Moving Towards a Knowledge City?

In the global knowledge economy, knowledge-intensive industries and knowledge workers are extensively seen as the primary factors to improve the welfare and competitiveness of cities. To attract and retain such industries and workers, cities produce knowledge-based urban development strategies, where such strategising is an important development mechanism for cities and their economies. This paper investigates knowledge-based urban development strategies of Brisbane, Australia that support generation, attraction, and retention of investment and talent. The paper puts forward a clear understanding on the policy frameworks, and relevant applications of Brisbane’s knowledge-based urban development experience in becoming a prosperous knowledge city, and concludes by providing invaluable insights and directions for other cities seeking knowledge-based urban development.

Outsourcing in Knowledge-Based Service Firms

This paper reports on empirical work recently conducted on outsourcing among knowledge-based and other service firms in Iceland. The results show that knowledge-based firms outsource on a larger scale and more human resource functions than other service firms. However, they do not have a more strategic vision towards outsourcing, nor do they outsource more low knowledge-based activities than other firms. The study gives support to the resource-based view of the firm, and is in line with former studies of knowledge-based firms. The firms in the survey tend to keep their core competencies and employees in-house, and at the same time they outsource other functions that they consider non-core, such as peripheral and administrative tasks, or IT that requires technical specialization. The more innovative firms rely on outsourcing from best in class suppliers regarding training and counselling. The contribution of this study to the theory of outsourcing is that the non-routine tacit knowledge base related to firms’ core competencies is not limited to knowledge-based firms, but to a large portion of service firms as well.

The Paradigm Shift in Organizational Research

The creation and development of theory and methods used in the study of organizations is predominantly carried out grounded in the positivist paradigm – epistemological and methodological assumptions similar to those of the natural sciences. This essay looks at the limitations of that paradigm for the study of human organizations and the benefits of relativist, humanist and post-modern assumptions, theory and methods. Limitations of the predominant paradigm are taken up by analyzing basic assumptions – objectivity, generality, empiricism, and linearity. The benefits of a more inclusive paradigm are reviewed in terms of two topic areas: Organizational learning and decision making, and financial markets and price distortion.

Using Ontologies in Drug Prescription

Medical prescription has been touted as following an accurate approach to addressing particular health problems. However, the importance of the process might demand considering a formal knowledge-driven procedure to ensure its correctness which can be achieved through Medical Decision Support Systems (MDSS). Semantic Technologies have emerged as a potential silver bullet to become the backbone of those particular Information Systems since it provides seamless integration and an underlying logical formalism. This paper sheds light into using ontologies for drug prescription through the SemMed model, architecture and proof-of-concept implementation, being able to face challenges in these areas and solve day-to-day problems of health professionals in terms of drug prescription

An Architecture for Query Optimization Using Association Rule Mining

This research presents a way to identify attribute-value relationships already existing in a database by using association rule mining to optimize query processing. Once relationships have been determined, these relationships can be used as a basis for creating temporary structures like views to optimize query operations. This paper presents an architecture that shows how table partitions in the form of views, created based on association rules, can be used to optimize queries. The results of this study were statistically significant.

Organizational Conditions as Catalysts for Successful People-Focused Knowledge Sharing Initiatives

This paper analyzes the impact of different organizational enablers on the degree of success of different people-focused knowledge sharing initiatives. Considering company size and technology intensity as two of the most relevant contingent variables in terms of organizational conditions (Mintzberg, 1979), the moderator role of these variables will be examined. For these relationships to be tested, an empirical study has been carried out among Spanish manufacturing firms with more than 50 employees which carry out R&D activities. Structural equation modelling (SEM) based on partial least squares (PLS) has been applied in order to test the main hypotheses of the research. The results obtained show that organizational design and organizational culture play a substantial role when it comes to explaining the degree of success of implementation of people-focused knowledge sharing initiatives. Conversely, the influence of information and communication technologies (ICT) is less relevant. Some interesting differences arise depending on technology intensity and company size.

An Ontology-Based Extraction Framework for a Semantic Web Application

The Semantic Web vision is rapidly becoming a mainstream reality, but obstacles remain in the way. A major challenge is the adoption of practical Semantic Web applications and the production of vast stores of ubiquitous meta-data which is needed to allow robust inference engines to attain the goals of machine readability of web documents. The authors propose the Semantic Web Applications (SEMWAP) framework which facilitates semi-automatic matching of instance data from opaque web databases using lightweight ontology terms. This framework combines information retrieval, information extraction, natural language processing, and ontology techniques to produce a matching and thus provides a viable building block for Semantic Web applications. To experimentally investigate the characteristics and limitations of the SEMWAP framework, a prototype system called the Semantic Ontological Data Labeler (SODL) was constructed.

Modeling Operational Robustness and Resiliency with High-Level Petri Nets

Military operations are highly complex workflow systems that require careful planning and execution. The interactive complexity and tight coupling between people and technological systems has been increasing in military operations, which leads to both improved efficiency and a greater vulnerability to mission accomplishment due to attack or system failure. Although the ability to resist and recover from failure is important to many systems and processes, the robustness and resiliency of workflow management systems has received little attention in literature. The authors propose a novel workflow modeling framework using high-level Petri nets (PNs). The proposed framework is capable of both modeling structure and providing a wide range of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The concepts of self-protecting and self-healing systems are captured by the robustness and resiliency measures proposed in this study. The proposed measures are plotted in a Cartesian coordinate system; a classification scheme with four quadrants (i.e., possession, preservation, restoration, and devastation) is proposed to show the state of the system in terms of robustness and resiliency. The authors introduce an overall sustainability index for the system based on the theory of displaced ideals. The application of the methodology in the evaluation of an air tasking order generation system at the United States Air Force is demonstrated.

Cross-Border Cooperative Network in the Perspective of Innovation Dynamics

This study proposes a framework for the empirical research of cross-border innovation networks dealing with network characteristics, resource and information flows, and decision-making concerning technological innovations. The authors develop a conceptual model that relates network properties, flows of knowledge, and tangible resources with the likelihood of a decision on open innovation, closed innovation, and business expansion without innovations. The model decomposes knowledge flows, considered as the most significant factor for innovation dynamics, into flows of information, trust, and technological competence. The likelihood of strategic decisions in a cross-border innovation network environment is supposed to be dependent on the peculiarities of these flows, network properties such as structural cohesion, autonomy, equivalence, as well as cognitive distance. The paper discusses some distinctive features of this type of network between the North-West of Russia and South-East of Finland.

Optimal Service Ordering in Decentralized Queries Over Web Services

The problem of ordering expensive predicates (or filter ordering) has recently received renewed attention due to emerging computing paradigms such as processing engines for queries over remote Web Services, and cloud and grid computing. The optimization of pipelined plans over services differs from traditional optimization significantly, since execution takes place in parallel and thus the query response time is determined by the slowest node in the plan, which is called the bottleneck node. Although polynomial algorithms have been proposed for several variants of optimization problems in this setting, the fact that communication links are typically heterogeneous in wide-area environments has been largely overlooked. The authors propose an attempt to optimize linear orderings of services when the services communicate directly with each other and the communication links are heterogeneous. The authors propose a novel optimal algorithm to solve this problem efficiently. The evaluation of the proposal shows that it can result in significant reductions of the response time.