This work consists in proposing a methodology to improve automated evaluation of the ergonomic quality of web sites (with special focus on usability and accessibility) by static analysis of HTML code of their pages using the evaluation technique called guideline review. This methodology will be articulated around: - A framework that defines a systematic and consistent way for structuring guidelines in order to enable their automatic evaluation; - A guideline definition language (GDL) able to express guideline information in a sufficiently rich manner to enable an evaluation engine to perform automated evaluation of any GDL-compliant guideline; - Tools to support the proposed methodology. The tools are (1) a structuring tool (editor) to enable the specification and manipulation of guidelines structures (structured following the framework and expressed in a GDL-compliant form) and (2) an evaluation tool which uses the guidelines to conduct the evaluation of Web sites.

This thesis aims to explore the importance of proximity and mobility, respectively, for individuals’ accessibility, as well as the relationship between these two key spatial dimensions of accessibility in the context of everyday life. The thesis is based upon three empirical research papers which focus on accessibility-related preferences, actual accessibility conditions, and travel patterns. Focus is directed towards the spatial relationships between individuals’ residential location vis-à-vis the location of a selection of different amenities including work, education, service and leisure functions as well as social relations. The analyses are based on a wide range of quantitative data, including questionnaire surveys as well as official register data for the Swedish population.      The first paper shows that residential proximity to amenities was most valued by individuals in the case of social relations and basic daily activities. The level of satisfaction with current accessibility conditions was generally high, with the exception of social relations where the findings suggest the existence of a ‘proximity deficit’. The second paper shows that observed average distances to most amenities have decreased over time (1995–2005). Concerning service amenities, the increases in proximity over the period were primarily due to a restructuring of the localization patterns within the service sector. A comparison of potential accessibility conditions and actual travel patterns revealed that people tend to travel farther than to the nearest amenity options, presumably to a large extent because of selective individual preferences, which may downplay the importance of distance in destination choice. The third paper shows that although the numerical supply of amenities within different spatial ranges has a significant influence on how far individuals travel for service errands, supply size alone is not sufficient for explaining travel length. The findings also suggest that although people tend to utilize the supply of amenities available locally, they are also willing to extend their travel distance in order to reach the amenity supply available within the region. Thus, even when there is a local supply, a rich regional supply may induce longer trips.      A juxtaposition of the findings of the three empirical studies suggests the existence of an ‘accessibility paradox’ with several facets. First, although people express an affinity for residential proximity to many amenities, this is not necessarily reflected in actual destination choices, since minimization of travel distance is apparently not always a key criterion. This is also suggested by the conclusion that the spatial structure of the amenity supply alone accounts for only a relatively small part of the explanation of travel length, which is influenced by many other factors. In addition, actual travel distances show an increasing trend over time despite the concurrent reductions in potential distances. Second, the development over time indicates that the proximity deficit regarding social relations may be increasing in the sense that average distances have increased to many of the amenities considered important to have nearby, for instance adult children, but have decreased to those where proximity is not considered particularly important. Third, there is a discrepancy between the observed trend towards increased proximity to many amenities and much of the general discourse on accessibility, which tends to emphasize deteriorating conditions.

The Svealand line opened in 1997 and the services areoperated with regional high speed trains. While the Svealandline was being built, the slow trains that had been inoperation on the old railway between Eskilstuna and Stockholm(a distance of 115 km) were replaced by buses with a highfrequency of service. In a case study of the effects of regional high speed trainservices, field surveys were made of residents and publictransport passengers along the line, and in a reference centreof population, before and after the Svealand line opened.Changes in knowledge, valuations and travel behaviour have beenanalysed, as have changes in accessibility. The supply and thedemand for regional journeys by car, bus and train have alsobeen examined. The results show that the Svealand line has meant anincrease of up to seven times in regional travel by railcompared to the old railway between Eskilstuna and Stockholm,and the market share has risen from 6% to 30%. Those who travelmost are people who have access to a car at times. Habitualmotorists, on the other hand, account for the largest increasein travel by public transport. In areas close to the railwaystations in Strängnäs and Eskilstuna new patterns ofcar ownership, travel behaviour, choice of transport mode andchoice of destination have been found since the regional highspeed trains began operating on the Svealand line. Commuting towork has also shown a marked increase. Travelling times arevalued highly and especially motorists value the high speedtrain mode of transport highly. Poorer train services and busservices are not attractive to motorists other than as areserve alternative to their own cars. A general conclusion is that the regional high speed trainservices have had a major impact on the travel market, travelbehaviour and accessibility. The improved accessibility toStockholm in particular is especially noticeable amongresidents close to the railway stations. Keywords:The Svealand line, high speed trains, regionaltravel, travel behaviour, choice of transport mode,accessibility / QC 20100608

This thesis concerns a research project about psoriasis care and conse¬quences of psoriasis in the county of Västerbotten in Northern Sweden. The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute to improvement of psoriasis care through increased knowledge of the use and accessibility of psoriasis care, and knowledge of impact of psoriasis on patients’ daily lives by describing and interpreting: (i) accessibility and use of psoriasis care, (ii) consequences of having psoriasis in everyday life, and (iii) dilemmas in psoriasis care and visions of future care among professionals, politicians and administrators. The theoretical framework in the psoriasis project was based on previous research, theories and concepts about priority setting, stigma, coping and qual¬ity of life. Parts of the framework were basis of the project plan and other parts were included in order to analyse the findings. Two different methodological approaches were used as complement to each other. The project started with a questionnaire to all known persons with psoriasis in Västerbotten with ques¬tions about socio-economic factors, psoriasis symptoms, psoriasis care, and quality of life. These formed the basis for two studies. The first focused on quality of life, and the other on gender differences in psoriasis care. Qualita¬tive research interviews were made with persons with psoriasis, and with ad¬ministrators, politicians and professionals. The interviews formed the basis for two studies focusing on consequences of psoriasis, and priorities and visions in psoriasis care, respectively. Findings from the studies are reported in four papers. Accessibility of psoriasis care influenced the use among persons with pso¬riasis. Use was also influenced by age, income, joint symptoms and quality of life. Men used psoriasis care more often than women. Both genders expected professional care and amelioration, while more women valued polite treat¬ment. Expectations were fulfilled apart from amelioration. Among decision makers, accessibility and issues on organisation and ethics involved priority dilemmas. The persons with psoriasis stated that visibility of both skin psoria¬sis and joint changes, as well as being stigmatised, was the worst with living with psoriasis. The visibility and stigmatisation were most difficult in younger ages. Some of those with both rashes and joint changes thus felt stigmatised in a twofold way. In order to deal with these difficulties, commonly used coping strategies were routinisation of both treatment and of adjustment to the stigma¬tising process, a strategy which could not be found in literature, and accep¬tance. These strategies developed with age. Those with large disease extent and joint symptoms run the highest risk of impaired health-related quality of life. Most of the interviewed participants, took power over their lives and by using coping strategies created an acceptable personal quality of life for them¬selves. Still they could not find anything positive with having psoriasis. In specialised care as well as local health care, special attention should be paid to gender differences and distance to treatment facilities, and handling of possible stigmatisation in patient care. This thesis suggests that the coping theories should be complemented with routinisation as a coping strategy for psoriasis patients. Also, more research on the usefulness of the letter of referral and its consequence on equality and fairness are suggested.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the influence of knowledge on the export performance of firms in different regions. More specifically, this study focuses on the impact of knowledge on the structure of regional export flows, in terms of horizontal and vertical product differentiation, as well as the geographical distribution of export flows. The thesis consists of four separate papers, which contribute to the overall analysis of knowledge, product differentiation and international trade in different ways. The second chapter presents a study of the effects of regional accessibility to R&D on the diversity of export flows with regard to goods, firms and destination markets. Chapter 3 provides an empirical analysis of vertical product differentiation, i.e. differentiation in terms of product quality, and examines the impact of educated labor and R&D on regional comparative advantages in goods of relatively high product quality. Chapter 4 contains a study of how the regional endowment of highly educated workers affects the structure of export flows, i.e. how the endowment of educated workers impacts on the number of product varieties exported, the average price per variety and the average quantity shipped out. The final chapter presents a micro-level analysis of firms’ propensity to participate in international markets and their propensity to expand export activities by introducing new export products or establishing export links with new destination countries. In summary, the empirical results of this thesis convey the message that regional accessibility to knowledge, embodied in highly educated labor and/or developed through R&D activities, plays a fundamental role in shaping the content and structure of regional export flows. More specifically, the present empirical observations suggest that the regional endowment of knowledge stimulates the size of the export base in terms of exporting firms and number of product varieties. The recurring significance of the accessibility variables in explaining spatial export patterns show that the knowledge endowment of a region must be defined in such ways that it captures sources of potential knowledge spillovers from inside as well as outside its own regional boundaries. This outcome shows that regional variations in knowledge endowments originate both in the actual spatial distribution of a nation’s knowledge labor across regions, and in regional differences in the geographical accessibility to internal and external knowledge labor.

This thesis consists of three main parts. The first and most important part, in terms of effort and time spent, is devoted to the estimation of the importance of accessibility for production at the firm or plant level using three different econometric estimation approaches. The results could have implications for the calculation of "wider" economic benefits of transport infrastructure, stemming from agglomeration externalities (e.g., scale economies). There are both methodological and result-wise conclusions that can be drawn from this research: methodologically, first, using unbalanced firm-level data requires the use of proxy variables to account for (initial) firm-specific unobserved productivity effects, and non-random exit from the dataset. Second, there are unsolved theoretical problems when applying an essentially aggregate approach to productivity analysis on disaggregate data, viz., relating to the existence of aggregate production functions, and to the aggregation of productivity from a disaggregate level to a more aggregate level in a spatial framework. Result-wise, clear productivity differences are presented, when comparing firms in the same time period but in different locations with different accessibility. However, it is not possible in this dataset to detect increased productivity for representative firms stemming from the opening of the Öresund link. It is therefore discussed whether the reason for this result could be the inappropriateness of output measures in a competitive business environment, where a large portion of the benefits are gradually transferred to consumers and thus remain unmeasured. Other, more comprehensive structural approaches to econometrics, including the demand side of the economy, are also recommended. The second part of the thesis treats an unjustly neglected area of transport research: the validation of transport demand models. These transport models are for example used to calculate the new traffic patterns and changes in accessibility from a transport infrastructure investment like the Öresund fixed link, around which most of this thesis orbits. The third and last part, written with two co-authors, deals with the "vulnerability" of the road network, in terms of effects on the travel time delays of the users when a link is disrupted. The calculated indices of importance and exposure could also be seen as extreme forms of accessibility, especially when there is no alternative route besides the one that is cut-off. / QC 20110513

The major aim of the thesis is to study various issues regarding the supply of services in the rural areas of Northern Sweden characterized by sparse population. Localities in these areas represent the lowest hierarchical units in the urban-place-system. With the help of different analyses of regio­nal development, a strategy to obtain a long-term, consolidated and socially acceptable standard of services is presented. Indispensable commercial ser­vices have been chosen for special examination. More precisely, the central question in the thesis is: How can households in sparsely populated areas, re­mote from major service centres, maintain an acceptable level of service ac­cessibility primarily through the use of existing social capital? The thesis is divided into ten chapters. It starts with a chapter on the growth of regional policies in Sweden. A survey of the urban-place-system with special reference to conditions prevailing in the four northernmost counties in Sweden between 1950 and 1980 is presented in the following chapter. The third chapter deals with theoretical premises and central con­cepts about service distribution. The main characteristics of the historical development of permanent services in rural areas are presented in the fourth chapter. The fifth chapter contains a survey over the central and local governments' measures to support the commercial services in such areas. In the second half of the thesis two separate approaches have been used. The first approach, which is used in chapters six and seven, analyses changes in the accessibility to services during a given period of time. A municipality and a county are made the subjects of such an analysis. The second approach is developed in the reamining three chapters of the thesis. It is focused on a pre­sentation of a knowledge-base and ideas for a planned contraction of servi­ces, which should lead to a minimum loss of social welfare for the popu­lation. The eighth chapter discusses a method for co-ordinating transport and service planning at the municipal level and the ninth chapter contains a policy-model concerning services in relation to other economic activities within a municipality. The final chapter contains a general discussion about possibilities for developing a long-term consolidated urban-place-system for sparsely populated rural areas. / digitalisering@umu

This paper provides support for the view that there should be a close link between inno-vation and export performance. In essence it is argued that successful exporting requires penetration of a market through an innovation process. For a small country like Sweden depending on production of knowledge intensive goods and product competition, to re-tain its international competitiveness, this notion is likely to hold true. Against this background an analysis aimed at testing to what extent Swedish export capacity can be determined by innovation is presented. In addition the factors perceived as influencing this capacity are identified and their relative importance is assessed. Specifically patent and R&D data are treated as the main proxies for innovation activity. Moreover the rela-tive export and innovation performance among the Swedish municipalities is analyzed. A spatial version of the product cycle model is introduced as it explicitly captures the process of innovation, relocation and export dynamics and forms a link to the succeed-ing theorizing. In particular it suggests that certain regions are more likely to be the lo-cation for innovative exporting firms due to advantageous intrinsic favorable attributes specific to these locations. In the specified model such attributes that are assumed to in-fluence export capacity in the Swedish municipalities are defined as local, intra- and in-terregional accessibility to research, average number of patents and density of employ-ment. Regression results suggest that accessibility to research from within the munici-pality exerts the principal effect on export and innovation capacity. Moreover the influ-ence of accessibility to industry R&D dominates over the university variable in both re-gressions, with total and per kilogram export value as dependents. In addition regional size exerts a rather strong positive effect on total export value.

Syftet med denna magisteruppsats är att studera huruvida en hög tillgänglighet till FoU vid företag respektive universitet genererar exporttillväxt. Denna tankegång grundar sig i produktcykelteorin varför även denna uppsats är en analys i dess validi-tet. Företag i en region som har stor tillgång till kunskap och forskning bör även vara i en frontposition inom export. Denna tillgänglighet har grupperats i forskning vi universitet och högskolor eller forskning inom företag. Därtill kan även denna till-gänglighet indelas vid dess geografiska lokalisering. På grund av data som använts vid analysen och dess komplexitet är resultaten troliga-re en indikation än exakta. Tillgängligheten är tveklöst av vikt för exporttillväxten men de olika underavdelningarna skiljer sig från varandra. Företagsforskning tycks påverka exporttillväxten positivt oavsett lokalisering. Därtill följer resultaten teorin eftersom den externa tillgängligheten till företagsforskningen har en betydligt större inverkan än den externa. Tillgängligheten till universitetsforskning ger de mest anmärkningsvärda resultaten. Utan en statistisk säkerhet kan endast en tendens utrönas. Universitetsforskningen ter sig svårare för företag att absorbera oavsett om den utförs inom regionen eller ex-ternt. Relationen mellan företag och universitet kan antas vara av dubbel natur där de å ena sidan påverkar varandra positivt samtidigt som de konkurrerar om samma ut-rymme i en region. / The purpose of this master thesis is to study whether a high accessibility to R&D performed by firms and universities respectively generate export growth. This sug-gestion is founded in the theory of the product cycle why this thesis also scrutinizes its validity. Firms in a region which have a high access to knowledge and research should have a front position within export. This access can be sub-divided into the unit of performance or with respect to the geographical location. Due to the data used in the analysis and its complexity, the final result is an indica-tion rather than precise. The accessibility is doubtlessly of major importance for the export growth but the subdivisions give different results. Research performed by firms seems to affect the export growth positively irrespective of the localisation. Also, the external accessibility to firm research has a larger impact on the export growth than if it is performed internally. The access to research performed by universities gives the most notable results. Without statistical significance a tendency can only be distinguished. The research performed by universities seems more difficult to absorb by firms irrespective of geographical location. The relation between firms and universities may be two folded where it is positive as well as competitive.

This thesis consists of two parts. The first part analyzesthe accessibility, generation and license holding effects incar ownership models. The second part develops a route choicemodeling framework with an attempt to address the differencesin drivers' route choice behavior. These two parts of work areboth based on the discrete choice theory - the car ownershipmodels are built up on the standard logit model, whereas theroute choice models are formulated in a mixed logit form. The study result of the first part shows that measuring theaccessibility by the monetary inclusive value reasonably wellcaptures the mechanism of the accessibility impact. Otheraccessibility proxies such as the parking costs, parking typeand house type are correlated with the accessibility but not toa great extent. Both young and old households are less likelyto have a car. The reduction of the propensity to own a car issignificant for households with average birth year before 1920,whereas this reduction is moderate for households with birthyear between 1920 and 1945. It is also demonstrated thatdriving license holding choice is conditional on the carownership level choice, and that these two choices need to bemodeled in a dynamic framework. The second part of the work investigates the performance ofthe mixed logit model using both simulated data and empiricalroute switching data. The empirical study mainly focused on theimpacts of information and incident related factors on drivers'route switching behavior. The result shows that using mixed logit gives a significantimprovement in model performance as well as a more sensitiveexplanation of drivers' decision-making behavior. For apopulation with greatly varying tastes, simply using thestandard logit model to analyze its behavior can yield veryunrealistic results. However, care must be taken when settingthe number of random draws for simulating the choiceprobability of the mixed logit model in order to get reliableestimates. The empirical results demonstrate that incident relatedfactors such as delay and information reliability havesignificant impacts on drivers' route switching, where themagnitude of the response to the change in the delay is shownto vary significantly between individuals. Other factors, suchas confidence in the estimated delay, gender, frequency of cardriving and attitude towards congestion, also make majorcontributions. In addition, it is found that individual's routeswitching behavior may differ depending on the purpose of thetrip and when the choice is made, i.e. pre-trip oren-route. <b>Keywords</b>: car ownership, accessibility, logit model,route choice, heterogeneity, mixed logit model