which they articulate to give rise to three figures of work experience: engaged, blocked and in transition. The conclusions elaborate on the study’s contribution to the field of Labor Studies in Latin America.Se presentan los resultados de una investigación sobre la experiencia social que construyen los trabajadores de las tiendas por departamentos del sector del retail en Chile; un sector económico que ha experimentado en América Latina un profundo proceso de modernización y reestructuración productiva desde 1990. Se empleó la perspectiva teórica de la Sociología de la Experiencia de François Dubet. Se utilizó una metodología de naturaleza cualitativa que consideró 31 entrevistas a trabajadores de las tiendas, y seis entrevistas a informantes claves, analizadas mediante los procedimientos de codificación de la teoría fundamentada. Los resultados describen las lógicas de acción (integración, estrategia y subjetivación) que despliegan los trabajadores en las tiendas y las modalidades específicas en que se articulan para dar lugar a tres figuras de la experiencia laboral: comprometida, bloqueada y en tránsito. Se concluye discutiendo el aporte empírico y conceptual del estudio al campo de los estudios laborales en Latinoamérica

La descualificación del trabajo en tiendas por departamento

This article presents the results of a study about the reorganization of the sales-work process recently implemented in department stores in the Chilean retail industry. It was used the theoretical framework of the Labor Process Theory and a qualitative methodological design. We conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with front-line workers and 6 interviews with experts in the field, which were analysed through the codification procedures of the grounded theory. The results describe the reorganization of the sales-work process and the customer service in stores, and analyses their consequences in terms of the tasks' level complexity and the autonomy of the workers, evidencing a tendency towards the deskilling. It is concluded that this trend has entailed a degradation of sales personnel working and employment conditions, in coincidence with the international evidence regarding recent organizational and labor worldwide transformations in the service sector and the retail industry.    Se presenta los resultados de un estudio sobre la reorganización del proceso del trabajo de ventas implementado recientemente en las Tiendas por Departamentos de la industria del retail en Chile. Se utilizó el marco teórico de la Labor Process Theory y una perspectiva crítico-interpretativa de investigación social.  Se empleó una metodología de carácter cualitativo, realizándose 31 entrevistas semi-estructuradas a trabajadores de primera línea y 6 entrevistas a expertos en el rubro, que fueron analizadas mediante los procedimientos de codificación de la teoría fundamentada. Los resultados describen la reorganización del proceso de trabajo de ventas y de los modelos de atención al cliente en las tiendas, y analizan sus consecuencias en términos del nivel de la complejidad de las tareas y de la autonomía de los trabajadores, constatando una evidente tendencia hacia la descualificación. Se concluye que esta tendencia ha conllevado una degradación de las condiciones de trabajo y empleo del personal de venta, lo que es coincidente con la evidencia internacional respecto a transformaciones organizacionales y laborales recientes en el sector servicios y la industria del retail a nivel mundial.   

Social recommendations of content and metadata

In this paper we present metadata based recommendation algorithms addressing two scenarios within social desktop communities: a) recommendation of resources from the co-worker's desktop, and b) recommendation of metadata for enriching the own annotation layer. Together with the algorithms we present first evaluation results as well as empirical evaluations showing that metadata based recommendations can be used in such distributed social desktop communities