A proxy, or wrapper, is an object that mediates access to an arbitrary target object. Proxies are widely used to perform resource management, access remote objects, impose access control [1, 5], restrict the functionality of an object [6], or to enhance the interface of an object. Ideally, a proxy is not distinguishable from other objects so that running a program with an interposed proxy shoul...

As a solution to declining political and civic participation, many governments are seeking to increase the number of citizens who participate in policy-making and governance. Contrary to early expectations, recent research suggests that new information and communications technologies (ICTs) may not increase participation rates in formal organisations, and so may not improve participation rates....

This paper describes a methodology, and its implementation in a tool, that is designed to make it easier to produce an investment appraisal and business case for projects with social outcomes and longer-term benefits external to the primary project initiator. This meets a need common to innovative public and charity sector projects which typically focus on a wide range of outcomes that extend b...

Sustainability has become a key concern for consumers and industry. However, coming to understand its implications in the context of daily life can be difficult. It may be hard to come to terms with the idea that traditional activities present environmental risks and may lead to real emergencies, manifested differently depending on local conditions. Everyone will be asked to do more but the mov...

Several private and public organisations have adopted Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), however, its application in the Local Government Authorities (LGAs) is limited. Although, there exist few EAI adoption models, these models mainly focus on a number of different factors (e.g. benefits, barriers, cost) influencing the decision making process for EAI adoption. Moreover, these models do...

South African municipalities experience serious challenges in dealing with the interface between politicians and officials. Inappropriate political interference in administrative matters as well as strained relations between key political and administrative officials in the municipalities appear to be the order of the day. Oftentimes, the lack of a separation of powers between legislative and e...

We have addressed the complex problem of recovery for concurrent failures in distributed computing environment. We have proposed a new approach in which we have effectively dealt with both orphan and lost messages. The proposed checkpointing and recovery approaches enable each process to restart from its recent checkpoint and hence guarantee the least amount of recomputation after recovery. It ...

B-Course is a free1 web-based Bayesian data mining service. This service allows the users to analyze their own data for multivariate probabilistic dependencies represented as Bayesian network models. In addition to this, B-Course also offers facilities for inferring certain type of causal dependencies from the data. The software is especially suitable for educational purposes as the tutorial st...

The GALILEO system aims at realising automated ontology evolution. This is necessary to enable intelligent agents to manipulate their own knowledge autonomously and thus reason and communicate effectively in open, dynamic digital environments characterised by the heterogeneity of data and of representation languages. Our approach is based on patterns of diagnosis of faults detected across multi...

In this paper it is presented our contribution for carrying out adaptive and intelligent Web-based Education Systems (WBES) that take into account the individual student learning requirements, by means of a holistic architecture and Framework for developing WBES. In addition, three basic modules of the proposed WBES are outlined: an Authoring tool, a Semantic Web-based Evaluation, and a Cogniti...