title: Ontological quality control in large-scale, applied ontology matching

authors: Legg, Catherine

subjects: ontology

abstract: To date, large-scale applied ontology mapping has relied greatly on label matching and other relatively simple syntactic features. In search of more holistic and accurate alignment, we offer a suite of partially overlapping ontology mapping heuristics which allows us to hypothesise matches and test them against the knowledge in our source ontology (OpenCyc). We thereby automatically align our source ontology with 55K concepts from Wikipedia with 93% accuracy.

text: Ontological quality control in large-scale, applied ontology matching To date, large-scale applied ontology mapping has relied greatly on label matching and other relatively simple syntactic features. In search of more holistic and accurate alignment, we offer a suite of partially overlapping ontology mapping heuristics which allows us to hypothesise matches and test them against the knowledge in our source ontology (OpenCyc). We thereby automatically align our source ontology with 55K concepts from Wikipedia with 93% accuracy.

year: 2013

title: Governance and conflict in Pakistan: Developing a Conflict Prevention and Reduction (CPR) model to promote peace in Baluchistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA)

authors: Karim, Muhammad Arsalan

subjects: Conflict Prevention and Reduction

abstract: Pakistan is an unstable country, home to a single religious nation made up of four major regional ethnic sub-nations. The inability of the political leadership of Pakistan to successfully connect and merge the interests of the nation and sub-nations with the interests of the state has been a longstanding issue. This has weakened the central political institution and allowed the military and civil bureaucracies, feudal elites and oligarch families to dominate the central government, preventing it from delivering good governance to the nation and sub-nations. These key central stakeholders allow the tribal chiefs, and religious and ethnic elites to dominate the regional political institutions and to become key regional stakeholders, triggering religious and ethnic conflict. Out of the four major sub-nation regions in Pakistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Baluchistan are hotbeds of religious terrorism and ethnic insurgency, generating a conflict that affects the rest of the country.

Through a mix of secondary data and primary information (that includes field interviews and surveys) gathered from Baluchistan, FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), this thesis reveals the existence of sub-states that operate as discrete regional systems of socio-political governance. The study provides empirical evidence that the religious and ethnic conflicts in Pakistan are produced and sustained by these socio-political structures and their governance mechanisms. These conflicts exist in FATA and Baluchistan but not in KP – this difference between the regions offers an opportunity to consider why KP has been more successful than FATA and Baluchistan. This, in turn, provides an opportunity to consider why the governance structures and mechanisms in KP have been successful, and in the process to develop a new Conflict Prevention and Reduction (CPR) model focused on improving governance in FATA and Baluchistan. This could reduce violence and terrorism in Pakistan, while the model has potential relevance for fractured nations beyond Pakistan.

text: Governance and conflict in Pakistan: Developing a Conflict Prevention and Reduction (CPR) model to promote peace in Baluchistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) Pakistan is an unstable country, home to a single religious nation made up of four major regional ethnic sub-nations. The inability of the political leadership of Pakistan to successfully connect and merge the interests of the nation and sub-nations with the interests of the state has been a longstanding issue. This has weakened the central political institution and allowed the military and civil bureaucracies, feudal elites and oligarch families to dominate the central government, preventing it from delivering good governance to the nation and sub-nations. These key central stakeholders allow the tribal chiefs, and religious and ethnic elites to dominate the regional political institutions and to become key regional stakeholders, triggering religious and ethnic conflict. Out of the four major sub-nation regions in Pakistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Baluchistan are hotbeds of religious terrorism and ethnic insurgency, generating a conflict that affects the rest of the country.

Through a mix of secondary data and primary information (that includes field interviews and surveys) gathered from Baluchistan, FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), this thesis reveals the existence of sub-states that operate as discrete regional systems of socio-political governance. The study provides empirical evidence that the religious and ethnic conflicts in Pakistan are produced and sustained by these socio-political structures and their governance mechanisms. These conflicts exist in FATA and Baluchistan but not in KP – this difference between the regions offers an opportunity to consider why KP has been more successful than FATA and Baluchistan. This, in turn, provides an opportunity to consider why the governance structures and mechanisms in KP have been successful, and in the process to develop a new Conflict Prevention and Reduction (CPR) model focused on improving governance in FATA and Baluchistan. This could reduce violence and terrorism in Pakistan, while the model has potential relevance for fractured nations beyond Pakistan.

year: 2022

title: Putting Sylvia in her place: history, geographical theory and the “New” Education

authors: Middleton, Sue

subjects: Sylvia Ashton-Warner

abstract: New Zealander Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a teacher in remote rural Mori schools in the 1940s-1950s, became internationally renowned as a novelist and educational theorist. Earlier commentators portrayed her educational theory as in conflict with those of her time and place, but recent studies conceptualise them as enabled by it. While space/place has often been considered the preserve of the geographer and time that of the historian, Henri Lefebvre and others suggest that: “these issues need to be thought together rather than separately” and that macro-, meso- and micro-levels of analysis be engaged simultaneously. The author traces how conceptual, linguistic, sensory and intellectual resources of the global “New Education” movement extended into the tiny bush-encircled Mori communities in which Sylvia taught and wrote in the 1940s-1950s and surfaced in her writing. The article zooms in and out between the “the immensity of the global” (the New Education, the Second World War) and “the intimately tiny” (her classroom and home). The “data” include Sylvia's non-fiction education texts and official documents of her time: school curricula, education policy documents, Ministerial and Inspectors' reports. What Lefebvre terms a “Rhythm analysis” of Ashton-Warner's educational writing shows intermingled pulses of domestic life, routines of educational bureaucracy, cycles of nature, and cataclysms of world events. It is important for historians to study “the where rather than just the when with location and landscape central parts of the analysis”.

text: Putting Sylvia in her place: history, geographical theory and the “New” Education New Zealander Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a teacher in remote rural Mori schools in the 1940s-1950s, became internationally renowned as a novelist and educational theorist. Earlier commentators portrayed her educational theory as in conflict with those of her time and place, but recent studies conceptualise them as enabled by it. While space/place has often been considered the preserve of the geographer and time that of the historian, Henri Lefebvre and others suggest that: “these issues need to be thought together rather than separately” and that macro-, meso- and micro-levels of analysis be engaged simultaneously. The author traces how conceptual, linguistic, sensory and intellectual resources of the global “New Education” movement extended into the tiny bush-encircled Mori communities in which Sylvia taught and wrote in the 1940s-1950s and surfaced in her writing. The article zooms in and out between the “the immensity of the global” (the New Education, the Second World War) and “the intimately tiny” (her classroom and home). The “data” include Sylvia's non-fiction education texts and official documents of her time: school curricula, education policy documents, Ministerial and Inspectors' reports. What Lefebvre terms a “Rhythm analysis” of Ashton-Warner's educational writing shows intermingled pulses of domestic life, routines of educational bureaucracy, cycles of nature, and cataclysms of world events. It is important for historians to study “the where rather than just the when with location and landscape central parts of the analysis”.

year: 2011