Many organizations currently implement formal mentoring programs to assist newcomers in their adjustment to organizational norms, standards, and culture. However, very few empirically-established guidelines exist for how to effectively match mentors to proteges in formal programs sponsored by organizations. Typically, organizations attempt to match mentors to proteges based on similarity of goals/interests. However, prior research suggests that even mentors and proteges disagree with respect to their perceived similarity. Consequently, it should be difficult for a program administrator to determine which mentors and proteges are likely to be compatible. Recent research has found that proteges who perceived they had input into their match reported higher quality relationships. The present study extended this research by experimentally manipulating protege choice and by investigating potential mechanisms through which choice is expected to influence relationship success. Mentors were undergraduate juniors and seniors and proteges were first-semester freshmen randomly assigned to choose their own mentor or to be matched to a mentor by the program administrator. Participants then met online in a private chat room once per week for a period of four weeks (30 minute sessions). Results indicated that when proteges were given the opportunity to choose their own mentors, both mentors and proteges felt more similar to one another. Additionally, proteges had higher expectations for what they would get out of the relationship and were more proactive in soliciting guidance from their mentors. Finally, each instance of coded psychosocial support demonstrated by a mentor related more positively to proteges' ratings of the support they received if they were in the choice condition. In fact, the relationship between coded psychosocial support and protege ratings of psychosocial support was slightly negative for those who were assigned to a mentor by the researcher. Pre-meeting expectations were found to fully mediate this effect. Finally, protege-reported psychosocial support was positively associated with self-efficacy and negatively related stress after the fourth chat session. In summary, the results of this study strongly suggest that protege involvement in the match process can facilitate the quality of formal mentoring programs.

With the massive deluges of data that several domains of study experience, referred to as Big Data, the need to efficiently process and analyze data has risen. Ontologies have been employed to structure these domains with the ultimate purpose of generating new knowledge about the respective domain. Currently, when creating or examining an ontology, the concepts of the domain are limited to being statically defined in relation to other concepts. This limitation on the concept's definition affects the reasoning process by omitting or not properly representing all information that may exist in the domain such as how the constantly evolving environment changes how the data can be understood. The resulting tool of this research, Conto, allows for the interpretation of a concept as an abstract data type. When coupled to knowledge generation process, these interpretations allow the obtention of new knowledge that would traditionally be unobtainable. The different types of knowledge that can be obtained via the multiple interpretations are explored in this work using examples of ontologies. Conto is a Protege plugin that uses Ontograf to display the ontologies. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Mentor/protégé programs are popular corporate tools, often used to identify and nurture emerging leaders internally, as part of senior management succession planning. This paper provides an analysis of the 2008 Mentor/Protégé program at Analog Devices, Inc from the Human Capital Framework (HCF) perspective. The HCF analysis specifically focuses on identifying implementation “levers” (e.g., human capital) which create or increase capabilities of the organization, to realize strategic goals. This analysis identifies implementation levers from the Mentor/Protégé training program which create new capabilities in the organization, with focus on a Protégé team initiative which developed a new lever to communicate corporate strategy to the organization. / text

This research explored the experiences of mentors mentoring institutionalised children under the auspices of Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Africa (BBBSSA). Children who become wards of the state and are placed in Children’s Homes may have had a number of their emotional needs unmet during developmental stages, manifesting in a variety of ways not least of which might be the development of an institutionalised mentality. These children are disadvantaged at age 18 when they enter the world with limited resources, infrastructure or the ability to be self-reliant. Mentoring may represent a means of ameliorating these repercussions and this qualitative research included exploring whether mentors engaged in any strategies to empower their protégé to reduce the effects of an institutionalised mentality, the successes achieved through the mentoring process as well as encountered challenges. The sample was purposively chosen and the seven participants had mentored for longer than a year at a Children’s Home. The data was gathered from them via semi-structured interviews. Data was analysed in light of the research questions, research tool and any subsequent themes that emerged. Mentoring through a programme appeared to enhance relationship longevity because of the structure it created. While growing themselves through the process, mentors reflected that preparing their protégé for adulthood was a concern. The mentors discussed that while not familiar with the concept of an institutionalised mentality per se, they recognised this as a challenge their protégés faced and described their attempts to empower them on mental, emotional and physical levels reporting small successes in often challenging circumstances. The study concludes that mentoring programmes offer a valuable tool in the preparation of institutionalised children for their emancipation from State care and should be capitalised on. Recommendations are made for policy makers, BBBSSA and the Children’s Home in light of these experiences.

Šiame darbe analizuojamos pasaulinio semantinio tinklo technologijos dalykinės srities žinioms užrašyti ir valdyti. Darbo metu buvo papildyta dalykinės srities ontologija bei sukurta nauja sistėminė vartotojo sąsajos formavimo ontologija, kuri palaiko daugiakalbystę. Realizuotos ir aprobuotos užklausos ir automatizavimo procesai dirbantys su minėtomis ontologijomis. Darbo vykdymo metu sukauptos žinios buvo surinktos, susistemintos ir pateikiamos kaip darbo metodika. Remiantis šia metodika sukurta eksperimentinė sistema, skirta padėti identifikuoti su BIOS klaidomis susijusias problemas ir/arba operacinių sistemų (OS) sutrikimo priežastis ir jas spręsti. Apie sukurtą sistemą buvo perskaitytas pranešimas konferencijoje „Mokslas ir studijos 2010: teorija ir praktika“, kuri įvyko Šiaurės Lietuvos kolegijoje. Metodiką galima pritaikyti bet kokiai dalykinei sričiai, tiek realizuojant e-mokymo(si) sistemose probleminio mokymosi principus, tiek paramos paslaugų teikimo prekės ar produkto vartotojui sferoje. / This work examines the global semantic web technologies in the subject area knowledge and record management. Work was completed in the subject area and Ontology, a new user interface making systemic ontology, which supports multilingualism. Realized and dealer inquiries, and automate processes in working with these ontologies. Work during the accumulated knowledge has been collected, systematised and presented as a working methodology. Based on the methodology developed an experimental system designed to help identify errors in the BIOS-related problems and / or operating systems (OS) and cause disruption to solve them. This system of notification was read in the conference of "Education and training 2010: Theory and Practice", which took place in Northern Lithuania College. The approach can be applied to any subject area, and implement e-learning (learning) problem of learning the principles of systems and support services or goods to the consumer product area.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T22:00:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 28 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar as narrativas e construções discursivas que os usuários do Programa de Apoio e Assistência a Vítimas e Testemunhas Ameaçadas do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul – PROTEGE realizam sobre si mesmos no âmbito dessa política pública. Para isso, baseia-se em referências teóricas e analíticas sobre as memórias coletivas, a socialização e as identidades. O resultado é uma tentativa por contrapor os anseios e objetivos políticos concretos de uma política pública de proteção sociais com as diferentes problemáticas, anseios e vivências específicas de alguns dos que se têm favorecido com ela. Trata-se de avaliar o PROTEGE não desde a sua prática, senão a partir das perspectivas dos seus usuários, quando estes vão construindo e reconstruindo as suas identidades e memórias e, dessa maneira, resignificam o espaço que lhes tocou vivenciar na sua passagem pelo programa

In general an ontology is created by following a top-down, or so called genus-species approach, where the species are differentiated from the genus and from each other by means of differentiae [8]. The superconcept is the genus, every subconcept is a species, and the differentiae correspond to roles. To complete it a user organizes data into a proper structure, accompanied with the instances in that domain in order to complete the construction of an ontology. It is a concept learning procedure in a school, for example. Students first learn the general knowledge and apply it to their exercise and homework for practice. After they are more familiar with the knowledge, they can use what they have learned to solve the problems in their daily life. The deductive learning approach is based on the fundamental knowledge that a student has acquired already. By contrast, a more intuitive way of learning is the bottom-up approach, which is based on atomism. That is also a frequently used way for humans to acquire knowledge. From sensing the world by vision, hearing, and touching, people learn information about actual objects, i.e., instances, in the world. After an instance has been collected, a relationship between it and existing knowledge will be created and an ontology will be formed automatically. The primary goal of this thesis is to make a better instance input interface for the ontology development tool Protégé to simplify the procedure of ontology construction. The second goal is to show the feasibility of a bottom-up approach for the building of an ontology. Without setting up the organization of classes and properties (slots) first, a user simply inputs all the information from an instance and the program will form an ontology automatically. It means after an instance has been entered, the system will find a proper location inside of the ontology to store it.

Ontologijų aprašymai yra dažniausiai naudojami semantiniame žiniatinklyje (Semantic Web/Web 2.0), tačiau pastaruoju metu jie randa vis daugiau ir daugiau pritaikymo kasdienėms informacijos sistemoms. Puikiai suformuota ontologija privalo turėti teisingą sintaksę ir nedviprasmišką mašinai suprantamą interpretaciją, tokiu būdu ji gali aiškiai apibrėžti fundamentalias sąvokas ir ryšius probleminėje srityje. Ontologijos vis plačiau naudojamos įvairiuose taikymuose: verslo procesų ir informacijos integravime, paieškoje ir žvalgyme. Tokie taikymai reikalauja geros greitaveikos, efektyvaus saugojimo ir didelio mąsto ontologinių duomenų manipuliavimo. Kai ontologijomis paremtos sistemos auga tiek akiračiu, tiek apimtimi, specialistų sistemose naudojami samprotavimo varikliai tampa nebetinkami. Tokiomis aplinkybėmis, ontologijų saugojimas reliacinėse duomenų bazėse tampa būtinas semantiniame žiniatinklyje ir įmonėse. Šiame darbe atsakoma į klausimą kokiu būdu OWL ontologijas galima efektyviai transformuoti į reliacinių duomenų bazių schemas. / Ontology descriptions are typically used in Semantic Web/Web2.0, but nowadays they find more and more adaptability in everyday Information Systems. Well-formed ontology must have correct syntax and unambiguous machine-understandable interpretation, so it is capable to clearly defining fundamental concepts and relationships of the problem domain. Ontologies are increasingly used in many applications: business process and information integration, search and navigation. Such applications require scalability and performance, efficient storage and manipulation of large scale ontological data. In such circumstances, storing ontologies in relational databases are becoming the relevant needs for Semantic Web and enterprises. For ontology development, Semantic Web languages are dedicated: Resource Description Framework (RDF) and schema RDFS, and Web Ontology Language (OWL) that consists of three sublanguages – OWL Lite, OWL Description Logic (DL) and OWL Full. When ontology based systems are growing in scope and volume, reasoners of expert systems are becoming unsuitable. In this work an algorithm which fully automatically transforms ontologies, represented in OWL, to RDB schemas is proposed. Some concepts, e.g. ontology classes and properties are mapped to relational tables, relations and attributes, other (constraints) are stored like metadata in special tables. Using both direct mapping and metadata, it is possible to obtain appropriate relational structures and not to lose the... [to full text]

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / In recent years, we have witnessed a significant increase in the number, size and diversity of the available data sources in many application domains. Data sources in a particular domain are autonomously created and maintained, and therefore distributed and semantically heterogeneous. In this thesis, we focused on the problem of querying such semantically heterogeneous data sources from a user's perspective. We approach this problem by using the concepts of ontologies and mappings between ontologies. A system for answering queries in a transparent way to the user has been designed and implemented. The main components of this system are an ontology mapping algorithm that maps user ontologies to data source ontologies, and a query processing engine that maps user queries to queries that can be answered by the data sources in the system. We have shown that machine learning algorithms can also be incorporated in the system, thus making it possible to learn machine learning classifiers (in particular, generative models such as Naïve Bayes) from distributed, semantically heterogeneous data sources. Because many data sources today are relational in nature, in this work we have dealt specifically with relational data sources, as opposed to flat files, XML or object oriented data sources. However, our system can be easily extended to other types of data sources.

Since the 1993 inception of the mentoring program in the U.S. Navy, little evidence has been collected on its effectiveness, primarily because of difficulties with instrumentation and conceptualization in conducting such assessments. The purpose of this correlational study was to identify external factors affecting military protégés' satisfaction with their mentoring experience. The conceptual framework of this study was based on Kram's mentor model theory, which includes career and psychosocial support functions. A 5-item Likert survey instrument was designed to measure the dependent variables of satisfaction with career mentoring and satisfaction with personal mentoring against 10 independent variables: dyad compatibility, mentor training, dyad geography, mentoring functions, mentor/protégé gender, challenging job assignments, protégé visibility, mentor leadership, time management, and protégé career expectations. The survey was completed by a total of 538 participants, selected among the service personnel of 17 U.S. Navy aviation squadrons in the enlisted ranks of E1 through E6. Ten simple linear regressions were performed with a level of significance of .001. All 10 independent variables were significantly related to satisfaction with both career and personal mentoring. The study results suggested, however, that career mentoring was favored to a greater extent than was personal mentoring by protégés, with the effect sizes ranging from 5% to 48% for career mentoring and from 3% to 22% for personal mentoring. Furthermore, Kram's theory was a useful lens to evaluate mentoring in this population. The implications for positive social change include informing program administrators in the U.S. Navy of the benefits to their units to evaluate and improve the design and the implementation of career and personal mentoring.