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There has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques, to support service discovery and to overcome the limitations in the traditional syntactic approaches. However, the existing semantic matching approaches lack certain desirable properties that must be present in an effective solution to support service discovery. The purpose of this paper is to present a solution to facilitate the effective semantic matching of resource requests and advertisements in pervasive environments.

The paper presents a semantic description and matching approach to facilitate resource discovery in pervasive environments; the approach includes a ranking mechanism that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request.

The solution has been evaluated for its effectiveness and the results have shown that the matcher results agree reasonably well with human judgement. The solution was also evaluated for its efficiency/scalability and from the experimental results obtained, it can be observed that for most practical situations, matching time can be considered acceptable for reasonable numbers of advertisements and request sizes.

The proposed approach improves existing semantic matching solutions in several key aspects. Specifically; it presents an effective approximate matching and ranking criterion and incorporates priority consideration in the matching process. As shown in the evaluation experiments, these features significantly improve the effectiveness of semantic matching.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a consistent and systematic integration framework of sustainable development (SD) in a civil engineering (CE) curriculum, given the connection between the two. Curriculum integration is a challenging project and requires the development of certain protocols to ensure success.

This paper thus proposes a framework for the systematic integration of SD through the lenses of life cycle approach and associated tools to attain effective curriculum integration. The proposed framework suggests the following five steps: mapping the curriculum, setting learning targets, developing an action plan for the assessed program, implementing the action plan and assessing the final performance.

This framework was applied to the CE curriculum at Sherbrooke University. To assess its success, a student satisfaction survey was conducted, and teachers’ feedback was obtained; the results showed 85 per cent positive responses. The authors show how this study allowed the CE curriculum to be properly updated and brought in line with today’s engineering profession requirements with regard to SD.

The integration focuses on the application of life cycle approaches and tools such as environmental life cycle assessment and life cycle costing on CE content. Additionally, the presented approach can be easily adapted to other engineering curriculums and, to a certain extent, to other non-engineering curriculums.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the French Revolution in Russian intellectual life. One could even make the claim that the French Revolution has had a more significant impact on modern Russian history than it has had upon modern French history! Indeed, since the end of the nineteenth century, the French Revolution has become passe in France in the sense that no Frenchman has looked at it as a blueprint for current political development. While there have been cases in which some of the old revolutionary images were invoked to bolster support for certain political activities (such as support for the war against Germany), it has never been wholeheartedly re‐embraced and there has been a sense of detachment about the revolution, a sense that modern conditions were somehow different.

The objective of this paper is to address the question of whether the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) can be utilized in non‐profit organizations, in particular hospital sector organizations. A secondary objective addresses the issue of whether the BSC can be utilized employing the methodology encountered in the literature.

A case is presented of a private Spanish hospital, specializing in psychiatric patients, which is owned by a religious congregation and which utilizes a very primitive and informal information system. The case describes the design of the strategic map and the BSC for this hospital.

The paper concludes that the BSC is applicable to any type of organization, albeit with modifications; a BSC for non‐profit organizations must be modified to include a mission perspective, thus supporting Kaplan's model for non‐profit organizations. Hospitals should also include an additional perspective which provides specific information on social demographic factors regarding the hospital's operating environment.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, the case supports Kaplan's inclusion of a mission perspective for non‐profit organizations. Second, it further modifies the non‐profit BSC by including an additional perspective which provides specific information on social demographic factors regarding the hospital's operating environment. The authors are unaware of any instance where this additional perspective has been included in the model. Finally, the case provides a fully developed BSC and strategy map for a hospital which can be used as a template for other health‐care organizations.

Today, the rapid increase in the population living in cities and new developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) increase the demand for smart cities day by day. It is thought that limited public resources and crowded cities will be managed better by making more use of the opportunities offered by smart technologies. At this point, many countries around the world are turning to smart city applications. Especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, local governments have started to give importance to smart city projects due to the advantages of smart cities. It is thought that urban planning against epidemics will gain more importance in the coming years.

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the evolution of a new e‐research paradigm and to outline key projects and developments in Europe, North America, Canada and Australia. The article also provides a detailed summary of the Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation e‐Research Technology (DART) project.

A review of relevant government reports, documents and general literature was conducted.

Projects currently being conducted in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia are part of an international movement that aims to use modern ICTs to enhance e‐research. The DART project is a significant part of this movement as it has adopted a “whole process” approach to e‐research, and provides a platform for the examination of the technical, legal and policy issues that arise in the new e‐research environment.

Provides an overview of current projects that concern the development of e‐research, with a particular focus on Australian research and the DART project.

The purpose of this paper is to open the special issue of Online Information Review on open knowledge management in higher education. Its aim is to review the concept and extension of the movement or philosophy of open knowledge in universities and higher education institutions.

The approach follows the reference model used by the University of Salamanca (Spain) to promote open knowledge in the institution through its Open Knowledge Office. This model comprises four areas: free software, open educational content and cultural dissemination, open science, and open innovation.

For each of the four areas mentioned above, milestones and the most significant projects are presented, showing how they are promoting publication and information transmission in an open environment, without restrictions and favouring knowledge dissemination in all fields.

Open knowledge is an approach which, although somewhat controversial, is growing relentlessly as cultural and scientific dissemination leave behind other interests or economic models. International organisations and governments are gradually embracing open knowledge as the way to share scientific advances with society and as an international cooperative way to assist development in third‐world countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how new technology-based firms (NTBFs) overcome established notions of scale and scope through business model innovation, leveraging the value from digitalization.

The study adopts an exploratory research design, drawing on a novel data set of 50 publicly available interviews with vertical farming (VF) industry leaders and insiders who represent 36 different organizations from North America and Europe.

The study develops a framework showing how NTBFs leverage the value from digitalization via a paradoxical approach combining both efficiency and novelty value drivers.

The study extends current theorizing on the desirability of a combined business model approach leveraging both efficiency and novelty from digitalization. Furthermore, the study is among the first to investigate the unique and highly technological context of VF.

This study aims to investigate the determinants of a shift in lending towards household sectors during the growth of fintech credit using a sample of 41 countries between 2015 and 2018.

This study uses a fixed-effects model by adding indicators for geographic areas and year dummy variables to achieve this objective.

The findings show that the household credit to firm credit ratio is positively associated with credit information sharing and financial literacy, emphasising the importance of credit information sharing mechanism and financial literacy to household credit growth. More interestingly, the findings show that fintech credit development plays a more critical role in the evolution of firm credit than household credit. Nonetheless, fintech credit development may complement the growth of conventional lending. The results still hold when using several robustness checks.

This is the first attempt to examine the roles of credit information sharing, financial literacy and fintech credit development in a shift in lending activities towards households.