In order to remain competitive, the integration of their information systems is an imperative for many large organisations. Applications that originally have been developed independently are now required to interoperate to support new or different functions of the enterprise. Although the mechanisms for application interoperation exist provided by the technology, due to the sheer number and complexity of the running systems, integration solutions � centralised or distributed�appropriate at the local level do not translate successfully to the whole enterprise. Centralised integration approaches often satisfy only some of the integration requirements, they are very expensive, and are fraught with danger since they imply an �all or nothing� approach. Distributed approaches, on the other hand, suffer from complexity and scalability problems as the number of system interfaces to be implemented and the number of execution-time invocations grows with the number of component applications. This dissertation makes a contribution to the field of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) within the framework of distributed systems technology. Based on real-life case studies experience, we present here a federated approach that controls the size and complexity of the integration effort by reusing existing systems as much as possible and reducing the number of interacting applications. Only selected local elements are exposed to the organisational milieu, and a consistent supporting infrastructure is provided to make systems interactions possible. Our approach provides a flexible and scalable strategy to enterprise integration, avoiding the shortcomings of traditional approaches. We respect existing organisational structures, and demonstrate how appropriate federation infrastructure and protocols enable the interoperation of existing systems. The three main facets of enterprise knowledge are systematically incorporated into the integration effort: a) by the use of domain ontologies to support data integration; b) by the development of a methodology to include business rules; and c) by the development of FEW, a federated workflow model to implement the business processes of the organisation.

This thesis addresses the issues of coherent distributed knowledge production and sharing in the Life-science area. In spite of the continuously increasing computing and storage capabilities of computing infrastructures, the management of massive scientific data through centralized approaches became inappropriate, for several reasons: (i) they do not guarantee the autonomy property of data providers, constrained, for either ethical or legal concerns, to keep the control over the data they host, (ii) they do not scale and adapt to the massive scientific data produced through e-Science platforms. In the context of the NeuroLOG and VIP Life-science collaborative platforms, we address on one hand, distribution and heterogeneity issues underlying, possibly sensitive, resource sharing ; and on the other hand, automated knowledge production through the usage of these e-Science platforms, to ease the exploitation of the massively produced scientific data. We rely on an ontological approach for knowledge modeling and propose, based on Semantic Web technologies, to (i) extend these platforms with efficient, static and dynamic, transparent federated semantic querying strategies, and (ii) to extend their data processing environment, from both provenance information captured at run-time and domain-specific inference rules, to automate the semantic annotation of ''in silico'' experiment results. The results of this thesis have been evaluated on the Grid'5000 distributed and controlled infrastructure. They contribute to addressing three of the main challenging issues faced in the area of computational science platforms through (i) a model for secured collaborations and a distributed access control strategy allowing for the setup of multi-centric studies while still considering competitive activities, (ii) semantic experiment summaries, meaningful from the end-user perspective, aimed at easing the navigation into massive scientific data resulting from large-scale experimental campaigns, and (iii) efficient distributed querying and reasoning strategies, relying on Semantic Web standards, aimed at sharing capitalized knowledge and providing connectivity towards the Web of Linked Data.

In the 1960s, Irene Spry served as the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada (FWIC) representative to the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW). In 1967 she accepted an offer to be the ACWW deputy president, a post that she held until the mid-1970s. During this time, the ACWW and its member societies engaged in international development efforts around the world. This was a critical moment in the history of international development. The Canadian movement for development was propelled by domestic and global politics, as well as a changing society that embraced a sense of global citizenship. Arising out of this context and armoured with her own socialist politics, Spry carefully navigated the development efforts of the ACWW. These efforts straddled grassroots ideals and mainstream pressures from the United Nations (UN). As a women's Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), the ACWW was part of the initial force behind the global shift in the approach to development referred to as Women in Development (WID). Contemporary research, however, suggests that WID has not succeeded in addressing the concerns of women in "developing" countries. As a case study, this paper examines some of the historical roots of WID and identifies the historical continuities that persist in today's development discourse. Analyzing Spry's documents from the Library and Archives Canada through the lens of feminist postcolonial theory reveals the dominance of Eurocentric ideologies within the development practices of the ACWW. The impetus to reach out to help people in developing countries became socially and politically part of the Canadian identity and, as Spry's navigation through the discourses of the international agencies and ACWW members reveal, such sentiments of international benevolence were inherently neo-colonial. In much the same way that Himani Bannerji suggests that subjects are "invented," women involved in this movement intersected discourses of modernity and "race" with essentializing notions of gender, which contributed to a standardized practice of development. This case study ultimately demonstrates that good intentions were not enough to decolonize western women's efforts to "develop" parts of Africa in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Stobbe, Mark Jacob, M.A. University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada, February 2014. Public-Private Partnerships in Saskatchewan: A Tale of two Upgraders. Most of the literature dealing with public-private partnerships (P3s) examines the impact of private sector involvement in the provision of infrastructure or services normally provided by the public sector. This thesis uses the two case studies of the NewGrade Heavy Oil Upgrader and the Bi-Provincial Heavy Oil upgrader to examine the dynamics of P3s entered into by government in a market-driven, commercial sector for the purposes of promoting economic development. In the 1980’s, there was a political consensus in the Saskatchewan legislature that the province needed upgrading capacity to convert heavy crude oil into more marketable and valuable light synthetic crude and that the upgraders should be built through P3s. The result was the creation of the NewGrade and Bi-Provincial Upgraders. In the 1990’s, financial losses at both upgraders caused the Saskatchewan government to demand renegotiation of these partnerships. The thesis examines these partnerships in their initial negotiation, construction/operation and renegotiation in order to determine what environmental factors and internal dynamics contributed to the success or failure of the partnerships and the relations between the partners. The thesis argues that the upgraders successfully achieved their public policy objectives and gained the benefits of synergies arising from the differences between the public and private sector. However, the partnerships came under severe stress arising from a prolonged downturn in oil markets and the price of crude oil. The resulting financial losses caused the Saskatchewan government to seek a renegotiation of the terms of partnership. Despite this common cause of stress in the partnerships, the renegotiations of the agreements varied greatly. It is demonstrated that these differences arose from the financial structure of each partnership, the nature of the private sector partners and the number of partners involved in the project. The thesis provides some observations of potential value for governments and corporations considering entering partnerships for economic development projects. The differences between partners that can create synergistic benefits can also be the basis for the erosion of trust between the partners. The different financial tools used by government to participate in P3s can have significant impacts on both project viability and relationships between the partners.

Methods: We address these issues by transforming the TCGA data into the Semantic Web standard Resource Description Format (RDF), link it to relevant datasets in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud and further propose an efficient data distribution strategy to host the resulting 20.4 billion triples data via several SPARQL endpoints. Having the TCGA data distributed across multiple SPARQL endpoints, we enable biomedical scientists to query and retrieve information from these SPARQL endpoints by proposing a TCGA tailored federated SPARQL query processing engine named TopFed. Results: We compare TopFed with a well established federation engine FedX in terms of source selection and query execution time by using 10 different federated SPARQL queries with varying requirements. Our evaluation results show that TopFed selects on average less than half of the sources (with 100% recall) with query execution time equal to one third to that of FedX. Conclusion: With TopFed, we aim to offer biomedical scientists a single-point-of-access through which distributed TCGA data can be accessed in unison. We believe the proposed system can greatly help researchers in the biomedical domain to carry out their research effectively with TCGA as the amount and diversity of data exceeds the ability of local resources to handle its retrieval and parsing.

In the 1960s, Irene Spry served as the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada (FWIC) representative to the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW). In 1967 she accepted an offer to be the ACWW deputy president, a post that she held until the mid-1970s. During this time, the ACWW and its member societies engaged in international development efforts around the world. This was a critical moment in the history of international development. The Canadian movement for development was propelled by domestic and global politics, as well as a changing society that embraced a sense of global citizenship. Arising out of this context and armoured with her own socialist politics, Spry carefully navigated the development efforts of the ACWW. These efforts straddled grassroots ideals and mainstream pressures from the United Nations (UN). As a women's Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), the ACWW was part of the initial force behind the global shift in the approach to development referred to as Women in Development (WID). Contemporary research, however, suggests that WID has not succeeded in addressing the concerns of women in "developing" countries. As a case study, this paper examines some of the historical roots of WID and identifies the historical continuities that persist in today's development discourse. Analyzing Spry's documents from the Library and Archives Canada through the lens of feminist postcolonial theory reveals the dominance of Eurocentric ideologies within the development practices of the ACWW. The impetus to reach out to help people in developing countries became socially and politically part of the Canadian identity and, as Spry's navigation through the discourses of the international agencies and ACWW members reveal, such sentiments of international benevolence were inherently neo-colonial. In much the same way that Himani Bannerji suggests that subjects are "invented," women involved in this movement intersected discourses of modernity and "race" with essentializing notions of gender, which contributed to a standardized practice of development. This case study ultimately demonstrates that good intentions were not enough to decolonize western women's efforts to "develop" parts of Africa in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

A produção científica de uma área do conhecimento aparece em diferentes formatos e é disponibilizada de forma essencialmente distribuída por entre revistas, anais, teses, dissertações e outros formatos característicos utilizados pela comunidade científica para a sistematização de seu discurso. Uma federação de bibliotecas digitais oferece uma arquitetura da informação que tem por finalidade facilitar a agregação de diferentes tipos de documentos disponibilizados, facilitando termos acesso a esses documentos, bem como a seus metadados descritores, formando, desse modo, verdadeiras estruturas de apoio ao desenvolvimento de pesquisas e análises científicas dos documentos que por ali circulam. Já a análise de redes sociais vem se mostrando um importante objeto de pesquisa da área da Ciência da Informação nas últimas décadas, tendo sido apropriada ainda de forma preliminar pela comunidade científica brasileira. Como forma de ampliar o conhecimento e experimentações com o uso da análise de redes sociais e identificar seu potencial analítico em relação ao que poderíamos coletar de informações de uma federação de bibliotecas digitais, tivemos por objetivo neste trabalho utilizar a análise de rede para mapear os padrões, tendências e estratégias de conectividade de dois planos de relacionamento entre pesquisadores: a coautoria em documentos oriundos de revistas científicas e a participação em bancas de defesas de teses e dissertações. Além disso, buscamos mapear as causas sociais e políticas dos padrões de rede identificados, colocando em evidência um uso crítico e contextualizado dos indicadores estruturais e dinâmicos de redes utilizados neste trabalho. Utilizamos como caso a biblioteca digital federada Univerciencia.org, uma biblioteca especializada na área de Ciências da Comunicação, tendo fornecido como fonte de dados 49 revistas científicas da área com 9864 documentos e 12 bibliotecas digitais de teses e dissertações com 1961 documentos. Os resultados apontam que os movimentos geradores e constituintes das redes sociais em nossos dois planos de análise são fortemente determinados por uma racionalidade característica da política científica do campo da Comunicação e da ciência de modo geral. / The scientific production of an area of knowledge appears in different formats and is available in a distributed mainly through journals, proceedings, theses, dissertations and other typical formats used by the scientific community for the systematization of his speech. A federation of digital libraries offers an information architecture that aims to facilitate the aggregation of different types of documents available, facilitating access to those documents and their metadata descriptors, forming thus real structures to support the development of research and analysis of scientific documents that circulate through there. The analysis of social networks has proven an important subject of research in the area of Information Science and in recent decades have been appropriate even in a preliminary way by the Brazilian scientific community. As a way to increase knowledge and experimentation with the use of social network analysis and identify his potential analytical, the objective of this work was use network analysis to map the patterns , trends and connectivity strategies between two planes of relation between researchers: co-authoring of documents from scientific journals and participation in defenses of theses and dissertations. Furthermore, we seek to map the social and political causes of network patterns identified, highlighting a critical use of structural and dynamic indicators. We use as case Univerciencia.org federated digital library, a library specialized in the field of Communication Sciences and provided as a source of data collected 49 scientific journals in the area with 9864 documents and 12 digital libraries of theses and dissertations with 1961 documents. The results show that the generative movements and constituents of social networks in our two levels of analysis are strongly determined by a characteristic rationality of science policy in the field of communication and science in general.

L'interopérabilité est une des caractéristiques requises pour les entreprises évoluant dans un marché globalisé à la concurrence croissante et complexe. Dans la dernière décennie, l'interopérabilité des entreprises a été développée et prescrite par différents types de cadres, de méthodes et de techniques. Cependant, le développement de l'interopérabilité n'est pas encore assez mature pour être considéré en tant que science à part entière. Par ailleurs, il ne cesse d'évoluer en fonction des besoins des entreprises,de leurs environnements et des différents secteurs d’activité. Aujourd'hui, l'environnement s’organise en réseaux multipleet provoque d’imprévisibles situations liées à leurs dynamiques (création, modification, résilience). Ainsi l’interopérabilité durable devient une dimension nouvelle de recherche pour l'interopérabilité des systèmes d'entreprise et de leurs domaines d'applications. Dans l'interopérabilité durable, l'interopérabilité d'entreprise dynamique est l'un des thèmes focaux. Cette approche dynamique, également appelée « fédérée », est originaire du cadre d'interopérabilité de l'Entreprise proposée dans le Réseau d’Excellence (NoE)INTEROP. Il vise à donner la capacité aux entreprises d’établir une interopérabilité à la volée sans connaissance préalable des informations à échanger. Cette thèse présente l'état actuel des travaux qui se rapprochent du développement de l'interopérabilité des entreprises « fédérés » en dynamique. Ces travaux de thèse mettent tout d’abord en évidence l’intérêt de la redécouverte de modèles à partir d’un système existant avant de concevoir un futur système. Une méthodologie de réverse engineering dirigée par les modèles et basée sur la norme de simulation distribuée HLA est proposée pour concevoir et développerpar l'approche fédérée d'interopérabilité le futur système d’information de l’entreprise. La phase de mise en œuvre réutilise les concepts d’interopérabilité issusde la simulation distribuée pour faciliter et coordonner la communication entre les systèmes d'information distribués hétérogènes des entreprises en combinant avec les dernières orientation service actuelle du web. La plate-forme tend ainsi à satisfaire les attentes de la dernière version du standard de l'architecture de haut niveau HLA 1516 Evolved. Ce cadre propose donc un cycle complet de développement pour qui a l'intention de réutiliser un système d'information existant sans recoder ex-nilo, mais en l’adaptant aux nouvelles exigences de la dynamique d'interopérabilité. / Interoperability is one of the requisite features for existing enterprises in the increasing competitive and complex global market. In the last decade, enterprise interoperability has been developed and prescribed by various kinds of frameworks, methods, and techniques. However interoperability development is still not mature enough to become a science. Meanwhile, it keeps evolving according to different business requirement and market environment. Nowadays, networked environment causes unpredictable dynamical situations, thus sustainable interoperability becomes a new research dimension in the interoperability of enterprise systems and applications domain. In the sustainable interoperability, enterprise interoperability dynamics is one of the focal topics. This dynamic approach also called federated is originated from Enterprise Interoperability Framework of INTEROP NoE, which aims to establish interoperability on the fly. This thesis presents current state on federated approaches to develop enterprise interoperability dynamics. Based on this study, a reversible model driven and HLA based methodology is proposed for achieving federated approach for Enterprise Interoperability. It reuses distributed simulation interoperability concepts to facilitate and coordinate the communication between heterogeneous distributed information systems of the enterprises. The platform is complaint with the latest version of the High Level Architecture (HLA) that is a distributed communication standard. This framework is also proposing a development lifecycle that intends to reuse existing information systems without recoding them but by adapting them to the new requirements of interoperability dynamics.

[pt] Este trabalho apresenta uma proposta para utilizar a tecnologia de banco de dados para o armazenamento e a gerência de objetos de aprendizado em uma federação de banco de dados (banco de dados distribuído). A crescente evolução no uso de aprendizado eletrônico trouxe o foco para a produtividade na elaboração e gerência do conteúdo dos módulos educacionais. Este conteúdo compreende hoje de vídeos, áudios e de outros dados relacionados, além de textos. Este material é normalmente armazenado pelos instrutores sem maiores preocupações quanto ao compartilhamento. Como membro do projeto PGL (Partnership in Global Learning) - uma organização virtual voltada para pesquisa, desenvolvimento e disseminação do aprendizado através de novas tecnologias - o laboratório de banco de dados da PUC-Rio - TecBD, tem pesquisado a adoção do enfoque de banco de dados para a gerência de objetos de aprendizado (Learning Objects) armazenados em locais interligados formando um ambiente de banco de dados heterogêneos distribuído. Este trabalho visa: 1) utilizando produtos de BD comercialmente disponíveis; 2) adotando os atuais padrões existentes para definição de objetos de aprendizado; 3) considerando objetos de aprendizado armazenados em locais separados e autônomos; 4) desenvolver uma aplicação (protótipo) com esses objetos de aprendizado. O modelo de dados adotado estabelece uma estrutura de objetos de aprendizado compostos, via relacionamentos com elementos atômicos e também com elementos compostos. Diferentes abordagens como, por exemplo, Web Services, Java/Servlets e Web Application Servers, foram estudadas para o problema da autonomia e distribuição geográfica. Um protótipo foi construído utilizando o produto IBM DB2 com seus recursos suplementares tais como extensores para dados de áudio, vídeo, imagens, XML e suporte para gerenciamento federado. A exploração dos dados armazenados, via navegador (browser), foi realizada utilizando a camada IBM Net.Data que embora não obrigatória, permitiu realizar a tarefa de um modo simples e disponibilizou uma solução bem integrada com o IBM DB2 e seus complementos. / [en] This work presents a proposal to utilize database technology for storing and managing learning objects in a database federation (distributed database). The evolution of e-learning has brought the focus over the productivity to make and to manage the content of learning modules, which today comprises videos, audio, among other related data, besides the text data. Instructors normally store this material without worry about sharing. As a member of PGL - Partnership in Global Learning - a virtual organization for research, development and dissemination of learning through new technologies - TecBD - the PUC-Rio`s Database Laboratory is researching the use of database approach for managing learning objects stored on interconnected sites composing a heterogeneous distributed database environment. This work intends: 1) using market ready DB products; 2) adopting the actual standards for defining of learning objects; 3) considering learning objects stored on separated and autonomous sites; 4) to develop an application (a study case) with these learning objects. The learning object`s model establishes a structure for composing learning objects by linking atomic elements and also linking composed elements. Different approaches as Web Services, Java/Servlets and Web Application Servers were considered for the geographically distributed problem. A study case was build using the product IBM DB2 with the provided extenders for audio, video, image, XML data and the Federated System Support. The web browser`s explore of the stored data was build using the IBM Net.Data software. Although not exclusive, it provided an easy way to perform this task and also enabled an easy integration with IBM DB2 and its extenders.

In the 1960s, Irene Spry served as the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada (FWIC) representative to the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW). In 1967 she accepted an offer to be the ACWW deputy president, a post that she held until the mid-1970s. During this time, the ACWW and its member societies engaged in international development efforts around the world. This was a critical moment in the history of international development. The Canadian movement for development was propelled by domestic and global politics, as well as a changing society that embraced a sense of global citizenship. Arising out of this context and armoured with her own socialist politics, Spry carefully navigated the development efforts of the ACWW. These efforts straddled grassroots ideals and mainstream pressures from the United Nations (UN). As a women's Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), the ACWW was part of the initial force behind the global shift in the approach to development referred to as Women in Development (WID). Contemporary research, however, suggests that WID has not succeeded in addressing the concerns of women in "developing" countries. As a case study, this paper examines some of the historical roots of WID and identifies the historical continuities that persist in today's development discourse. Analyzing Spry's documents from the Library and Archives Canada through the lens of feminist postcolonial theory reveals the dominance of Eurocentric ideologies within the development practices of the ACWW. The impetus to reach out to help people in developing countries became socially and politically part of the Canadian identity and, as Spry's navigation through the discourses of the international agencies and ACWW members reveal, such sentiments of international benevolence were inherently neo-colonial. In much the same way that Himani Bannerji suggests that subjects are "invented," women involved in this movement intersected discourses of modernity and "race" with essentializing notions of gender, which contributed to a standardized practice of development. This case study ultimately demonstrates that good intentions were not enough to decolonize western women's efforts to "develop" parts of Africa in the late 1960s and early 1970s. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate