1869 research outputs found
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The Complexity of Self-reference. A Critical Evaluation of Luhmann's Theory of Social Systems
No full textThe paper presents the basic elements of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems and shows that his theories follow quite naturally from the problem of the reproduction of social systems. The subsequent feature of the self-referentiality of social systems is discussed against the theory of hierarchical loops, as developed in particular by Robert Rosen. It will be shown that Rosen’s theory is more general than Luhmann’s. The nature of anticipatory systems and the problem of conflict are used as testing grounds to verify some interesting articulations of the general theory of hierarchical loops
Specification of Models for Representing Single-user and Community-based Annotations of Web Resources
No full textINSEMTIVES overall goal is to increase the amount of available semantic content by looking into incentives and by bridging the gap between human and computational intelligence. Annotations are one form of semantic content which are supposed to make information machine readable and which typically attach additional meaning to a resource based on an implicit analysis of the resource by a human user. This deliverable builds upon an earlier deliverable which reported on a classification scheme for annotation models and an analysis of the requirements of the use cases partners in the project (INSEMTIVES D2.1.1: “Report on the State-of-the-Art and Requirements for Annotation Representation Models”). Based on that, it presents a consolidated annotation model and a formalization of it
Reviewing peer review: a quantitative analysis of peer review
No full textIn this paper we focus on the analysis of peer reviews and reviewers behavior in a number of different review processes. More specifically, we report on the development, definition and rationale of a theoretical model for peer review processes to support the identification of appropriate metrics to assess the processes main properties. We then apply the proposed model and analysis framework to data sets from conference evaluation processes and we discuss the results implications and their eventual use toward improving the analyzed peer review processes. A number of unexpected results were found, in particular: (1) the low correlation between peer review outcome and impact in time of the accepted contributions and (2) the presence of an high level of randomness in the analyzed peer review processes
A variational approach to stochastic nonlinear diffusion problems with dynamical boundary conditions
No full textPreprint. We study a nonlinear partial differential equation of the calculus of variation in a bounded domain, perturbed by noise; we allow stochastic boundary conditions which depend on the time derivative of the solution on the boundary. This work provides the existence and uniqueness of the solution and it shows the existence of an ergodic invariant measure for the corresponding transition semigroup; further, under suitable additional assumptions, uniqueness and strong asymptotic stability of the invariant measure are proved
A facet-based methodology for geo-spatial modeling
No full textSpace, together with time, is one of the two fundamental dimensions of the universe of knowledge. Geo-spatial ontologies are essential for our shared understanding of the physical universe and to achieve semantic interoperability between people and between software agents. In this paper we propose a methodology and a minimal set of guiding principles, mainly inspired by the faceted approach, to produce high quality ontologies in terms of robustness, extensibility, reusability, compactness and flexibility. We demonstrate - with step by steps examples - that by applying the methodology and those principles we can model the space domain and produce a high quality facet-based large scale geo-spatial ontology comprising entities, entity classes, spatial relations and attributes
Semantics Disambiguation in Folksonomy: a Case Study
No full textSocial annotation systems such as del.icio.us, Flickr and others have gained tremendous popularity among Web 2.0 users. One of the factors of success was the simplicity of the underlying model, which consists of a resource (e.g., a web page), a tag (e.g., a text string), and a user who annotates the resource with the tag. However, due to the syntactic nature of the underlying model, these systems have been criticised for not being able to take into account the explicit semantics implicitly encoded by the users in each tag. In this article we: a) provide a formalisation of an annotation model in which tags are based on concepts instead of being free text strings; b) describe how an existing annotation system can be converted to the proposed model; c) report on the results of such a conversion on the example of a del.icio.us dataset; and d) show how the quality of search can be improved by the semantic in the converted dataset
Where are the Concepts in the Folksonomy Model?
No full textCorporate portals make an important integral part of the enterprise infrastructure, facilitating the creation, sharing, discovery and consumption of enterprise assets through blogs, news, forums, documents and information in general. However, as the amount of data grows, it becomes much more difficult to access the right asset in the precise moment when it is needed. Annotation systems tried to address this problem to a certain extent by allowing the users to collaboratively annotate assets using tags such that these assets can be found more easily by reusing these tags in queries. However, this model often falls short due to mismatches in the vocabularies of different users, due to the use of synonymous, polysemous, more specific or general terms in tagging and searching, and so on. In this paper we: (a) provide an analysis of the corporate portal of the Telefonica group; (b) identify requirements for a semantics-enabled annotation system that is capable of addressing the above-mentioned shortcomings; (c) define a semantic annotation model that meets the requirements; (d) provide the details of the implementation of the annotation model for the Telefonica portal; and (e) provide an initial evaluation from the use of the semantic annotation system in the enterprise
L’allegoria: teorie e forme tra medioevo e modernità
No full textIl volume raccoglie i contributi all’incontro di studio organizzato sul tema dell’allegoria, nel dicembre 2009, dalla Scuola di dottorato in Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Filologici dell’Università di Trento.
Intento principale dell’iniziativa era fornire un’occasione di dibattito interdisciplinare su uno degli argomenti più affascinanti e discussi della teoria letteraria, mettendo a confronto elaborazioni e metodologie di analisi differenti e favorendo un approccio che non sacrificasse alcun punto di vista o specificità, ma permettesse una discussione ampia e feconda.
Il numero e la qualità degli interventi come anche la varietà dei problemi, dei testi e dei periodi trattati testimoniano l’interesse e la vivacità di una discussione che rappresenta senza dubbio un importante contributo alla riflessione teorica sull’allegoria, sia nel mondo tardo-antico e medievale sia in quello moderno e contemporaneo
Which is the Right Source for Vulnerability Studies? An Empirical Analysis on Mozilla Firefox
No full textThe last years have seen a major trend towards the notion of quantitative security assessment and the use of empirical methods to analyze or predict vulnerable components. Many past researches focused on vulnerability discovery models. The common method is to rely upon either a public vulnerability database (CVE, NVD), or vendor vulnerability database. Some combine these databases. Most of these works address a knowledge problem: can we understand the empirical causes of vulnerabilities? Can we predict them? Still, if the data sources do not completely capture the phenomenon we are interested in predicting, then our predictor might be optimal with respect to the data we have but unsatisfactory in practice. In our work, we focus on a more fundamental question: the quality of vulnerability database. How good we are at sampling? Or, with respect to the research objectives of current papers on empirical study in security, are we sampling the right data
Liquid Journals: Knowledge Dissemination in the Web Era
No full textIn this paper we redefine the notion of "scientific journal" to update it to the age of the Web. We explore the historical reasons behind the current journal model, and we show that this model is essentially the same today, even if the Web has made dissemination essentially free. We propose a notion of liquid and personal journals that evolve continuously in time and that are targeted to serve individuals or communities of arbitrarily small or large scales. The liquid journals provide "interesting" content, in the form of "scientific contributions" that are "related" to a certain paper, topic, or area, and that are posted (on their web site, repositories, traditional journals) by "inspiring" researchers. As such, the liquid journal separates the notion of "publishing" (which can be achieved by submitting to traditional peer review journals or just by posting content on the Web) from the appearance of contributions into the journals, which are essentially collections of content. In this paper we introduce the liquid journal model, and demonstrate through some examples its value to individuals and communities. Finally, we describe an architecture and a working prototype that implements the proposed model