Applied Research in System Analysis (ARiSA) is a company specialized in the development of the customer-specific quality models and applied research work. In order to improve the quality of the projects and to reduce maintenance costs, ARiSA developed Quality Monitor (QM) – a web application for quality analysis. QM application has been originally developed as a basic program to enable customers to evaluate the quality of the sources. Therefore, the business logic of the application was simplified and certain limitations were imposed on it, which in its turn leads to a number of issues related to user experience, performance and architecture design. These aspects are important for both application as a product, and for its future promotion. Moreover, this is important for customers, as end users. Main application issues, which were added to the maintenance list are: manual data upload, insufficient server resources to handle long-running and resource consuming operations, no background processing and status reporting, simplistic presentation of analysis results and known usability issues, weak integration between analysis back-ends and front-end. ­­­­­­­­­­­In order to address known issues and to make improvements of the existing limitations, a maintenance phase of QM application is initiated. First of all, it is intended to stabilize current version and improve user experience. It also needed for refactoring and implementation of more efficient data uploads processing in the background. In addition, extended functionality of QM would fulfill customer needs and transform application from the project into a product. Extended functionality includes: automated data upload from different build processes, new data visualizations, and improvement of the current functionality according to customer comments. Maintenance phase of QM application has been successfully completed and master thesis goals are met. Current version is more stable and more responsive from user experience perspective. Data processing is more efficient, and now it is implemented as background analysis with automatic data import. User interface has been updated with visualizations for client-side interaction and progress reporting. The solution has been evaluated and tested in close cooperation with QM application customers. This thesis describes requirements analysis, technology stack with choice rationale and implementation to show maintenance results.

The aim of this study is to find out in which way the education about climate in school is taught and how the students experience the world situation today. There are various theories about the greenhouse effect and its origin and these theories should be addressed to ensure that students get a broader understanding of how climate change occurs. This includes the natural phenomena and also the human impact on climate change. Students in school are a source of concern that only human are the cause of global warming, and know little or almost nothing about the natural phenomena of global warming.  I will mention what has emphasized in the national steering documents in the case of environmental education at school. I have used a qualitative method, where interviews and document analysis were used as techniques. The interviews took place with five students in ninth grade and with three science teachers in the same school.

This report describes a comparative study about reading- and writing development in “A-towns school” in The Gambia and in “Villaskolan” in Sweden. The purpose of this study is to compare two teachers in Sweden with two teachers and two volunteers from the school in Gambia, with focus on their thoughts and methods on teaching reading and writing at each school and in their social context. The aim is also to observe and describe how classroom environment at both schools can encourage students to read and write. The theoretical base of this study is rooted in a sociocultural perspective but I have also chosen to illuminate behaviorism and cognitivism. The study is qualitative and the main research methods are interviews and observations of the classrooms. My conclusions are, even though considerable differences in approach and conditions, teachers in both schools work hard and show dedication towards their students. Another finding is that teachers use different techniques and working methods to achieve the same goal -to teach their students to read and write based on what is required of them in their cultural and social context. The different ways of teaching have been caused by the existence of different perceived needs based on culture and tradition. One conclusion is also that read and write requirements for students in the Gambia and Sweden are different from each other. In Sweden there is clearly a higher demand for more advanced reading - and writing skills while one person in the Gambia is perceived to be able to read and write if he/she can handle basic administrative tasks.

I denna uppsats har vi undersökt hur styrdokumenten inom ett medelstort företag i Västsverige påverkar organisationskulturen och samspelet mellan personalen. Vårt syfte har varit att öka förståelsen kring hur eller om dessa dokument kan styra och påverka individerna och kulturen inom en organisation. Vi har utgått ifrån ett institutionellt etnografiskt och etnometodologiskt angreppssätt i vår ansats in i fältet. Vi har genom detta sett till dokumenten som en makronivå, translokal nivå och samspelet som en mikronivå, lokal nivå inom företaget. Detta angreppsätt har blivit både vår metodologiska utgångspunkt samtidigt som de även blivit en hjälp i vårt analysarbete med det empiriska materialet. För att förstärka vår analys utifrån metoderna har vi även tagit in Randall Collins teori om interaktionsritualer samt Johan Asplunds teori om social responsivitet. Insamlingen av det empiriska materialet gjordes utifrån en triangulering av metoder i form av en mindre observation av arbetsplatsen, intervjuer med personal och ledning samt en textanalys av företagets verksamhetshandbok. Resultatet vi kom fram till i denna studie var att styrdokumenten, organisationskultur och samspelet på arbetsplatsen står i relation till varandra där det finns en svårighet i att uttolka vilket som kom först eller vad som påverkar det andra mest. / In this study we have researched how policy and procedure documents in an organisation influences the culture and the social interaction between the workers. Our goal as been to increase the understanding on how these documents can control and influence the individuals and the culture in an organisation. To help us understand our material we have had institutional ethnography and ethnomethodology in our approach. Our approach has helped us to analyse and view these documents from a macro perspective, as a translokal relation and the social interaction from a micro perspective, a local level within the organisation. These methods have also helped us in our analysis, but in order to confirm and strengthen this we have used both Johan Asplunds theory about social responsivitet and Randall Collins interaction ritual chain. In order to collect the empirical data we did an observation of the workplace, interviewed the employees and a text analysis of the policy and procedure documents. The conclusion of the study was that the policy and procedure documents, the organisational culture and the social interaction between the workers were in a close correlation, thus making it difficult to see which of these factors that had the most influence.

The interoperability of the electronic documents exchanged in eBusiness applications is an important problem in industry. Currently, this problem is handled by the mapping experts who understand the meaning of every element in the involved document schemas and define the mappings among them which is a very costly and tedious process. In order to improve electronic document interoperability, the UN/CEFACT produced the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) which defines a common structure and semantic properties for document artifacts. However, at present, this document content information is available only through text-based search mechanisms and tools. In this thesis, the semantics of CCTS based business document standards is explicated through a formal, machine processable language as an ontology. In this way, it becomes possible to compute a harmonized ontology, which gives the similarities among document schema ontology classes of different document standards through both the semantic properties they share and the semantic equivalences established through reasoning. However, as expected, the harmonized ontology only helps discovering the similarities of structurally and semantically equivalent elements. In order to handle the structurally different but semantically similar document artifacts, heuristic rules are developed describing the possible ways of organizing simple document artifacts into compound artifacts as defined in the CCTS methodology. Finally, the equivalences discovered among document schema ontologies are used for the semi-automated generation of XSLT definitions for the translation of real-life document instances.

The aim of the thesis is to find out children&rsquo / s expectations from smart products that enhance their learning and analyze their conformity with the state of art smart products and educational technologies. The developments in technology affect many dimensions including education. There are many studies that aimed to improve the learning process by the help of technology. However, the perspective of children considering this topic is almost absent in the literature. Therefore, expectations of children from learning technologies are explored via an empirical study. The state of art smart technologies and products to enhance learning will also be covered. Then, in the light of an empirical study, to what extent children&rsquo / s expectations overlap with current technologies will be presented.

Principle of sustainability, as in all areas, is becoming a major issue in urban transportation planning all around the world. Urban transportation political and legal documents are statutory basis of urban transportation plans and projects and developed countries have established urban transportation political and legal documents to ensure that local governments implement plans and projects in line with the sustainability principle. In this thesis, it is intended to analyze the sufficiency of central government&rsquo / s political and legal documents on urban transportation in Turkey in realizing the sustainability of urban transportation plans and projects. For this aim, political and main legal documents of sustainable urban transportation in United States of America (USA) and United Kingdom (UK), which is accepted as one of the leaders in the world about sustainable transportation, are analyzed. Based on this analysis a checklist has been produced, highlighting headings for sustainable urban transportation that should be present in a country&rsquo / s political and legal documents in order to guide and perhaps enforce local governments. Then this checklist has been applied to Turkey to determine strengths and weaknesses of political documents and legislations in Turkey with regards to sustainable urban transportation. A comparative analysis has also been carried out with Turkey, USA and UK under three main headings which are policy documents / guidance papers for local governments, acts and laws / and nation-wide studies. As a result, strengths and weaknesses about political and legal basis of sustainable urban transportation in Turkey have been illustrated and recommendations were made for Turkey to adopt guidance papers and legislations.

In the past, information was stored more or less well-structured in database. Nowadays, a lot of information is presented in unstructured format. The management of and retrieval from such large vast of textual information has been a challenging issue for organizations or individuals. Information extraction is the process of extracting relevant data from semi-structured or unstructured documents and transforming them into structured representations. Many information extraction learning techniques have been proposed. However, they are ineffectiveness on unstructured documents. Thus, in the research, we proposed a new information extraction learning algorithm, called LIEF, that enhancing existing information extraction learning techniques. According to the empirical evaluations on news documents that are unstructured format, the LIEF algorithm proposed showed its capabilities in accuracy rate.

The objective of the proposed research is to answer the question of how to provide verification and redactability to medical documents at a manageable computation cost to all parties involved. The approach for this solution examines the use of Merkle Hash Trees to provide the redaction and verification characteristics required. Using the Merkle Hash Tree, various Continuity of Care Documents will have their various elements extracted for storage in the signature scheme. An analysis of the approach and the various characteristics that made this approach a likely candidate for success are provided within. A description of a framework implementation and a sample application are provided to demonstrate potential uses of the system. Finally, results seen from various experiments with the framework are included to provide concrete evidence of a solution to the question which was the focus of this research.

Zugl.: Diss.