This article introduces a new pragmatist-inspired perspective on the social sciences. It explores the relevance of neo-pragmatism for the philosophy of the social sciences, showing how it can lead to innovative and groundbreaking social research. The paper attempts to drive home these insights by elaborating on the affinities of neopragmatism with some Continental philosophers who have engaged ...

The discussion of models and modeling in this chapter is based, in part, on the results of research on students’ understanding of quantum mechanics (Gardner, 2002) and research designed to probe students’ ability to visualize the rotation of organic molecules (Briggs, 2004). Our perspective on models and modeling has also been influenced by work in both physics education (Halloun, 1996) and mat...

Continuity and change is a core biology theme that refers to how genetic information is carried forward. This paper reports on our initial steps toward representing this core theme in an existing knowledge base and describes the methodological background and open challenges. We define continuity and change from a conceptual modeling perspective, identify its facets that require further ontologi...

Co-simulation is a key tool in the design and operation of a growing number of complex cyber-systems. But efficiently yet accurately combining continuous time components (such as FMUs) with event-based ones can be challenging, both from a modeling perspective and an operational, tools-oriented one. We propose a platform to tackle this problem building up on MECSYCO, a MAS-based DEVS wrapping pl...

Recent database research has given much attention to the specification of "flexible" transactions that can be used in interoperable systems. Starting from a quite different angle, Business Process Modelling has approached the area of communication modelling as well (the Language/Action perspective). The main goal of this paper is to provide some useful structuring mechanisms for interoperable t...

Since electronic commerce transaction are characterised by their highly communicative character, the Language-Action-perspective proves to be very suitable to provide a deep-structure analysis because it concentrates on the essential aspects of an electronic commerce transaction rather than the form. In this paper, we present a layered pattern definition language, based on various L/A-perspecti...

Cluster retrieval assumes that the probability of relevance of a document should depend on the relevance of other similar documents to the same query. The goal is to find the best group of documents. Many studies have examined the effectiveness of this approach, by employing different retrieval methods or clustering algorithms, but few have investigated text representations. This paper revisits...

Abstract While travel cost in urban areas is generally best modeled using network distances, continuous distance measures are mostly used for location problems in rural environments. Combining both is not only interesting from a modeling perspective, but has also computational advantages since it combines reduced storage requirements for the network data with a high accuracy of the approximated...

Innovative networked value constellations, such as Cisco or Dell, are often enabled by Information Technology (IT). The same holds for the Distributed Electricity Balancing Service (DBS), which we present in this case study. To explore feasibility of such constellations while designing them, we need at least to develop a financial and technical understanding of the constellation at hand. In thi...