Visualizing internetworked argumentation

In this chapter, we outline a project which traces its source of inspiration back to the grand visions of Vannevar Bush (scholarly trails of linked concepts), Doug Engelbart (highly interactive intellectual tools, particularly for argumentation), and Ted Nelson (large scale internet publishing with recognised intellectual property). In essence, we are tackling the age-old question of how to organise distributed, collective knowledge. Specifically, we pose the following question as a foil: In 2010, will scholarly knowledge still be published solely in prose, or can we imagine a complementary infrastructure that is ‘native’ to the emerging semantic, collaborative web, enabling more effective dissemination and analysis of ideas

Lethal Thermal Impact at Periphery of Pyroclastic Surges: Evidences at Pompeii

Background: The evaluation of mortality of pyroclastic surges and flows (PDCs) produced by explosive eruptions is a major goal in risk assessment and mitigation, particularly in distal reaches of flows that are often heavily urbanized. Pompeii and the nearby archaeological sites preserve the most complete set of evidence of the 79 AD catastrophic eruption recording its effects on structures and people. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we investigate the causes of mortality in PDCs at Pompeii and surroundings on the bases of a multidisciplinary volcanological and bio-anthropological study. Field and laboratory study of the eruption products and victims merged with numerical simulations and experiments indicate that heat was the main cause of death of people, heretofore supposed to have died by ash suffocation. Our results show that exposure to at least 250uC hot surges at a distance of 10 kilometres from the vent was sufficient to cause instant death, even if people were sheltered within buildings. Despite the fact that impact force and exposure time to dusty gas declined toward PDCs periphery up to the survival conditions, lethal temperatures were maintained up to the PDCs extreme depositional limits. Conclusions/Significance: This evidence indicates that the risk in flow marginal zones could be underestimated by simply assuming that very thin distal deposits, resulting from PDCs with poor total particle load, correspond to negligible effects. Therefore our findings are essential for hazard plans development and for actions aimed to risk mitigation at Vesuvius an

Photocatalytic activity of nitrogen-doped TiO2-based nanowires: a photo-assisted Kelvin probe force microscopy study

The emerging industrial business partnerships, which feature cross-functional and cross-company development efforts, raise the barrier for the establishment of effective knowledge sharing practices in the larger organization. This chapter aims to highlight the role of knowledge as a key enabler for effective engineering activities in the light of such emerging enterprise collaboration models. Knowledge Enabled Engineering (KEE) is presented as an approach to enhance the extended organization’s capability to establish effective collaboration among its parts, in spite of different organizational structures, technologies or processes. KEE is analysed in its constituent parts, highlighting areas, methods and tools that are particularly interesting for leveraging companies’ knowledge sharing capabilities

Enhancing digital libraries with social navigation: The case of ensemble

A traditional library is a social place, however the social nature of the library is typically lost when the library goes digital. This paper argues social navigation, an important group of social information access techniques, could be used to replicate some social features of traditional libraries and to enhance the user experience. Using the case of Ensemble, a major educational digital library, the paper describes how social navigation could be used to extend digital library portals, how social wisdom can be collected, and how it can be used to guide portal users to valuable resources. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Ensemble: A distributed portal for the distributed community of computing education

NSF's NSDL is composed of domain-oriented pathways. Ensemble is the pathway for computing and supports the full range of computing education communities, providing a base for the development of programs that blend computing with other STEM areas (e.g., X-informatics and Computing + X), and producing digital library innovations that can be propagated to other NSDL pathways. Computing is a distributed community, including computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information science, information systems, and information technology. Ensemble aims to provide much needed support for the many distinct yet overlapping educational programs in computing and their associated communities. To do this, Ensemble takes the form of a distributed portal providing access to the broad range of existing educational resources while preserving the collections and their associated curatorial processes. Ensemble encourages contribution, use, reuse, review, and evaluation of educational materials at multiple levels of granularity. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Capturing Design Decision Rationale with Decision Cards

Part 7: Design Rationale and Camera-ControlInternational audienceIn the design process, designers make a wide variety of decisions that are essential to transform a design from a conceptual idea into a concrete solution. Recording and tracking design decisions, a first step to capturing the rationale of the design process, are tasks that until now are considered as cumbersome and too constraining. We used a holistic approach to design, deploy, and verify decision cards; a low threshold tool to capture, externalize, and contextualize design decisions during early stages of the design process. We evaluated the usefulness and validity of decision cards with both novice and expert designers. Our exploration results in valuable insights into how such decision cards are used, into the type of information that practitioners document as design decisions, and highlight the properties that make a recorded decision useful for supporting awareness and traceability on the design process

Safety and Security Interference Analysis in the Design Stage

Safety and security engineering have been traditionally separated disciplines (e.g., different required knowledge and skills, terminology, standards and life-cycles) and operated in quasi-silos of knowledge and practices. However, the co-engineering of these two critical qualities of a system is being largely investigated as it promises the removal of redundant work and the detection of trade-offs in early stages of the product development life-cycle. In this work, we enrich an existing safety-security co-analysis method in the design stage providing capabilities for interference analysis. Reports on interference analyses are crucial to trigger co-engineering meetings leading to the trade-offs analyses and system refinements. We detail our automatic approach for this interference analysis, performed through fault trees generated from safety and security local analyses. We evaluate and discuss our approach from the perspective of two industrial case studies on the space and medical domains.The research leading to this paper has received funding from the AQUAS project (H2020-ECSEL grant agreement 737475). The ECSEL Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme