With the great mass of the pages managed through the world, and especially with the advent of the Web, it has become more difficult to find the relevant pages after an interrogation. Furthermore... Show More

With the great mass of the pages managed through the world, and especially with the advent of the Web, it has become more difficult to find the relevant pages after an interrogation. Furthermore, the manual filtering of the indexed Web pages is a laborious task. A new filtering method of the annotated Web pages (by our semantic annotation process) and the non-annotated Web pages (retrieved from search engine “Google”) is then necessary to group the relevant Web pages for the user. In this paper, the authors will first synthesize their previous work of the semantic annotation of Web pages. Then, they will define a new filtering method based on three activities. The authors will also present their querying and filtering component of Web pages; their purpose is to demonstrate the feasibility of the filtering method. Finally, the authors will present an evaluation of this component, which has proved its performance for multiple domains.

In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) Member States subscribed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the 2030 Agenda (General Assembly 2015). This work makes an analysis on how Knowledge... Show More

In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) Member States subscribed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the 2030 Agenda (General Assembly 2015). This work makes an analysis on how Knowledge Societies can effectively contribute for the achievements of the Agenda's 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, it will be presented the research overview conducted by UNU-EGOV for producing the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Knowledge Societies Handbook (UNESCO/IFAP and UNU-EGOV 2016). In addition, three countries from three different Continents of Asia, Europe and Africa - China, Portugal and Uganda respectively - will be analyzed in the context of the knowledge societies architecture proposed in the handbook. For making that analysis a set of indicators collected from the “The World Bank” (The World Bank 2016) and “International Telecommunication Union” (ITU) (ITU 2015) databases have been selected. The indicators have been interpreted taking into consideration the socio-cultural, political, and economic context of each of the three countries.

This study examined the normative ethical claims, social norms and values laden in Ibibio social system and culture. These claims institutes avowal about ethical considerations and make moral... Show More

This study examined the normative ethical claims, social norms and values laden in Ibibio social system and culture. These claims institutes avowal about ethical considerations and make moral judgments. This study presents a socio-cultural description of Ibibio norms which are an integral part of the culture, social custom, rituals and beliefs governing social coexistence. It argues that though norm is a cultural production with emphasis on prohibitions, Ibibio norms dictates behavioral and/or conversational re-orientation which determines how basic moral standards are arrived at and justified. The findings of this study however have a significant implication for cumulative research on the ethical elements of Ibibio norms and social beliefs.

Cloud-based technologies play a significant role in the technology-enhanced learning domain. The adoption of cloud technologies in the educational environment has a positive impact on the learning... Show More

Cloud-based technologies play a significant role in the technology-enhanced learning domain. The adoption of cloud technologies in the educational environment has a positive impact on the learning process by offering new tools and services to improve and support the learning life cycle, including interactivity. In specific fields, such as clinical skills training, that involve computer-intensive training scenarios, there is an increased demand to deliver training services to a larger number of learners, therefore the need for cloud services. However, to date there has been a lack of a formalized framework relating to the use of cloud computing for on-demand interactive e-training resources. This paper is to formalize a theoretical framework for an interactive e-training system particularly for clinical skills training, taking into consideration e-training system requirements and with a focus on applying cloud technologies to ensure the dynamic scalability of services and computing power while maintaining QoS and security

It is necessary to introduce changes in teacher education in order to include the acquisition of competences necessary for the technology-enhanced learning process both organizing the learning... Show More

It is necessary to introduce changes in teacher education in order to include the acquisition of competences necessary for the technology-enhanced learning process both organizing the learning process and developing new and innovative didactic means that promote learning as well as using digital technologies that nowadays has become an integral part of any teacher's and university lecturer's competence in the learning process to perform qualitatively their work. Despite the fact that teaching/learning methods used in the education system in the world have been explored, different studies on advantages and shortcomings of these methods have been performed there still are no serious reviews on the effectiveness of applying technology-enhanced learning methods in the contexts and environments of different school subjects. In order to close this gap serious research has been carried out using the latest scientific literature found in Web of Science data basis to work out a scientific review on the effectiveness of applying TEL in the educational environment.

In Mauritius, the teaching of social studies presents educators with a unique set of challenges, as they are expected to have multi-disciplinary knowledge and multi-dimensional skills to be... Show More

In Mauritius, the teaching of social studies presents educators with a unique set of challenges, as they are expected to have multi-disciplinary knowledge and multi-dimensional skills to be effective in classrooms. Many of these social studies educators have undertaken the PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education) course offered by the Mauritius Institute of Education (MIE), which is the leading teacher training institute in the country. This paper explores the relevance of the social sciences teacher education programme offered by the MIE in preparing secondary school educators to meet the challenges in their practice in the wake of current curricular reforms. The study used focus group discussions as the main tool to gather in depth views of the participants. Preliminary findings tend to show that although educators may possess skills, lack of mastery in multi-disciplinary knowledge influences their proficiency in classrooms. An analysis of the different modules of the social sciences programme also shows a gap between the educators' needs and the modules offered.

In this paper, we propose an approach combining behavioral and targeting techniques for a better reaction of the customer with a star product using a personalized ubiquitous advertisement. We use... Show More

In this paper, we propose an approach combining behavioral and targeting techniques for a better reaction of the customer with a star product using a personalized ubiquitous advertisement. We use the clustering to study the customer's behavior and the association rules to estimate the probability of star product's purchases in the near future. In order to validate our approach, we develop a prototype to send a personalized advertisement to loyal customers and potential customers in ubiquitous environment. Each target receives the advertising according his classification and his degree of loyalty obtained by the behavioral analysis. Loyal customers are the first to receive the personalized advertising in the ubiquitous environment.

The current sociopolitical climate of the country (USA) is tumultuous and volatile. It is an era that recognizes and strives for change and open dialogue on topics that have otherwise been brushed... Show More

The current sociopolitical climate of the country (USA) is tumultuous and volatile. It is an era that recognizes and strives for change and open dialogue on topics that have otherwise been brushed under the rug. Such times call for open discussions on topics that may also be tabooed and bear a sense of unease and discomfort. Under this umbrella of racy and risky times emerged this study on the lived experiences and occurrences that have negatively impacted members of ethnic minorities and LGBTQ communities within academia. As an intellectual field that prides itself on its intensive research rigor and vitality, academia can no longer overlook this subject of workplace bullying in academia among faculty, staff, and students whose bullied experiences need to be addressed and shared by the main stream population so we can all move forward together and seek to find a resolve to the existing atrocities that the members from these minority groups currently face.

This study aims to determine food security on upland agriculture households in rural area. Food security is concerned with the first two main goals of Sustainable Development Goals, No Poverty and... Show More

This study aims to determine food security on upland agriculture households in rural area. Food security is concerned with the first two main goals of Sustainable Development Goals, No Poverty and Zero Hunger. Myanmar is Food Insecure State that showing 14.2% that is 7.7 million of 51 million population. Chin state is least developing and Paletwa is poorest out of 324 townships. Research is applied by both qualitative and quantitative approaches. 3 Villages and 1 Quarter are chosen for qualitative method and 141upland agriculture households are selected for field survey using random sampling method. The data are analyzed by logistic regression in SPSS 17 to determine food security. Age, education, schooling years of household head, size, second occupation and no. of working people in households are socio-economic determinant and own food production and fruit access are food security determinant.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have recently gained much fame and have proved to be a potential technology that enables the construction and development of collaborative intelligent software systems.... Show More

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have recently gained much fame and have proved to be a potential technology that enables the construction and development of collaborative intelligent software systems. Development of such autonomous intelligent systems require a high level of communication with enriched semantics that will enable them to be integrated with the Web to achieve the ultimate goal of the Semantic Web in the future. The most important issues in MAS are high-level agent interaction, expressive power of agents, and semantics of messages to collaborate and cooperate with each other in Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ADS). This encoding/decoding mechanism will not only increase the reliability of the system but will also exhibit the properties of ADS that are high assurance. The evaluation proves that the implementation of semantically enriched communication improves performance and efficiency as a whole.

The main purpose of this research was to find relations between the chemical composition of the wines and the wine testers' opinions on the wine quality. We used in our study a dataset which... Show More

The main purpose of this research was to find relations between the chemical composition of the wines and the wine testers' opinions on the wine quality. We used in our study a dataset which contains examples of red wine from Vinho Verde, Portugal. Firstly, we did an analysis on the attributes of the examples, in the dataset, to find correlations between quantitative and qualitative properties in wines. Secondly, we performed clustering using the algorithms k-means and x-means. Additionally, we used the J48 algorithm for getting a decision tree and then to extract first order logic rules. We concluded that, there is a relation between physicochemical properties and quality of wines. This result opens the possibility of further analysis and perhaps this could lead to use fewer wine testers and therefore, our research could bring benefit to the wine industry.

This research aims to discover the effort of accomplishing Sustainable Development Goals in developing country. Adopting qualitative method and case study approach, this research held in Bajulmati... Show More

This research aims to discover the effort of accomplishing Sustainable Development Goals in developing country. Adopting qualitative method and case study approach, this research held in Bajulmati, Indonesia. The result of this research shows that social education institution establishment by society in remote area can answer the problems to reach Sustainable Development Goals. The establishment process is begun by the external party in remote area to provide medium to discuss problem. The first stage of Sustainable Development Goals accomplishment is attained by implementing Sustainable Education by giving long-live learning education for children and training for adult. The second stage is making Sustainable Economic around society by making business from the potential resources. After doing sustainable education and economic, it can achieve Sustainable Development Goals. In this study, it will figure out that social education institution in Bajulmati can be an example for another remote area to achieve Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper presents the decisions taken during the implementation of DSSim (DSSim stands for Similarity based on Dempster-Shafer) our multi-agent ontology mapping system. It describes several types... Show More

This paper presents the decisions taken during the implementation of DSSim (DSSim stands for Similarity based on Dempster-Shafer) our multi-agent ontology mapping system. It describes several types of agents and their roles in the DSSim architecture. These agents are mapping agents which are able to perform either semantic or syntactic similarity. Our architecture is generic as no mappings need to be learned in advance and it could be easily extended by adding new mapping agents in the framework. The new added mapping agents could run different similarity algorithms (either semantic or syntactic). In this way, DSSim could assess which algorithm has a better performance. Additionally, this paper presents the algorithms used in our ontology alignment system DSSim.

One of the marvels of our time is the unprecedented development and use of technologies that support social interaction. Social mediating technologies have engendered radically new ways of... Show More

One of the marvels of our time is the unprecedented development and use of technologies that support social interaction. Social mediating technologies have engendered radically new ways of information and communication, particularly during events; in case of natural disaster like earthquakes tsunami and American presidential election. This paper is based on data obtained from Twitter because of its popularity and sheer data volume. This content can be combined and processed to detect events, entities and popular moods to feed various new large-scale data-analysis applications. On the downside, these content items are very noisy and highly informal, making it difficult to extract sense out of the stream. Taking to account all the difficulties, we propose a new event detection approach combining linguistic features and Twitter features. Finally, we present our system that aims (1) detect new events, (2) to recognize temporal markers pattern of an event, (3) and to classify important events according to thematic pertinence, author pertinence and tweet volume.

Emerging technologies have become a part of daily life of each student. To keep up with time, education has to evolve and customize providing the learner with a more meaningful learning environment.... Show More

Emerging technologies have become a part of daily life of each student. To keep up with time, education has to evolve and customize providing the learner with a more meaningful learning environment. More and more teachers are introducing Learning Technologies (LT) for training purposes since they can serve as powerful tools for efficient student participatory learning. The technology-aided learning environment enhances learning outcomes in language acquisition and stimulates the implementation of quality learning. The aim of this research is to emphasize the importance of applications of learning technologies in the language classroom and to present an overview of the practical tools available for technology-mediated language learning, their effective ICT implementation and use. The study analyzes the strategies and techniques for the ICT integration by means of introducing the Computer Language Lab (CLL) in the Secondary School Setting. It describes personal experience and best practice in the use of learning technologies with secondary school students.

E-services are becoming of increasing importance for government and for business services. They provide benefits to all parties concerned, including: service providers, users, and the society at... Show More

E-services are becoming of increasing importance for government and for business services. They provide benefits to all parties concerned, including: service providers, users, and the society at large. This paper presents a framework of key issues that an e-service should enjoy. The framework is based on three main domains: the e-service strategy; its architecture; and its performance. Each of these domains is structured in three groups of issues, which are associated with: management; targeted features, and the people concerned. Per this structure, the framework considers “45” key e-services issues; and these issues are derived from the available literature and from previous experience. A survey using the framework is conducted to assess the level of awareness of IT staff, working in the field, in the importance of these key issues, as this awareness reflects their practices in e-services. The outcome shows that further awareness is needed, in various key issues, to improve future e-service practices.

While distance learning education continues to grow, online instructors face certain asynchronous uncertainties when it comes to knowledge exchange with students. To counteract such uncertainties... Show More

While distance learning education continues to grow, online instructors face certain asynchronous uncertainties when it comes to knowledge exchange with students. To counteract such uncertainties and minimize teaching deficiencies expected to occur in asynchronous learning environments, this study examines a set of knowledge building blocks that play a role in the online knowledge exchange process. Knowledge technology synchronicity framework for asynchronous environment is proposed that integrates knowledge seeking behavior, knowledge properties, knowledge domains, knowledge types, knowledge tools, and technology synchronicity. A real-life case is provided to integrate the framework in practice.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, with their rich oil resources, are facing the problem of fallen oil prices on the one hand, and reduced oil reserves on the other. As a result, they are... Show More

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, with their rich oil resources, are facing the problem of fallen oil prices on the one hand, and reduced oil reserves on the other. As a result, they are moving toward less dependence on oil, and increasing dependence on people and knowledge. This paper develops a wide scope “people and knowledge index (PKI)” using relevant international indicators made available by various international organizations. The index includes “ten building blocks.” Four of these blocks are concerned with the “core issues” of people and knowledge; while the other six blocks are related to the “environment issues” according to which people and knowledge interact. The paper assesses the GCC countries according to the index revealing their strengths and weaknesses, and enabling the derivation of guidelines for their future development. The resulting guidelines consider how the GCC countries can direct their future development toward a high and growing standard of living, while reducing dependence on oil. Finally, the future use of the new index is highlighted.

Frame perspective can be used to contextualize action: to a certain degree it both explains, why individuals behave as they do, and emphasizes various restrictions upon individuals. “Its central... Show More

Frame perspective can be used to contextualize action: to a certain degree it both explains, why individuals behave as they do, and emphasizes various restrictions upon individuals. “Its central feature is the experience of individuals and the organizing of experience when interacting with others” (Persson, 2015). The study aimed at revealing the ways of framing the conflict. Data were collected from undergraduate students at Mykolas Romeris University (N = 138). Findings show that most students perceived conflict in negative versus positive terms. Identifying the images of conflict students made statements mostly about the situations that have become aggressive, both verbally and physically.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a western concept that is penetrating Middle Eastern countries, and the UAE is the most appropriate region to offer insights into CSR because other Middle... Show More

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a western concept that is penetrating Middle Eastern countries, and the UAE is the most appropriate region to offer insights into CSR because other Middle Eastern countries are not adopting the concept quite as quickly as the UAE. One indication of CSR in UAE is its transparent firms. This paper explores the current stage of CSR implementation in Arab countries, with special attention given to the UAE. An in-depth study was conducted to explore CSR implementation among local managers. Primary data from 198 questionnaires and case studies were analyzed to obtain valuable insights into the current state of CSR in the UAE. Key concepts are highlighted regarding the definition and practice of CSR in the UAE. Secondary data from both western and eastern cultures were also analyzed to examine the extent of adoption and adaptation of CSR and corporate philanthropy from multiple perspectives. Findings suggest all organizations, both local and multinational, must consider environmental and stakeholder interests in order to become global. Some confusion appears to exist between the concept of philanthropy and CSR. Some CSR highlighted by firms includes following regulations effectively and efficiently, adopting environmentally friendly business processes, organizing seminars, and creating awareness of the concept among peers. Although CSR is maturing in the Middle East, UAE firms need to improve CSR to compete with the practices that have become the CSR standard in western countries. In the last few years, governments and local organizations have strictly enforced business ethics and environmental regulations to support the growth of CSR in the country.