1522 research outputs found
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Issues in Developing a Blended Learning Initiative to meet Continuing Professional Development needs of Construction Professionals in Ireland
Get PDFThe need for continuing professional development (CPD) in both the UK and Ireland has been recognised by the construction sector. CPD and lifelong learning are vital to individual and organisational success. All individuals
learn in different ways from listening, watching, questioning, doing and helping others to learn. Lifelong learning programmes aimed at people in the workplace must be suited to their particular needs. When addressing learning needs using technology, management, staff and technical support in higher-level institutes face new challenges and are required to make new decisions. Higher-level institutes are at different stages of technology deployment in addressing learning needs. A concern for all involved in these undertaking is the cost of deploying content to be delivered online. On-line higher education learning is part of the growing trend in lifelong learning. The academic issues that need to be considered in developing an e–learning environment to promote the learning of construction professionals and bridge the gap between industry and academia are outlined. A proposed blended learning initiative to meet CPD needs in the Irish construction industry is discussed. The structure of this new blended approach is outlined
Espied with Truth’s Ray or Error’s jaundiced Eye?: Richard Twiss’s Account of Dublin in 1775
Get PDFDiscusses the background to Richard Twiss’s tour of Ireland, particularly in the context of travel literature, the reputation of the author and his journey around the country in general. The paper then goes on to outline the observations he made about Dublin during the summer of 1775 and conclude with some remarks on the poetical response to his book, which took the form of four satirical poems
Flexible Charging for Multi-provider Composed Services using a Federated, Two-phase Rating Process
Get PDFWe present a framework enabling charging for
composed services comprised of services offered by multiple
providers. In the framework rating engines may generate charge
information for individual services and provide this information
upon request to other rating engines when these services are used
as part of a composed service. Rating engines additionally employ
a two-phase rating process which allows potentially complex
business agreements between providers to be reflected in
composed service charges. Charges can vary depending on the
context in which a service is executed, for example, as part of a
composed service which includes services offered by a partner
provider. Crucially, the process allows rating engines to calculate
these varying charges without having to be manually
pre-configured with details of the structure of individual
composed services. In the paper we provide an overview of the
framework, specifying in detail the rating process and
inter-rating engine communications, and describe via an example
its deployment in a distributed environment supporting the
execution of composed services
End-to-End Model Driven Policy Based Network Management
Get PDFThe continued movement towards converged networks
changes the focus to building application services that enable
customers to move between different types of service
providers based on their needs. Policy management becomes
paramount for the rapid deployment and management
of these application services. This paper presents the
concept of a policy continuum and discusses the importance
of modeling and natural languages in the presence of the
policy continuum, resulting in a novel architecture suitable
for autonomic computing
FOCALE: A Novel Autonomic Networking Architecture
Get PDFNetwork resources will always be heterogeneous, and thus have different
functionalities and programming models. This can be solved through the
combination of information models and knowledge engineering, which together
can be used to discover and program semantically similar functionality for
heterogeneous devices regardless of the data and language used by each device.
This paper introduces FOCALE, a semantically rich architecture for orchestrating
the behavior of heterogeneous and distributed computing resources. We apply the
FOCALE architecture to Beyond 3G Networks as a case study
Synchronization and Clustering in a Multimode Quantum Dot Laser
Get PDFWe analyze experimentally the intensity oscillations of the longitudinal modes of quantum dot
semiconductor lasers. We show that the modal intensities can oscillate chaotically with different average
frequencies, but obey a highly organized antiphase dynamics leading to a constant total output power. The
fluctuations are in the MHz range. We report the first experimental observation of frequency clustering
associated with synchronization. We also observe the propagation of perturbations across the optical
spectrum from blue to red
Simple closed form Hankel transforms based on the central coefficients of certain Pascal-like triangles
Get PDFWe study the Hankel transforms of sequences related to the central coefficients of a family of Pascal-like triangles. The mechanism of Riordan arrays is used to elucidate the structure of these transforms
ARTICULATING SERVICE CONCEPT TO ENHANCE TOURISM EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Get PDFARTICULATING SERVICE CONCEPT TO ENHANCE TOURISM EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Identifying the nature of Irish Tourism experience is recognised as being of primary importance in the formulation of tourism policy and in the shaping of an enhanced competitive position for the industry (OECD, 2004), however tourism service managers often have difficulty articulating the true nature of their service concept (Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons, 2004). The definition of service concept is a fundamental part of the strategic advantage seeking processes of service design, service development and service innovation (Tax & Stuart, 2004). In response to the competitive imperative for improved tourism product development, this paper will develop a conceptual model of the components of a service concept, an experience concept and the process by which the tourism experience concept can be articulated.
There exist varied definitions of the components of a service concept from both service marketing, e.g. Lovelock & Wright (1999) 8 P’s, and service operations perspectives, e.g. Clark, Johnston & Shulver (2000) and there is also considerable literature on the subject of service experience components. Experiences create added value by engaging and connecting with customers in a personal and memorable way (Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons, 2004) and progress the economic value of the organisations’ market proposition (Pine & Gilmore (1998)). As services are driven to become more experiential and therefore increasingly intangible, the articulation of service concept invariably becomes more difficult but also more necessary. The objective of this paper is to examine the existing theories and frameworks of the components of services and experiences and to identify areas of commonality and/or divergence. From this understanding of the components of an experience, a preliminary conceptual model of the process service providers should follow in seeking to better define and articulate their tourism experiences will be developed.
Pine & Gilmore (1998) assert that developed nations have moved beyond the notion of a service economy to a the idea of an experience economy and that the ability to design effective systems for the creating desired customer experiences has become increasingly important for competitive advantage. Articulating Service concept is a fundamental part of improved Tourism service des
Ontology-Based Knowledge Representation for Self-Governing Systems
Get PDFSelf-governing systems need a reliable set of semantics and
a formal theoretic model in order to facilitate automated reasoning. We
present an ontology-based knowledge representation that will use data
from information models while preserving the semantics and the taxonomy
of existing systems. This will facilitate the decomposition and
validation of high level goals by autonomous, self-governing components.
Our solution reuses principles and standards from the Semantic Web
and the OMG to precisely describe the managed entities and the shared
objectives that these entities are trying to achieve by autonomously correlating
their behavior. We describe how we created UML2, MOF, OCL
and QVT ontologies, and we give a case study using the NGOSS Shared
Information and Data model. We also set the requirements for integrating
existing information models and domain ontologies into a unique
knowledge base