The Difference Between Legal Control and Material Control - Coordination of Access Rights in Shared Workspaces

Research purpose. Modern work is increasingly taking place in temporary workgroups embedded in decentralized work environments that transcend organizational boundaries. The first implementations of the shared workspace idea emerged in the 1990s in the CSCW research area and are now firmly integrated into the working world with systems such as Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. However, when it comes to accessing documents, problems arise in terms of coordinating access to documents. Who can access the documents, modify them, and upload them back to the shared workspace? It should be noted that concurrent changes can lead to inconsistencies. Furthermore, incorrect changes to the content of documents can have economic and legal consequences. Who is responsible for this? Strict access control can avoid this problem if necessary. However, it contradicts the approach of agile cooperation, which benefits, among other things, from access to documents that is not restricted in terms of time and place. Design / Methodology / Approach. The article proposes a semantic approach for access coordination of shared workspaces. Its basis is the legal distinction between the levels of legal control (owner) and material control (possessor). The owner of an object has the right and the duty to allow the other participants of the shared workspace to access it, i.e., to have material control. This is done through an agreement between the owner and the possessor, which specifies the conditions of material control. In addition to coordinating access, the owner is also responsible for arbitrating in case of conflict and deciding which changes are valid and which are not. Findings. Transferring the distinction between owner and possessor leads to three possible classes of conflicts: Ownership vs ownership, ownership vs possession, and possession vs possession. Conflict schemes within these classes of conflict are analyzed in detail. On the one hand, it is possible to use strict, conflict-avoiding settings, but this tends to limit cooperation. On the other hand, greater cooperation agility can be enabled if the owner situationally controls access or if the owner has preset flexible response tactics in case a conflict arises. A closer look at possible conflict classes shows that it is necessary to adapt the legal concepts of owner and possessor to the cooperation situation. Originality / Value / Practical implications. The concept of the legal distinction between owner and possessor has not yet been applied to the domain of access coordination in shared workspaces. This approach can introduce the previously missing semantics for access coordination, at least on an informal basis. It also improves participants’ awareness of the context of cooperation.

Presenting documents to clients in Social Work encounters

In service encounters between social workers and clients, professionals introduce clients to specific bureaucratic procedures required by the institution and provide assistance in handling problems related to their institutional affairs. Here, paper-based documents are treated by the participants as relevant objects containing important textual information about clients’ rights and obligations, and duly presented by professionals to clients so to inform them of relevant matters at hand. Based on a corpus of video recordings of Social Work encounters in Portugal, and taking a multimodal conversation analytical approach, this study examines how social workers present paper documents to clients and how, through talk and bodily conduct, they ensure clients’ ability to inspect and make sense of relevant information, managing practical problems concerning clients’ access to documents and knowledge of the information contained therein.

Development of a New Research Methodology Tool ‘Pearsons Visual Relationship Framework’

Academics and researchers are often faced with reading significant numbers of publications to identify and extract the relevant information that is required for their research, which can be time consuming and difficult to keep track of. The aim of this study was to find an alternative solution to current research methodologies used for publication review information storage and retrieval. The objectives were to develop a system utilising a relationship management format, that is visual and easy to create, providing access to documents, notes, abstracts and other relevant information at the click of a button. Following extensive research into methods of achieving this, it became apparent that there was a gap in the knowledge on how to achieve it efficiently. The visual relationship tool was developed and evaluated in practical use in academia and manufacturing, with extremely positive results as to its suitability in both fields. The conclusions were that the tool is not limited to academic research but can also be used in manufacturing, industry and small business management as well.

Proceedings before the Office and Procedural Rules

This chapter discusses the Basic Regulation and the Proceedings Regulation that contain a diversity of provisions on procedures, which relate to application procedures, objection procedures, or appeal procedures. It describes the Community plant variety rights system that opens the possibility for breeders to apply for Community plant variety rights. It also explains the specific procedure of framework of the Community system, which complies with fundamental principles on legitimate expectations and the right to a fair hearing. This chapter deals with the ancillary procedures relating to variety denominations, the objection procedure, and the procedure on access to documents. It highlights specific procedures to be followed concerning the application for a compulsory licence and requests for nullity and cancellation.

Facilitating Study and Item Level Browsing for Clinical and Epidemiological COVID-19 Studies

COVID-19 poses a major challenge to individuals and societies around the world. Yet, it is difficult to obtain a good overview of studies across different medical fields of research such as clinical trials, epidemiology, and public health. Here, we describe a consensus metadata model to facilitate structured searches of COVID-19 studies and resources along with its implementation in three linked complementary web-based platforms. A relational database serves as central study metadata hub that secures compatibilities with common trials registries (e.g. ICTRP and standards like HL7 FHIR, CDISC ODM, and DataCite). The Central Search Hub was developed as a single-page application, the other two components with additional frontends are based on the SEEK platform and MICA, respectively. These platforms have different features concerning cohort browsing, item browsing, and access to documents and other study resources to meet divergent user needs. By this we want to promote transparent and harmonized COVID-19 research.

The naming of the Permian System

The naming of the Permian by Roderick Murchison in 1841 is well known. This is partly because he ‘completed’ the stratigraphic column at system level, but also because of the exotic aspects of his extended fieldwork in remote parts of Russia and Murchison's reputed character. Here, we explore several debated and controversial aspects of this act, benefiting from access to documents and reports notably from Russian sources. Murchison or Sedgwick could have provided a name for the unnamed lower New Red Sandstone in 1835 based on British successions or those in Germany, so perhaps the Imperial aim of naming time from British geology was not the urgent task some have assumed. Murchison has been painted as arrogant and Imperialistic, which was doubtless true, but at the time many saw him as a great leader, even an attractive individual. Others suggest he succeeded because he stood on the shoulders of local geologists; however, his abilities at brilliant and rapid geological synthesis are undoubted. Two unexpected consequences of his work are that this arch conservative is revered in Russia as a hero of geological endeavours, and, for all his bombast, his ‘Permian’ was not widely accepted until 100 years after its naming.Supplementary material:https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5412079

EU Transparency as ‘Documents’: Still Fit for Purpose?

In this thematic issue, the question whether EU decision making might be characterised by an excess of transparency stands central. This contribution addresses an issue that precedes such questions of quantity: that of transparency’s qualities, i.e., its specific shape. From an early point in time, transparency in the EU has been equated with the narrow and legalistic notion of ‘access to documents.’ Although since then, transparency has become associated with a wider range of practices, the Union has not managed to shake off the concept’s association with bureaucracy, opacity, and complexity. This remains the case, in spite of the fact that administrations and decision-makers across the world increasingly utilise the possibilities of technological innovation to communicate more directly with their electorates. In this changing communicative context, this commentary considers whether EU transparency as access to documents is still fit for purpose. It does so by exploring access policy from the vantage point of legal developments, administrative practices, political dynamics, and technological innovations. The commentary concludes that while improvements are needed, the access to documents concept endures. However, access to documents needs to be complemented by constructive (rather than predatory) public justification and contestation, to remain viable.

Improving exploratory information retrieval for neophytes

Digital libraries have become an essential tool for researchers in all scientific domains. With almost unlimited storage capacities, current digital libraries hold a tremendous number of documents. Though some efforts have been made to facilitate access to documents relevant to a specific information need, such a task remains a real challenge for a new researcher. Indeed neophytes do not necessarily use appropriate keywords to express their information need and they might not be qualified enough to evaluate correctly the relevance of documents retrieved by the system. In this study, we suppose that to better meet the needs of neophytes, the information retrieval system in a digital library should take into consideration features other than content-based relevance. To test this hypothesis, we use machine learning methods and build new features from several metadata related to documents. More precisely, we propose to consider as features for machine learning: content-based scores, scores based on the citation graph and scores based on metadata extracted from external resources. As acquiring such features is not a trivial task, we analyze their usefulness and their capacity to detect relevant documents. Our analysis concludes that the use of these additional features improves the performance of the system for a neophyte. In fact, by adding the new features we find more documents suitable for neophytes within the results returned by the system than when using content-based features alone.