bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Five trends that matter: Challenges to 21st century electronic government
Authors: Scholl Hans Jochen
Published: February 2025

Democratic government of the 21st century is believed to head towards more agility, leanness, responsiveness, accessibility, openness, and participation than its predecessors in the 20th century. However, at the same time democratic government has to cope with new challenges and trends, which are unprecedented in their potential impacts (positive and negative) on society at large. These challenges are intertwined and interact. The article discusses the interacting challenges of market regulations and deregulations, the third industrial revolution, sustainable levels of government spending and debt financing, theevolutionofsmartgovernment, andtheemergenceofnewmodelsofparticipation. Informationandcommunication technologies seemingly play a pivotal role in enabling the emerging shape of 21st century democratic government. They also appear to be instrumental in addressing and coping with the new challenges and trends. Consequently, electronic government research needs to fully engage in studying these complex phenomena and help both theory and practice understand the choices and potential outcomes.
Forward to the past: Lessons for the future of e-government from the story so far
Authors: Bannister Frank  , Connolly Regina
Published: February 2025

While the development of e-government since the early 1990s has been characterized by many successful applications and systems, it has also been notable for a number of failures to fully realise visions and for several stalled ideas. Governments, professionals and indeed scholars have a tendency to embrace the latest technological developments before older ones have been fully exploited or in some cases even fully understood and this can leave a trail of uncompleted projects in its wake. The future success of e-government depends in part on understanding this phenomenon, addressing it and developing the ability to discern when a technology or concept is no longer of value and therefore should be abandoned and when a task needs to be finished properly, no matter how unglamorous that task may be.
Incorporating Explicit Coordination Mechanisms by Agents to Obtain Green Waves
Authors: Batista Júnior Antonio de Abreu  , Coutinho Luciano Reis
Published: February 2025

This paper describes a multi-agent system (MAS) acting on an arterial road network, where each intersection is controlled by an agent. The agents are concerned with the efficient control of their intersection. In order to improve the overall performance of the system we propose a model of explicit coordination that directs the behavior of agents for the formation of green waves on the artery, in addition to maintaining the autonomy of each agent. The model is tested in simulation and compared with the traditional approach of synchronization of traffic lights. The results obtained in simulation overcome the traditional model by representing a more realistic model of traffic.
A Layered Adjustable Autonomy Approach for Dynamic Autonomy Distribution
Authors: Mostafa Salama A.  , Ahmad Mohd Sharifuddin  , Annamalai Muthukkaruppan  , Ahmad Azhana  , Basheer Ghusoon Salim
Published: February 2025

Autonomy adjustment to a system requires a mechanism to implement the roles of the autonomous entities in the system. The required degree of autonomy to which the autonomous entities adhere is a highly debated topic. On one hand, people argue that strict minimal autonomy to the autonomous entities is sufficient in producing reliable systems. On the other hand, others deliberate that the entities with full autonomic capabilities are essential aspects of advanced intelligent and flexible systems. The adjustable autonomic agent approach can be a solution for both cases. In this paper, we extend the idea of modeling a spectrum of autonomy in a layered structure, where the agents can act at different layers of autonomy in order to fulfill the system's autonomic conditions. Consequently, a logical representation of the conceptual model of Layered Adjustable Autonomy (LAA) is proposed. The LAA model aims to give the system implicit control over the agents' decisions whenever necessary by managing the agents' autonomy, ensuring quality and robust decision-making. An Autonomy Analysis (AAM) and Situation Awareness (SAM) Modules are proposed to attest the dynamic distribution of agent autonomic performance to a degree of autonomy level.
Non Classical Techniques in Decision Support Systems
Authors: Encheva Sylvia
Published: February 2025

In this work we propose ranking of projects proposals applying both classical and non-classical cluster analysis techniques. The evaluation is based on six criteria and is employing four linguistic values. In addition we combine concept lattices and vector weights in an attempt to find possible clusters over the dataset used for cluster analysis. Thus obtained findings are compared and conclusions are drawn.
Vector Space Model Anonymization
Authors: Abril Daniel  , Navarro-Arribas Guillermo  , Torra Vicenç
Published: February 2025

The vector space model is a document set representation widely used in information retrieval and text mining. When we are dealing with confidential documents the use of this model should be restricted in order to preserve the confidentiality and anonymity of the original documents. Following this idea, we introduce a method to anonymize the document vector space, allowing thus the use of analytic techniques without disclosing private information. The proposed method is inspired by microaggregation, a popular technique used in statistical disclosure control, which ensures privacy by the satisfaction of the k-anonymity principle.
Character of Substitution and Its Significance for Letter Demand: The Finnish Case
Authors: Nikali Heikki
Published: February 2025

While this article considers letter demand in general, it concentrates on the substitution effect, and its characteristics and prerequisites for realization. The purpose of the paper is to determine the differences in substitution carried out in different letter-sender and -receiver groups or between different countries, and what the reasons for this are.
Big Data: A Framework For Research
Authors: Nagle Tadhg  , Sammon David
Published: February 2025

Big Data is not the first and most definitely not the last new term that the IT industry is going to coin in order to drive interest and investment in new technology. Moreover, with these new terms, an opportunity is afforded for the research community to objectively understand the impact (or lack thereof) on organizations and decision makers. This paper provides a high-level framework to guide researchers in the area of Big Data through a conceptualization of the Information Supply Chain. The Information Supply Chain can be used as a scoping device for researchers in positioning their work but also as a tool to enable stronger objectivity and prevent an automatic resistance or acceptance of the new term/trend.
Comparing Models for Spreadsheet Fault Localization
Authors: Hofer Birgit  , Wotawa Franz
Published: February 2025

Locating faults in spreadsheets can be difficult. Therefore, tools supporting the localization of faults are needed. This paper presents a novel dependency-based model that can be used in Model-based software debugging (MBSD). This model allows improvements of the diagnostic accuracy while keeping the computation times short. In an empirical evaluation, we show that dependency-based models of spreadsheets whose value-based models are often not solvable in an acceptable amount of time can be solved in less than one second. Furthermore, the amount of diagnoses is reduced by 15 % on average when using the novel instead of the original dependency-based model.
Inference in the FO(C) Modelling Language
Authors: Bogaerts Bart  , Vennekens Joost  , Denecker Marc  , Van den Bussche Jan
Published: February 2025

Recently, FO(C), the integration of C-LOG with classical logic, was introduced as a knowledge representation language. Up to this point, no systems exist that perform inference on FO(C), and very little is known about properties of inference in FO(C). In this paper, we study both of the above problems. We define normal forms for FO(C), one of which corresponds to FO(ID). We define transformations between these normal forms, and show that, using these transformations, several inference tasks for FO(C) can be reduced to inference tasks for FO(ID), for which solvers exist. We implemented this transformation and hence, created the first system that performs inference in FO(C). We also provide results about the complexity of reasoning in FO(C).
Manipulating picking sequences
Authors: Bouveret Sylvain  , Lang Jérôme
Published: February 2025

Picking sequences are a natural way of allocating indivisible items to agents in a decentralized manner: at each stage, a designated agent chooses an item among those that remain available. We address the computational issues of the manipulation of picking sequences by an agent or a coalition of agents. We show that a single agent can compute an optimal manipulation in polynomial time. Then we consider several notions of coalitional manipulation; for one of these notions, we show that computing an optimal manipulation is easy. We temper these results by giving a nontrivial upper bound on the impact of manipulation on the loss of social welfare.
A Systematic Solution to the (De-)Composition Problem in General Game Playing
Authors: Cerexhe Timothy  , Rajaratnam David  , Saffidine Abdallah  , Thielscher Michael
Published: February 2025

General game players can drastically reduce the cost of search if they are able to solve smaller subproblems individually and synthesise the resulting solutions. To provide a systematic solution to this (de-)composition problem, we start off with generalising the standard decomposition problem in planning by allowing the composition of individual solutions to be further constrained by domain-dependent requirements of the global planning problem. We solve this generalised problem based on a systematic analysis of composition operators for transition systems, and we demonstrate how this solution can be further generalised to general game playing.
On the Efficient Implementation of Social Abstract Argumentation
Authors: Correia Marco  , Cruz Jorge  , Leite João
Published: February 2025

In this paper we present a novel iterative algorithm – the Iterative Successive Substitution (ISS) – to efficiently approximate the models of debates structured according to Social Abstract Argumentation [10]. Classical iterative algorithms such as the Iterative Newton-Raphson (INR) and the Iterative Fixed-point (IFP) don't always converge and, when they do, usually take too long to be effective. We analytically prove convergence of ISS, and empirically show that, even when INR and IFP converge, ISS always outperforms them, often by several orders of magnitude. The ISS is able to approximate the models of complex debates with thousands of arguments in well under a second, often in under one tenth of a second, making it comfortably suitable for its purpose. Additionally, we present a small modification to ISS that, with a negligible overhead, takes advantage of the topological structure of certain debates to significantly increase convergence times.
Nested Dichotomies with probability sets for multi-class classification
Authors: Yang Gen  , Destercke Sébastien  , Masson Marie-Hélène
Published: February 2025

Binary decomposition techniques transform a multi-class problem into several simpler binary problems. In such techniques, a classical issue is to ensure the consistency between the binary assessments of conditional probabilities. Nested dichotomies, which consider tree-shaped decomposition, do not suffer from this issue. Yet, a wrong probability estimate in the tree can strongly biase the results and provide wrong predictions. To overcome this issue, we consider in this paper imprecise nested dichotomies, in which binary probabilities become imprecise. We show in experiments that the approach has many advantages: it provides cautious inferences when only little information is available, and allows to make efficient computations with imprecise probabilities even when considering generic cost functions.
Near Fairness in Matroids
Authors: Gourvès Laurent  , Monnot Jérôme  , Tlilane Lydia
Published: February 2025

This article deals with the fair allocation of indivisible goods and its generalization to matroids. The notions of fairness under consideration are equitability, proportionality and envy-freeness. It is long known that some instances fail to admit a fair allocation. However, an almost fair solution may exist if an appropriate relaxation of the fairness condition is adopted. This article deals with a matroid problem which comprises the allocation of indivisible goods as a special case. It is to find a base of a matroid and to allocate it to a pool of agents. We first adapt the aforementioned fairness concepts to matroids. Next we propose a relaxed notion of fairness said to be near to fairness. Near fairness respects the fairness up to one element. We show that a nearly fair solution always exists and it can be constructed in polynomial time in the general context of matroids.
On the revision of planning tasks
Authors: Herzig Andreas  , Menezes Viviane  , Nunes de Barros Leliane  , Wassermann Renata
Published: February 2025

When a planning task cannot be solved then it can often be made solvable by modifying it a bit: one may change either the set of actions, or the initial state, or the goal description. We show that modification of actions can be reduced to initial state modification. We then apply Katsuno and Mendelzon's distinction between update and revision and show that the modification of the initial state is an update and the modification of the goal description is a revision. We consider variants of Forbus's update and Dalal's revision operation and argue that existing belief change operations do not apply as they stand because their inputs are boolean formulas, while plan task modification involves counterfactual statements. We show that they can be captured in Dynamic Logic of Propositional Assignments DL-PA.
DITO: a CSP-based diagnostic engine
Authors: Pencolé Yannick
Published: February 2025

We present a new generic diagnostic engine to diagnose systems that are modelled with first order logic. The originality of this engine is that it takes benefit of recent advances in constraint programming to perform satisfiability tests by the use of an off-the-shelf CSP solver. The second contribution of this paper is the definition of an incremental search strategy that deals with the intrinsic complexity of the problem to look for minimal diagnoses in complex digital systems. The use of the DITO engine and its strategy is fully illustrated on the c6288 circuit that is part of the classical ISCAS85 benchmark.
Automating Gödel's Ontological Proof of God's Existence with Higher-order Automated Theorem Provers
Authors: Benzmüller Christoph  , Woltzenlogel Paleo Bruno
Published: February 2025

Kurt Gödel's ontological argument for God's existence has been formalized and automated on a computer with higher-order automated theorem provers. From Gödel's premises, the computer proved: necessarily, there exists God. On the other hand, the theorem provers have also confirmed prominent criticism on Gödel's ontological argument, and they found some new results about it.
DL-Lite and Interval Temporal Logics: a Marriage Proposal
Authors: Artale A.  , Bresolin D.  , Montanari A.  , Sciavicco G.  , Ryzhikov V.
Published: February 2025

Description logics of the DL-Lite family are widely used in knowledge representation because of their low computational complexity and rather good expressivity sufficient to capture important conceptual modelling constructs and the OWL2 QL profile of the Ontology Web Language (OWL). Recently, various point-based temporal extensions of DL-Lite have been investigated. Here, we propose to extend DL-Lite with fragments of Halpern and Shoham's interval logic of Allen's relations (ℋ𝒮). We formally define such extensions and show how they can be successfully used in knowledge representation. In the quest for a decidable logic, we discuss the challanges in combining decidable fragments of ℋ𝒮 with DL-Lite.
Generic data models for Semantic e-Government interoperability: Literature Review
Authors: Ryhänen Katariina  , Päivärinta Tero  , Tyrväinen Pasi
Published: February 2025

Interoperability of e-government systems is suggested to increase transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, and customer service in the public sector. Generic data models are often seen as a way for achieving especially semantic interoperability. To assess how the contemporary data models support semantic e-government interoperability, we reviewed literature on data models suggested for the public sector in light of four features: standard modelling language, entity-relationship modelling, vocabulary for data exchange and methodology. The review contributes previous research by introducing a four-feature framework for assessing capability of e-government data models to enhance interoperability and by providing an up-to-date review of the generic data models for this purpose.
Fusing Open Public Data, Prosperity Indexes, Fuzzy Cognitive Maps and Argumentation Technology for more factual, evidence-based and accountable policy analysis and evaluation
Authors: Markaki Ourania  , Kokkinakos Panagiotis  , Koussouris Sotirios  , Psarras John  , Glickman Yuri  , Lee Habin
Published: February 2025

This paper introduces a novel and innovative approach for more factual, evidence-based and accountable policy analysis and evaluation, based on the pillars of open public data, prosperity indicators, fuzzy cognitive maps, argumentation technology, deliberation platforms and social media. The approach assumes making better use of Europe's open public data resources and aspires to enable both the lay public as well as domain experts to create, apply, annotate, share and discuss progress metrics and causal models of policies, with the view to support them in assessing the governments' course of actions, and enhance thereby the transparency and effectiveness of the policy analysis and monitoring phases of the policy cycle.
The impact of digitization on the management of administrative procedures: The case of building permits
Authors: Kourakou Georgia  , Glassey Olivier  , Evequoz Florian
Published: February 2025

Information and Communication Technologies provide public administrations new ways to meet their users' needs. At the same time, e-Government practices support the public sector in improving the quality of service provision and of its internal operations. In this paper we discuss the impacts of digitization on the management of administrative procedures. The theoretical framework and the research model that we will use in this study help us tackle the question of how digitization transforms administrative procedures as, for example, in terms of time and roles. The multiplicity of institutions involved in issuing building permits led us to consider this administrative procedure as a very interesting case study. An online survey was first addressed to Swiss civil servants to explore the field, and here we present some of its results. We are currently undertaking an in-depth case study of the building permit procedures in three Swiss Cantons, which we will also present in this paper. We will conclude with a discussion and the future steps of this project.
Administrative and Digital Literacy: the Legend or Myth in e-Government
Authors: Cestnik Bojan  , Kern Alenka
Published: February 2025

New literacies are often used to denote the abilities to swiftly use data, information and knowledge in the modern age. In this paper we re-examined the hypothesis that a citizen having higher digital and administrative literacy would more frequently and with a higher success rate use e-government services. We analysed the collected applications received to a tender conducted by a public housing institution for renting flats under favourable conditions to citizens. The concerned citizens were intentionally offered two possibilities for submitting their applications: in paper form by the ordinary mail or in electronic form via the internet. The electronic web form was designed to be simple and easy to access, use and navigate; submitting and completing the application for renting flats through the web was of the same, if not of the lesser, complexity than filling and sending the same application by the ordinary mail. Contrary to a popular belief that the electronic submission would be typically preferred by more digitally and administrative literate citizens, the results of our study indicate that the completeness of submitted applications by the ordinary mail was significantly better than the completeness of the applications submitted via the web form. There is an agreement that citizens' digital literacy has to reach a certain level in order to start successfully using the available e-government services. However, our results indicate that a high digital literacy might not be enough. In some cases it not only ceases to help, but might also degrade the overall performance and success of a citizen using e-government services.
Evaluation of E-Participation in Social Networks: Russian E-Petitions Portal
Authors: Bershadskaya Lyudmila  , Chugunov Andrei  , Trutnev Dmitrii
Published: February 2025

Methods and Technologies of e-participation are an important component of Information society and e-governance development programmes. E-petitions portals are one of the mechanisms of e-participation. They provide the opportunity for citizens to influence the process of decision making at federal, regional and municipal levels. At the same time issues of the impact of e-petitions on traditional way of political decision making still remain unexplored. The article describes the practical case of an official e-petition portal development in Russia. The study aims at identifying the demand for electronic petitions portal in Russia in three main areas: 1) the dynamics of initiatives' publishing across federal districts; 2) citizens' discussion on Russian e-petition portal in social media; 3) correlation analysis of citizens' demand indicators and citizens' satisfaction with authorities work and openness, as well as other economic indicators.
Preferences and Unrestricted Rebut
Authors: Caminada Martin  , Modgil Sanjay  , Oren Nir
Published: February 2025

The work of Caminada & Amgoud presents two possible ways of satisfying the rationality postulates: one using restricted rebut, and one using unrestricted rebut. Subsequent work on ASPIC+ has extended the work of Caminada & Amgoud, for instance by allowing preferences over arguments. However, such extensions have utilised restricted rebut only. In the current paper, we make the case for unrestricted rebut, and provide a formalism (called ASPIC−) that implements preferences between the defeasible rules, in the context of unrestricted rebut while still satisfying the rationality postulates of Caminada & Amgoud.
Implementing Instantiation of Knowledge Bases in Argumentation Frameworks
Authors: Strass Hannes
Published: February 2025

We present an implementation of Wyner, Bench-Capon and Dunne's [2013] approach to instantiate knowledge bases in argumentation frameworks. The translation is encoded into answer set programming (ASP); the encoding can be used with ASP-based implementations of argumentation frameworks, such as aspartix or diamond.
Medical – pharmaceutical information system with recognition of Lithuanian voice commands
Authors: Rudžionis Vytautas  , Raškinis Gailius  , Ratkevičius Kastytis  , Rudžionis Algimantas  , Bartišiūtė Gintarė
Published: February 2025

This paper presents a Lithuanian voice recognition system of medical – pharmaceutical terms. The system consists of two separate speech recognition modules working in parallel. One recognizer is a proprietary CD-HMM Lithuanian speech recognizer. The second recognizer is a Spanish speech recognizer adapted to recognize Lithuanian voice commands. The outputs of both recognizers are combined by the decision making block yielding the final decision. The decision making block was automatically derived by an induction algorithm that learns a set of symbolic rules. The investigations showed that both recognizers produce uncorrelated outputs and could complement each other. The investigations also showed that Lithuanian speech recognizer achieves higher accuracy (over 96 percent in a speaker independent mode) but the use of the adapted foreign language recognizer allows increase this baseline accuracy even further (over 98 percent in a speaker independent mode for 1000 voice commands). The voice recognition system is in the process of being embedded into several medical information systems which will be used by healthcare practitioners.
Applying reverse engineering and complexity analysis to refine a cost estimation model based on function point
Authors: Yeh Dowming  , Chen Yi-Hong  , Yang Chih-Ying  , Chen Li-Wei  , Wang Ying-Hsiu  , Chen Kai-Wei
Published: February 2025

Software size estimation plays an important role in software development. There are methods proved to be helpful in providing a more systematic way in making estimates, in particular, those based on function points. Among various function point analysis methods, COSMIC-FFP is an approach more suitable for object-oriented systems and its application is relatively easy. However, when a system is involved with some complex computation, COSMIC-FFP method does not provide a clear mechanism which adjusts the weighting of these raw function points. In this study, we develop a tool to support the procedure by integrating reverse engineering-based function points with complexity analysis. Then, the unadjusted function points and complexity metrics are combined in statistical analyses to produce regression models which can produce an estimate of software size based on COSMIC-FFP and complexity. A study case is performed to verify the effectiveness of our method. The results are encouraging.
An Optimal Budget Assignment of Real-Time Query Processing for Wireless Sensor Networks in Context of the Internet of Things
Authors: Lu Yung-Feng  , Kuo Chin-Fu  , Suei Pei-Lun  , Pao Wei-Chen
Published: February 2025

With the development of sensor, wireless mobile communication, embedded system and cloud computing, the technologies of Internet of Things (IOT) have been widely used in logistics, Smart Meter, public security, intelligent building and so on. The Internet of Things is regarded as the third wave of information technology after Internet and mobile communication network, which is characterized by more thorough sense and measure, more comprehensive inter operability and intelligence.
Detecting Malware in Malicious Virtual Machines Using Tensor Analysis Techniques
Authors: Chang Ting-Yao  , Lai Wei-Yu  , Hsiang Tien-Ruey  , Mao Ching-Hao
Published: February 2025

Since computers are universalized in every aspect of modern applications, detecting malware embedded in computer systems is essential in protecting user privacy, robustness of services, and data integrity. With the rapidly growing popularity of cloud computing technologies, although the underlying system virtualization enhances the protection of service systems, it also brings new security challenges. For example, it can be less cost-effective, both to the cloud vendor and the cloud service tenants, to independently execute security services within every virtualized system based on common cloud pricing schemes. Also, malicious tenants may disrupt other tenants' service operations by means such as exhausting shared computing resources. In this paper, we focus on detecting malware running in virtual machines using the virtual machine introspection framework. The malware behaviors, in particular, the sequential system calls translated by the hypervisor of malware-infected virtual machines, are analyzed by tensor factorization techniques. By segmenting the system logs according to execution time or accumulated system call transition counts, our experiments shows that the proposed tensor-based detection approach can detect most types of malware with good accuracy using relatively short log segments.
Ontology Pattern Modeling for Cross-Repository Data Integration in the Ocean Sciences: The Oceanographic Cruise Example
Authors: Krisnadhi Adila A.  , Arko Robert  , Carbotte Suzanne  , Chandler Cynthia  , Cheatham Michelle  , Finin Timothy  , Hitzler Pascal  , Janowicz Krzysztof  , Narock Thomas  , Raymond Lisa  , Shepherd Adam  , Wiebe Peter
Published: February 2025

EarthCube is a major effort of the National Science Foundation to establish a next-generation knowledge architecture for the broader geosciences. Data storage, retrieval, access, and reuse are central parts of this new effort. Currently, EarthCube is organized around several building blocks and research coordination networks. OceanLink is a semantics-enabled building block that aims at improving data retrieval and reuse via ontologies, Semantic Web technologies, and Linked Data for the ocean sciences. Cruises, in the sense of research expeditions, are central events for ocean scientists. Consequently, information about these cruises and the involved vessels is of primary interest for oceanographers, and thus, needs to be shared and made retrievable. In this paper, we report the use of a design pattern-centric strategy to model Cruise for OceanLink data integration. We provide a formal axiomatization of the introduced pattern using the Web Ontology Language, explain design choices and discuss the planned deployment and application scenarios of our model.
A Linked Science Investigation: Enhancing Climate Change Data Discovery with Ontologies and Semantic Technologies
Authors: Pouchard Line C.  , Devarakonda Ranjeet  , Branstetter Marcia  , Noy Natasha
Published: February 2025

Linked Science is the practice of inter-connecting scientific assets by publishing, sharing and linking scientific data and processes in end-to-end loosely coupled workflows that allow the sharing and re-use of scientific data. Much of this data does not live in the cloud or on the Web, but rather in multi-institutional data centers that provide tools and add value through quality assurance, validation, curation, dissemination, and analysis of the data. In this paper, we make the case for the use of scientific scenarios in Linked Science. We propose a scenario in river-channel transport that requires biogeochemical experimental data and global climate-simulation model data from many sources. We focus on the use of ontologies — formal machine-readable descriptions of the domain — to facilitate search and discovery of this data. Mercury, developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is a tool for distributed metadata harvesting, search and retrieval. Mercury currently provides uniform access to more than 100,000 metadata records; 30,000 scientists use it each month. We augmented search in Mercury with ontologies, such as the ontologies in the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) collection by prototyping a com-ponent that provides access to the ontology terms from Mercury. We evaluate the coverage of SWEET for the ORNL Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC).
Determination of Muscle Recruitment Sequences in Upper Limb while Reaching Tasks
Authors: Miyoshi Tasuku  , Takagi Motoki  , Saito Hajime  , Yimit Adiljan  , Hagihara Yoshihiro
Published: February 2025

Although muscle activation timing and its level while reaching movements in a two-dimensional horizontal plane have been extensively studied, the present study was designed to experimentally determine the muscle recruitment sequence (which muscle is a determinant of its activity level) using reaching tasks in the anterior-posterior and medial-lateral directions. The preferred torque directions in six upper limb muscles were calculated and referenced to determine the muscle recruitment sequences while anterior-posterior and medial-lateral reaching tasks. The results indicated that the estimation of muscle recruitment sequences using an inverse dynamics operation starting from the end-effector side for an anterior-posterior movement and a forward dynamics operation for a medial-lateral movement could reproduce the observed muscle activation patterns.
Establishing a MDM function: First Steps in the Master Data Management Architecture Design
Authors: Vilminko-Heikkinen Riikka
Published: February 2025

Public sectors need to manage data for internal and external use is growing. Master data management aims to manage the core data that affects generally the data quality in large extent. The objective of the research is to observe the factors that affect the architectural decisions when establishing a MDM function. This is done though prior research and a case study in a municipality. Business needs and the existing IT environment indicate the best usage scenario for MDM. Scenario indicates the suitable architectural implementation style and also helps the organization to comprehend what they should emphasize in their development.
Open Skies with Cloud Computing
Authors: Solar Mauricio  , Araya Mauricio
Published: February 2025

This article shows that high costs to obtain data in astronomy justifies the use of cloud computing. In such a field, like others in science, there are several benefits when this data is freely available to the whole scientific community. The availability of these data will foster innovative applications to exploit and explore data. These applications could be offered as a service in the cloud. A National Data Center for e-Science could take advantage of these high costs data and offer open data to the community to maximize data accessibility.
Towards Exploiting Linked Statistical Open Government Data
Authors: Karamanou Areti
Published: February 2025

A significant part of Open Government Data (OGD) is of statistical nature and is currently available in governmental portals. Moreover, statistical OGD is published as linked data to facilitate the exploitation of dispersed data around the Web. However, the potential of linked statistical OGD data has not been fully realized yet. From one point of view, this is due to the limited and still immature efforts to create new processes, software components, models and methods that efficiently exploit linked statistical OGD so as to fully unleash its value. This paper describes the research aim of a currently immature PhD dissertation that fosters for the definition of a well-defined research question in the field of linked statistical OGD.
Time Divide, Money Divide and Attitudes towards Globalization, and eGovernment
Authors: Lindskog Helena  , Senejko Alicja  , Los Zbigniew
Published: February 2025

In order to achieve this enhanced eGovernment, it was necessary to provide adequate infrastructure to the citizens. This has been achieved in many countries. The digital divide has become quite narrow. One aspect that has not been covered to the same extent is time and money divide and attitudes towards globalisation. The Department of Management and Engineering, Linkoping University, Sweden, and the Institute of Psychology, Wroclaw University, Poland, have started a joint project in order to fill this gap by investigating different profiles based on two models;
Simulating the Core Dynamics of a Social Dilemma. Individual Choices, Time and Sanctions in the Tragedy of the Commons
Authors: Lettieri Nicola  , Vestoso Margherita
Published: February 2025

The understanding of the way in which collective phenomena emerge from the interaction between individual behaviors, environment and institutions, can play a crucial role in supporting the design of more contextualized policies. An apparently effective policy can easily fail if policy makers do not consider the interplay between individual decision making and social aggregate dynamics. This paper presents an ongoing research exploiting an agent-based simulation model to explore the core dynamics of the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC), a social dilemma known for being behind a series of societal problems spanning from pollution to resource depletion and climate change. The goal is twofold: capture the basic processes through which the ToC emerges and evolves; explore in an artificial society the effects of different strategies aiming to contrast the phenomenon. Our attention is focused on the interplay between different factors proven to be involved in the genesis of this dilemma: the selfish rationality of human beings, the temporal dimension of individual choices and the potential impact of sanctions.
Aggregating Expectations to Predict Policy Indices with Information Markets
Authors: Nikolakakou Niki  , Bothos Efthimios  , Mentzas Gregoris
Published: February 2025

As our world is becoming increasingly interconnected and globalized, policy modelers and policy makers are faced with complex decisions for challenges like climate change and financial crises. To address such challenges in an efficient and effective way, policy officials require timely and reliable information. Accordingly, the availability of appropriate methods and tools to aggregate scattered pieces of information and stakeholders' expectations is becoming increasingly important. In this paper we focus on the problem of aggregating and interpreting heterogeneous information dispersed among individuals in a timely manner to support public policy making. We propose an approach that involves the creation of belief (Bayesian) networks to model conditional and probabilistic dependencies between policy indices and the use of Information Markets (IMs) for aggregating stakeholder expectations on uncertain policy indices. An example case focusing on predicting Greenhouse Gas emissions shows how our approach can support real life policies and decisions.
SPARQL-based framework for semantically-based event processing
Authors: Sasa Bastinos Ana  , Lavbic Dejan
Published: February 2025

Event-driven architecture and complex event processing have become important topics in achieving business reactivity and proactivity. Even though many technologies to support this have been developed, there is still a need for providing support for complex events based on different levels of required expressivity. On the other hand, semantic technologies and semantic-based systems have emerged and are becoming more and more used, whereas there is no recognized solution for event processing in information systems based on semantic technologies. In this paper, we address these issues. We present a framework for ontology-based support for complex events, which allows for semantically enriched event definitions and automatic recognition. In order to automatically recognize complex events, an appropriate event definition basis has to be defined. The paper represents a continuation of our previous work by enhancing this basis and developing a SPARQL-based framework to provide a richer mechanism for event definitions and more efficient event detection. As a proof-of-concept, we provide an implementation of this framework using the semantic integration platform - Information Workbench. The implementation is available as an app that runs on top of the Information Workbench platform.
Web-Based Geodetic Data Processing System
Authors: Zhao Wen-Bo  , Hong Ming-Quan  , Lin Ping
Published: February 2025

This paper described novel geodetic data processing software, and analyzed the advantages of a web-based geodetic data processing system. The function module system was explained, the design process and methods of the measuring calculation modules were presented, and the system was implemented using ASP.Net, VB.Net 2010, and SQL Server.
An Approach to Fault Diagnosis Based on Fuzzy Bayesian Network for FMS
Authors: Su Jun  , Xu Bing  , Zhu Ya-Cheng  , Fan Qiu-Ming
Published: February 2025

In Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) fault diagnosis, there are some problems hard to tackle, such as fuzziness, polymorphism, etc. So this paper proposes an improved Bayesian network (BN) approach. By first introducing BN and describing the transformation process from FT to BN. In addition, this paper applies fuzzy theory to set up conditional probability table of BN, and proposes observing nodes used to describe symptom information. Finally, by analyzing the fault of the numerical control processing unit of FMS, results indicate that this approach can improve the efficiency and accuracy of reasoning for fault diagnosis.
‘Probing with the Prototype’: Using a Prototype e-Participation Platform as a Digital Cultural Probe to Investigate Youth Engagement with the Environment
Authors: Forbes Paula  , De Paoli Stefano
Published: February 2025

This study describes how we used a prototype e-participation platform as a digital cultural probe to investigate youth motivation and engagement strategies. This is a novel way of considering digital cultural probes which can contribute to the better creation of e-participation platforms. This probe has been conducted as part of the research project STEP which aims at creating an e-participation platform to engage young European Citizens in environmental decision making. Our probe technique has given an insight into the environmental issues concerning young people across Europe as well as possible strategies for encouraging participation. How the e-participation platform can be utilised to support youth engagement through opportunities for social interaction and leadership is discussed. This study leads to a better understanding of how young people can co-operate with each other to provide collective intelligence and how this knowledge could contribute to effective e-participation of young people.
Evaluating eGovernment Evaluation: Trend and Issues
Authors: Mukamurenzi Solange  , Grönlund Åke  , Islam M. Sirajul
Published: February 2025

Evaluating e-government has proven difficult. Reasons include the complex nature of e-government, difficulties in measuring outcomes and impact, and the evolving nature of the phenomenon itself. Practical and effective evaluation methods would be useful to guide the development. To gauge the state of the art in the field, a review of contemporary literature investigated the status of research on e-government evaluation. We found the issues involved to be described by five critical factors: maturity levels, evaluation object, type of indicators, evaluation timing, and stakeholder involvement. The review suggests that there is no best model but rather that e-government evaluation must be situated and take a formative approach to guide the next step. However in doing so there is a need for a clear perspective on where e-government development is going. On this point research is more in agreement, and we provide a model to conceptualize this development.
Governance and Online Service Delivery: The Danish Case
Authors: Meyerhoff Nielsen Morten
Published: February 2025

ICT enabled public sector reform and service delivery is actively researched in both classical Public Administration, Information System Management, and eGovernment literature. Multiple studies, research projects, and benchmarking efforts nonetheless highlight gaps in the current literature, not least in the eGovernment maturity models. Research points to a limited understanding of public service delivery technology as well as the role of governance, cross-governmental decision making, and cooperation when introducing ICT solutions and online services to citizens. Summarising the weaknesses, this article develops a qualitative multi-country case study methodology and applies it to Denmark. Initial findings highlight the strength of the Danish cross-governmental and consensus seeking approach to eGovernance. The article concludes with suggestions for an adapted methodology and aspects requiring further research.
Smart City: A Rigorous Literature Review of the Concept from 2000 to 2015
Authors: Macadar Marie Anne  , Porto Josiane Brietzke  , Luciano Edimara
Published: February 2025

This paper provides a thorough review of publications on smart city from 2000 to 2015 aiming at clarifying the concept. Grounded theory principles are used to systematize and understand the different meanings arising from initiatives in the area. Results have shown that smart city settings in the analyzed period allow the expansion of knowledge on the subject and a better understanding of the concept in its semantic and structural dimensions from the use of coding techniques. The concept of smart city has evolved from an initial emphasis on the technological aspect to a current approach, more focused on human, social aspects and participatory governance aiming at sustainability and quality of life. There have also been efforts to define the theoretical core of the smart city phenomenon due to the prevalence of qualitative and exploratory studies in the period and in recent publications with insufficient definitions to the concept.
Environmental Information and Policy Cycle: Developing the Complex Relationship
Authors: Tilio Lucia  , Riva Marina
Published: February 2025

The research investigates the link between environmental information and environmental policies, pointing out how, even now, complexity in creation, capture and analysis of first ones makes difficult building knowledge basis for decisions, in spite of variety of available tools with several analytical capabilities. Particularly, research introduces an analysis of criticisms related to environmental information, among which its fragmentary nature, high variety of sources, incompleteness, difficult accessibility, validation lack, multiple formats etc., and, considering policy cycle, it proposes some paths to strengthen the link between environmental information and policies. These paths have been defined in a context characterized by an increasing spread of information and communication technologies; these, moreover, now open also to new scenarios, where citizen science and volunteer geographic information become new and additional sources of information, even if not official, for environmental and not only environmental data, useful to fill potential incompleteness.
Assessing Mobile Participation: A Case Study of iCitizen, Buycott and USHAHIDI
Authors: Bunar Charly  , Isagah Tupokigwe
Published: February 2025

The ubiquity of mobile devices has led to the provisioning of mobile e-administration services in many countries and it possesses the potential to introduce new practices of e-participation specifically. Applying case study methodology, this paper identifies iCitizen, Buycott and USHAHIDI as practical examples for m-participation offers and compares them in regards to features, influence in the policy cycle, and usability. The lessons learnt highlight that m-participation should be a part of a wider strategy that includes offline and other media channels, that it utilises mobile features such as location-based services and Social Media integration to enhance efficacy of participation, and to make the offer focused on the user experience rather than a singular topic.