Since the 1980s the hosting of mega-events has been a globalised practice in entrepreneurial urban governance. A spectacle that lasts only weeks is portrayed by event promoters as capable of generating legacies for decades. In addition to stimulating the short-term local economy and job market, accelerating urban landscape transformation and raising a city’s profile are the two strongest claims made by cities when bidding for hosting rights. However, a careful comparison of the London 2012 and Beijing 2008 Olympics shows that only half of the story has been told. The transformation of the urban landscape and place branding campaigns not only are engendered by, but also engender, the delivery of mega-events; through which standardised Games delivery is enabled and so too the smoothness and profitability of the Games. What is the implication of this? Data collected from semi-structured interviews and questionnaire surveys conducted in London and Beijing suggest that the festivity derived from hosting mega-events may be temporary, but the implications are not. Through observing the negotiation in Games-led regeneration/development and place branding, this project finds that the standardisation requirement for delivering the Olympic Games provides a shortcut for the standardisation of urban spaces. Cities tend to be planned in a standardised way to maximise their urban growth, irrespective of their social and political settings. In the negotiations between the Olympic Games as a globalising power and host cities’ localised aspirations, the repercussion is a standardised, undemocratic urban space.

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BACKGROUND. The need for public sector agencies to work together to deal with complex issues which overlap agencies spheres of work has been well established. Cases such as the Soham murders in 2002 (BBC News, 2003), the Climbie child abuse case in 2003 (Health Committee, 2003) and the Pilkington Anti-social Behaviour case in 2007 (Telegraph, 2009) each highlighted the need for public sector agencies to work more closely and share information with each other to more effectively serve their public. METHODOLOGY. A three year period of participant observation in the implementation of a real time information sharing system used by multiple agencies to jointly manage anti-social behaviour was undertaken. An information sharing framework was produced detailing the factors which impact an information sharing project, classified into six categories; External Environment, Organisation, Process, Project, Technology and Individual. FINDINGS. Firstly bureaucracy is not always a barrier to information sharing. At times bureaucracy was found to enable information sharing by providing documentary evidence to decisions made throughout the system implementation. Secondly an agency's level of buy in and involvement with the information sharing project was shown to be a key indicator of their motivation to share information, correlating with the level of case recording on the system. Thirdly whilst technology enables the process of information sharing the research showed people had a much greater impact on whether information sharing took place. Finally whilst the UK public sector encourages public sector agencies to share information a wide scale review and approach to IT infrastructure would better enable future information sharing projects. CONCLUSIONS. The research identified there are many factors which impact an agency's ability/motivation to share information. It is the level of motivation an agency has minus the cost of sharing which ultimately determines whether information sharing occurs. In order to further encourage information sharing there is a recommendation that the UK government look at ways to make integrating the disparate data sources easier to decrease the cost of sharing and thus improve the likelihood information sharing will occur.

Trade marks are valuable intangible intellectual property (IP) assets with potentially high reputational value that can be protected. Similarity between trade marks may potentially lead to infringement. That similarity is normally assessed based on the visual, conceptual and phonetic aspects of the trade marks in question. Hence, this thesis addresses this issue by proposing a trade mark similarity assessment support system that uses the three main aspects of trade mark similarity as a mechanism to avoid future infringement. A conceptual model of the proposed trade mark similarity assessment support system is first proposed and developed based on the similarity assessment criteria outlined in a trade mark manual. The proposed model is the first contribution of this study, and it consists of visual, conceptual, phonetic and inference engine modules. The second contribution of this work is an algorithm that compares trade marks based on their visual similarity. The algorithm performs a similarity assessment using content-based image retrieval (CBIR) technology and an integrated visual descriptor derived using the low-level image feature, i.e. the shape feature. The performance of the algorithm is then assessed using information retrieval based measures. The obtained result demonstrates better retrieval performance in comparison to the state of the art algorithm. The conceptual aspect of trade mark similarity is then examined and analysed using a proposed algorithm that employs semantic technology in the conceptual module. This contribution enables the computation of the conceptual similarity between trade marks, with the utilisation of an external knowledge source in the form of a lexical ontology, together with natural language processing and set similarity theory. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using both information VI retrieval and human collective opinion measures. The retrieval result produced by the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional string similarity comparison algorithm in both measures. The phonetic module examines the phonetic similarity of trade marks using another proposed algorithm that utilises phoneme analysis. This algorithm employs phonological features, which are extracted based on human speech articulation. In addition, the algorithm also provides a mechanism to compare the phonetic aspect of trade marks with typographic characters. The proposed algorithm is the fourth contribution of this study. It is evaluated using an information retrieval based measure. The result shows better retrieval performance in comparison to the traditional string similarity algorithm. The final contribution of this study is a methodology to aggregate the overall similarity score between trade marks. It is motivated by the understanding that trade mark similarity should be assessed holistically; that is, the visual, conceptual and phonetic aspects should be considered together. The proposed method is developed in the inference engine module; it utilises fuzzy logic for the inference process. A set of fuzzy rules, which consists of several membership functions, is also derived in this study based on the trade mark manual and a collection of trade mark disputed cases is analysed. The method is then evaluated using both information retrieval and human collective opinion. The proposed method improves the retrieval accuracy and the experiment also proves that the aggregated similarity score correlates well with the score produced from human collective opinion. The evaluations performed in the course of this study employ the following datasets: the MPEG-7 shape dataset, the MPEG-7 trade marks dataset, a collection of 1400 trade marks from real trade mark dispute cases, and a collection of 378,943 company names.

In the UK many industries are suffering as a result of business being lost to competition abroad. Raising the technical content of a company’s product or service may enable them to increase its competitiveness and hence retain or even increase business. A Trade Association exists to represent the interests of its members. One way that this can be realized is by provision of technical information to its members to support raising the technical content of their members’ products or services. The provision of technical information entails sourcing information, collecting it and then disseminating it in an appropriate format. Ways of undertaking this are identified. The factors that are likely to influence the provision of technical information are determined. This is so that a Trade Association can build upon its strengths, diminish weaknesses, exploit opportunities and avoid threats. A strategy for provision of engineering technical information to trade association members was given. Four mechanisms were implemented on a test-bed Trade Association; utilising information technology communication capabilities, newsletters, collaborations and conferences. Feedback and parameters were used to assess the strategy chosen for implementation on the test-bed. Taking this into consideration a revised strategy was established that can be adapted and applied by Trade Associations who wish to provide such a service in the future.