1,720,995 research outputs found
Towards Development of a Decision Support System for Water Resources Management
No full textDeveloping decision support systems for environmental applications is an intricate, challenging task. The increasing complexity of environmental decision problems, the growing number of subjects involved and keen competition between conflicting interests make decisions and decision support difficult. Decision support systems have been developed since the 1970s to help tackle semi-structured and unstructured decision problems. Despite their popularity, the success of DSS development is uncertain and many computerised decision-support tools have failed when dealing with complex and unstructured problems. This article describes the development methodology and progress of mDSS, a decision support system for water resource management that has been developed under the European research project MULINO. The mDSS tool is designed to integrate environmental (especially hydrological) models with multiple-criteria evaluation procedures.Anumber of prototypes have been developed and the final version is expected at the end of the 3-year project. The system’s development is driven by the experience acquired in several case studies selected in five European countries. Although the main aim of the MULINO project and the DSS is to help with increasingly complex decisions of general water management, the concepts of sustainable river basin management introduced by the water framework directive are addressed as well
Towards the Development of a Decision Support System for Water Resource Management
No full textDeveloping decision support systems for environmental applications is an intricate, challenging task. The increasing complexity of environmental decision problems, the growing number of subjects involved and keen competition between conflicting interests make decisions and decision support difficult. Decision support systems have been developed since the 1970s to help tackle semi-structured and unstructured decision problems. Despite their popularity, the success of DSS development is uncertain and many computerised decision-support tools have failed when dealing with complex and unstructured problems. This article describes the development methodology and progress of mDSS, a decision support system for water resource management that has been developed under the European research project MULINO. The mDSS tool is designed to integrate environmental (especially hydrological) models with multiple-criteria evaluation procedures. A number of prototypes have been developed and the final version is expected at the end of the 3-year project. The system's development is driven by the experience acquired in several case studies selected in five European countries. Although the main aim of the MULINO project and the DSS is to help with increasingly complex decisions of general water management, the concepts of sustainable river basin management introduced by the water framework directive are addressed as well
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
MULINO-DSS: a computer tool for sustainable use of water resources at the catchment scale
No full textMULINO, an ongoing project financed by the European Commission, has released the prototype of a Decision Support System software (mDSS) for the sustainable management of water resources at the catchment scale. The software integrates socio-economic and environmental modelling, with geo-spatial information and multi-criteria analysis. The policy background refers to the EU Water Framework Directive. The challenging multi-disciplinary context was approached by developing an innovative and dynamic implementation of the DPSIR framework, originally proposed by the European Environmental Agency. In mDSS integrated assessment modelling provides the values of quantitative indicators to be used for transparent and participated decisions, through the application of value functions, weights and decision rules chosen by the end user. Simple routines for the sensitivity analysis and comparison of alternative weight vectors also provides effective decision support by exploring and finding compromises between conflicting interests/perspectives in a multi-stakeholder context
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