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In Taiwan, particularly in rural settlements, the temple serves as the religious and social centre. In the past 30 years, as Taiwan experienced rapid economic growth, modernizing temple architecture was something worshipers viewed as the newest and best offering. Many old temples were demolished entirely or in parts to build larger temples using modern materials and construction methods.

In the early 1990s, finding the old temple too small to fulfil the large number of worshipers from outside the community, the Chen-An Temple Association proposed to raise funds for a new temple. It commissioned a Japanese architecture firm, well known for several public projects in I-Lan, to design the new temple. The design partially preserved the old temple building, integrating it into the landscape design of the new temple. At the time, the central government cultural bureau was promoting the preservation of community historic spaces, and at first had agreed to give funding. However, after reviewing, funding was refused because the jurors had failed to see community involvement in the design.

It was under these circumstances that the Er-Jie community invited our organization to work with them, in hope that by bringing in a new perspective, the original scheme could be altered to satisfy government funding. Through a nine month participation process, the community realized that what meant the most to them about the old temple was the public square defined by the temple building, the large canopy of the Banyan trees, and the social activities that took place there. After much deliberation and numerous design workshops with the architects of the new temple, the resulting design preserved the entire old temple building by moving it to an unused space across from its current location; and to recreate the character of the temple square through attention to design elements.

Our work in Er-Jie demonstrated that although language is a vital part of preservation efforts, most community members do not have a grasp of the planning and design language, including words, drawings, body language, and actions. Not having adequate language ability leads to misunderstanding, prevents one’s voice from being heard, and creates obstacles in dialogue. In retrospect, the lack of a common language was the cause of many of the difficulties and issues we confronted during the project.

There were five key players in the project -the government, the Chen-An Temple Association, the community, the architects, and us. The participation process was about encouraging a common language. Through the process, we observed a rise in the community’s confidence, as they were increasingly able to share their thoughts with and define their values to the others involved.

Accordingly, we were able to draw from the community that the temple square was what they valued most. The end product of the preservation effort is more than a conserved temple building. The revitalization effort also preserved the meaning the public square holds for the community. For the community, temple preservation is about public space because of the cultural and historical attachments the local residents have to that space. Revitalization is about providing the opportunity for the community to redefine the role of the building given the community’s current needs.

The success of the conservation effort can be measured by the effect the process has on the community. Following the preservation of the Chen-An Temple, the community led the restoration of a waterway that runs through their community. As the community became more comfortable with the language of participation, preservation, space, and design, there emerges a preservation and environmental design consciousness in the community.

Conceptually examines the effect of individualism/collectivism on the tenets of equity theory. It is the view of the authors that the equality principle of reward allocation in collectivistic cultures is not a separate method of distribution, but a subset of the theoretically grounded equity principle appropriately integrating the cross‐cultural individualism/collectivism value. To support this position, the authors reduce equity theory to its fundamental elements and illustrate how in dividualism/collectivism separately affects each component. The derived model and subsequent discussion should provide researchers with a theoretical frame work for future empirical studies.

The purpose of the paper is to advance a framework that can assess and analyze the value of patent portfolios. On this purpose, the framework develops a conceptual and comprehensive index, the patent portfolio value index (PPVI), to assess the patent innovation level and suggest economic-strategic guidelines.

The authors have designed and applied a framework that synthesizes into a single index the results of a multiple criteria approach, based on information derived from quantitative objective data (claims, citations, and market coverage), information related to qualitative determinants (strategic positioning and economic importance), and information derived from decision makers’ perceptions and judgments.

The authors have applied the PPVI to the 3,532 patent portfolio documents in an Italian worldwide player in aerospace and defense market. The combined analysis, provided by the PPVI and a qualitative synoptic representation, has made it possible to understand the strategic positioning and alignment of patents with the core business of the company. The results of the analysis have provided managers with the necessary suggestions regarding action items to be performed: to reinforce, license, try to dismiss, or sell some of the examined patents of the portfolios.

The PPVI supplies a quick procedure to ascertain the profitability of patents and accounts for the value of a patent portfolio from an internal business perspective.

As it is built and defined, the PPVI shows elements of novelty compared to the other indexes existing in the literature, in that it follows a multiple criteria approach by merging quantitative and qualitative information.

Einleitung Dieser Artikel hat den Zweck, den heutigen Stand des Wissens auf dem Gebiet der strategischen Führung auf die Fremdenverkehrsunternehmung zu übertragen. Zweck der folgenden Ausführungen ist' es, die Orientierungsgrössen der strategischen Führung in ihrem Zusammenhang darzustellen. Es soll gezeigt werden, dass die entsprechenden, bisher im industriellen Bereich erprobten Denkkategorien auch für Fremdenverkehrunternehmungen gültig und mit Nutzen auf diese anwendbar sind. lm Rahmen dieses Artikels können nicht alle für die Tourismusbranche spezifischen Gegebenheiten vollumfänglich berücksichtigt werden. Die theoretischen Ausführungen werden jedoch anhand von zahlreichen konkreten Beispielen aus dem Tourismus‐ und Freizeitsektor erläutert. Neben Beispielen aus Fremdenverkehrsunternehmungen im engeren Sinne werden auch solche aus Fremdenverkehrsorten dargestellt, bei denen es sich in bestimmter Hinsicht urn unternehmungsartige Gebilde 1) handelt.

The entity‐relationship approach is applied to similarity‐driven pictorial database design. The capabilities and the limitations of computers are presented. Advantages of the entity‐relationship approach, and similarity‐driven pictorial database design are also presented. Classification of pictures, similarity‐driven face databases, chromosome databases, leukocyte databases are investigated. Quantitative measure of equal‐perimeter circular shape, equal‐area circular shape, elongated, spiculed, indented, slightly indented, and deeply indented leukocytes are also investigated. The entity‐relationship diagrams of a house, a house with high roof, and a church are shown as illustrative examples of this approach. The class of elongated isosceles triangles is viewed as a “fuzzy entity”. Topics for future research are also stated. The results have useful applications in data engineering, knowledge engineering, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, fuzzy language theory, computer graphics, expert systems and pictorial database design.

To provide a selective bibliography for researchers and practitioners interested in database modeling of engineering information with sources which can help them develop engineering information systems.

Identifies the requirements for engineering information modeling and then investigates how current database models satisfy these requirements at two levels: conceptual data models and logical database models.

Presents the relationships among the conceptual data models and the logical database models for engineering information modeling viewed from database conceptual design.

Currently few papers provide comprehensive discussions about how current engineering information modeling can be supported by database technologies. This paper fills this gap. The contribution of the paper is to identify the direction of database study viewed from engineering applications and provide a guidance of information modeling for engineering design, manufacturing, and production management.

Pictures are natural and effective means of communication among people, computers, and robotics. A pictorial database is a collection of sharable pictorial data encoded in various formats. During the past several years, pictorial databases have attracted growing attention as an important component in building pictorial information systems as well as intelligent information systems. Eight research tasks are presented. They are comparing the numerical and the linguistic variable approaches, examining new linguistic hedges, studying the similarity of various similarity measures, investigating pictorial data compression techniques, performing pictorial data compression using array grammars, applying the entity‐relationship (ER) model to picture description; further investigating the relationship hierarchy for picture representation using ER diagrams, and extracting pictorial knowledge from pictorial databases. The research results may have a major impact on the development of object‐oriented pictorial databases.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the use of two Object-Relational models against the use of a post-Relational model for a realistic application. Although real-world applications, in most cases, can be adequately modeled by the Entity-Relationship (ER) model, the transformation to the popular Relational model alters the representation of structures common in reality, like multi-valued and composite fields. Alternative database models have been developed to overcome these shortcomings.

Based on the ER model of a medical application, this paper compares the information representation, manipulation and enforcement of integrity constraints through PostgreSQL and Oracle, against the use of a post-Relational model composed of the Conceptual Universal Database Language (CUDL) and the Conceptual Universal Database Language Abstraction Level (CAL).

The CAL/CUDL pair, although more periphrastic for data definition, is simpler for data insertions, does not require the use of procedural code for data updates, produces clearer output for retrieval of attributes, can accomplish retrieval of rows based on conditions that address composite data with declarative statements and supports data validation for relationships between composite data without the need for procedural code.

To verify, in practice, the conclusions of the paper, complete implementation of a CAL/CUDL system is needed.

The use of the CAL/CUDL pair would advance the productivity of database application development.

This paper highlights the properties of realistic database-applications modelling and management that are desirable by developers and shows that these properties are better satisfied by the CAL/CUDL pair.