The way that historians do research has changed as more and more digitised primary sources have become available online. Whilst desktop access to historical resources is becoming the norm in the digital age, many historians prefer working with original sources. This observation triggered an investigation into the information needs and behaviour of historians with a view to identifying ways in which information retrieval system (IRS) might be enhanced to meet their specific needs. During the investigation it became apparent that the information-seeking behaviour (ISB) of historians involves a great deal of creative thinking and that IRS aimed at historians would benefit from features specifically designed to stimulate their creativity. The research described here follows a “mixed methods” approach in which quantitative and qualitative research techniques have been applied sequentially. The first, quantitative, phase of the study concerned the question of which format of primary sources (original or digitised) historians prefer to work with and why. Results from an online questionnaire, distributed to historians in the UK, revealed the historians’ preference for originals but with a very positive attitude towards digitised sources, which were considered to be more “useful”. This led the study to explore ways in which the “usefulness” of IRS could be further improved to support historical research. The exploration of these issues involved a qualitative analysis based on “grounded theory” techniques and led to certain specific recommendations to the designers of future IRS intended to support historical research.

Pyrazoles have been intensely studied in the design and synthesis of biologically active agents because they display considerable medicinal activities. Recent studies have shown that integration of a ferrocenyl unit with structural features of pyrazoles can result in the formation of the new products with enhanced or/and unexpected biological activity since several ferrocene derivatives have already been illustrated to be active against a number of tumors. Therefore, we have investigated the electrophilic cyclizations of the hydrazones to afford 5-ferrocenyl-4-((4-nitrophenyl)sulfenyl)-substituted pyrazole derivatives. First, the requisite hydrazone derivatives were synthesized by the reactions of ferrocenyl propargyl aldehydes or ketones with a series of hydrazines. Then electrophilic cyclizations of these hydrazones were investigated by treating with 4-(nitrophenyl)sulfenyl chloride as electrophile. By employing these electrophilic cyclizations, a series of 5-ferrocenyl-4-((4-nitrophenyl)sulfenyl)-1H-pyrazoles, 5-ferrocenyl-4-((4-nitrophenyl) sulfenyl)-3-methyl-1H-pyrazoles and 5-ferrocenyl-4-((4-nitrophenyl)sulfenyl)-3-phenyl-1H-pyrazoles have been synthesized in moderate to good yields.

This thesis is about broadsheet coverage of the European Parliament (EP). More precisely, it studies the amount and content of news referring to the EP as well as the professional attitudes of their producers. The main purpose of the thesis is to explain variation in the press coverage. Thereby it combines political communication research with the European integration literature discussing the legitimacy of the EP. It argues that cross-country and inter-temporal variation cannot be explained by factors internal to news production alone. Instead, national parliamentary traditions impact profoundly on the way EU parliamentary affairs are reported. The thesis employs a mixed-methods research design. It conducts a quantitative content analysis of 18 broadsheets published in six European countries – Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria – over three time periods: one is a routine period of two years; the remaining two datasets are oriented at key issues and events over time. In total, 3956 newspaper articles are analysed. In addition, 18 in-depth interviews with the respective Brussels correspondents and a director at the EP Directorate-General for Communication complement the findings. While the EP receives regular coverage, the thesis finds that news are selected and presented according to the interest of the audience. Hence the domestic angle prevails in the news coverage and the EP’s own prominence and potential to generate conflict attract media attention more often when major issues are at stake. However, domestic relevance is not the only explanatory factor. While newsmakers also respond to varying levels of public support for EU membership, the thesis identifies national parliamentary traditions as a strong external driver of EP news coverage. Here, procedural characteristics and public expectations shape the amount and content of EP news as well as newsmakers’ attitudes – and more significantly so with the rising powers of the Parliament.

Governance is the process by which power and authority are exercised in a society by which government, the private sector, and citizens' groups articulate their interests, mediate their differences, and exercise their legal rights and obligations. Governance in public organisations is different from that in private organisations as they both possess different types of institutional stakeholders. Governments are directly answerable to the public. Therefore, it is essential for governments to be transparent in order to avoid any triggers in the accountability process that might adversely affect people's trust. The proper creation, capture, distribution and preservation of judicial evidence in the form of records can help avoid these problems. A trusted government is one that can demonstrate its accountability and transparency and is continually striving to improve value delivery and increase cost-effectiveness. The freedom of information demands governments to be more transparent and accountable for their actions and decisions. Whilst governments promote corporate governance to provide transparency and objectivity it can only give stakeholders better tools to do their job, it does not and cannot do it for them. The need for managing risk and audit culture is imperative to balance and satisfy the expectation of citizen and stakeholders. The accountability of a government can arguably only be achieved when it demonstrates considerable transparency, which in turn can only happen when trust is supported by authentic and reliable records. The records management community claims that records have to be preserved for accountability, but they rarely explore what 'accountability' is and what role records play in the accountability processes. In addition, the contribution of records management to good governance and accountability are often not recognised by other professions and management. In an age where corporate governance and transparency is a global agenda, it is imperative for the records management community to scrutinise their present role and approach in order to change the perception by other professions about their contribution towards achieving organisational goals in a highly regulated and compliant bound environment in the public and private sectors. The contention of this thesis is that record keeping is just a tool that ensures the availability of evidence for the accountability of governance, which in turn relies on the ethical standard of those involved.

The principles of knowledge management (KM) are widely acknowledged and have been developed over the last 50 years, especially in such disciplines as management science, sociology, and construction. Whilst knowledge management (KM) is still an evolving practice, specific emphasis is now taking place on securing leverage through knowledge-context, interpretation, transfer, and reflection. Knowledge-based economies are increasingly reliant upon their intellectual capital (IC) cognisant of: the Information Technology (IT) revolution; expanding information society; the increased importance of knowledge; and the congruence and emergence of innovation through the application of KM practices. However, little work in the remit of KM has been evidenced in the Libyan financial sector the omission of which is the focus of this research. This research uses a case-study approach using an interpretive perspective to develop a knowledge management implementation (KMI) framework for the Libyan banking industry. The framework was developed and tested using three Libyan banks (LBs) and one bank from the United Kingdom (UK). Domain expertise was selected from the financial sector and academia to validate all results and findings. Research findings identified that the body of literature surrounding KM (from a Western perspective), could be applied to the Libyan context with a high degree of congruence. Moreover, the Libyan banking industry has now reached a level of maturity to embrace this framework as part of its core business practices. Several critical KM implementation areas were identified for incorporation (linked to organisational maturity). However, no definitive measurable leverage could be ascertained from this study, the aspect of which would need to form part of a larger study using cross-case analysis and multiple replications.

Computer simulations have been used more than ever before to embark on developing and understanding complex systems such as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). As simulation systems become larger and more complex, scalability becomes an important issue for their successful deployment. PDES-MAS (Parallel and Discrete Event Simulations for Multi-Agent Systems) framework is, implemented based on distributed shared memory architecture, a parallel and discrete event simulation kernel to distribute and run parallel simulation of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). There are several issues within such system and this thesis presents a notion of logical time synchronised range queries to address the issue of data access. Accessing data efficiently in a latency-sensitive and large scale network overlay is a vital requirement for the scalability of the system. So, this thesis presents a notion of synchronised range queries with algorithms to manage distributed data structures consistently and in a time ordered fashion across the system. To localise data access in such a large scale simulation system, algorithms are provided to distribute shared state such that the distribution reflects access patterns of simulating nodes. The algorithms are evaluated within the implementation of PDES-MAS framework using various agent based simulation traces.

This thesis presents a late-Durkheimian theoretical framework on civil society as a sphere of solidarity and applies it to the development from modern society to an „information society‟. The framework is used to identify the cultural codes that exist in different information societies and to show their role in integrating or dividing the members of civil society. The framework is applied to South Korean civil society entering an information age coincident alongside processes of democratisation. Three policy debates relating to information are used as case studies to show the coexistence of, and conflicts between, a „developmental code‟ based on economic growth and anti-communism deriving from the authoritarian period of state-sponsored capitalism, and a later „democratic code‟ based on human rights. The three cases are: the Electronic National Identification Card, the National Education Information System and the credit information system. The thesis argues that the values of a „democratic‟ code are becoming more dominant in recent South Korean society, despite continuous challenge for its validity. The cases provide evidence that democratisation and informatization can operate in tandem to establish the dominance of the democratic code in public discourse in South Korean civil society.

Over the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in the volume of digital content created from museum, library and archive collections but research on how this material is actually used, particularly in digital learning environments, has fallen far behind the rate of supply. In order to address this gap, this thesis examines how communities of practice (CoPs) involved in the supply and use of digital artefacts in the Higher Education sector in the UK interact with content and what factors affect this process. It focuses on a case study involving the digitisation of Shakespeare collections used in postgraduate research, and the testing of use in a range of different learning environments. This produced a number of significant findings with implications for the HE and cultural sectors. Firstly, similar patterns of artefact use were found across all users suggesting there are generic ways in which everyone interacts with digital artefacts. However, distinct forms of use did emerge which correspond with membership of particular communities of practice. Secondly, members of a CoP appear to share a particular learning style and this is influenced by the learning environment. Finally, the research indicates that a mixed method for analysing and measuring use, piloted and tested in the case study, is possible.

Verification of access control systems against vulnerabilities has always been a challenging problem in the world of computer security. The complication of security policies in large- scale multi-agent systems increases the possible existence of vulnerabilities as a result of mistakes in policy definition. This thesis explores automated methods in order to verify temporal and epistemic properties of access control systems. While temporal property verification can reveal a considerable number of security holes, verification of epistemic properties in multi-agent systems enable us to infer about agents' knowledge in the system and hence, to detect unauthorized information flow. This thesis first presents a framework for knowledge-based verification of dynamic access control policies. This framework models a coalition-based system, which evaluates if a property or a goal can be achieved by a coalition of agents restricted by a set of permissions defined in the policy. Knowledge is restricted to the information that agents can acquire by reading system information in order to increase time and memory efficiency. The framework has its own model-checking method and is implemented in Java and released as an open source tool named \(\char{cmmi10}{0x50}\)\(\char{cmmi10}{0x6f}\)\(\char{cmmi10}{0x6c}\)\(\char{cmmi10}{0x69}\)\(\char{cmmi10}{0x56}\)\(\char{cmmi10}{0x65}\)\(\char{cmmi10}{0x72}\). In order to detect information leakage as a result of reasoning, the second part of this thesis presents a complimentary technique that evaluates access control policies over temporal-epistemic properties where the knowledge is gained by reasoning. We will demonstrate several case studies for a subset of properties that deal with reasoning about knowledge. To increase the efficiency, we develop an automated abstraction refinement technique for evaluating temporal-epistemic properties. For the last part of the thesis, we develop a sound and complete algorithm in order to identify information leakage in Datalog-based trust management systems.

This research is dedicated to make a foreseeing of the future state of the Kizildere Geothermal Field in order to suggest acceptable solutions to the current problems. The non-isothermal mechanism of the geothermal field is simulated for the pressure and temperature variables. For this purpose, a finite element model (696 four-nodal elements with 750 nodes) of the field is formulated by considering the geological conditions and the present wells already drilled in the area. Then the model is calibrated to the field for the natural state by using appropriate physical properties, boundary and initial conditions. Comparison of the simulated and the observed pressures and temperatures has emphasized a very successful calibration study. After the calibration, response of the field to the production and injection for the period of 1984-2006 has been simulated by applying a history matching study. History matching runs have yielded very good correlations between the observed and the computed values of the pressure and temperature variables. The calibrated and history matched model has been applied to the field to simulate the future performance of the field for different production and injection scenarios. In the first scenario the field is simulated for the next 10-year production period keeping the on-going production conditions. Then, the influence of the production of two new wells has been investigated in two different scenarios. In the forth scenario, the effect of injection from one of the production wells has been simulated.