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The purpose of this paper is to present descriptive characteristics of the historical development of concept networks. The linguistic principles, mechanisms and motivations behind the evolution of concept networks are discussed. Implications emanating from the idea of the historical development of concept networks are discussed in relation to knowledge representation and organization schemes.

Natural language data including both speech and text are analyzed by examining discourse contexts in which a linguistic element such as a polysemy or homonym occurs. Linguistic literature on the historical development of concept networks is reviewed and analyzed.

Semantic sense relations in concept networks can be captured in a systematic and regular manner. The mechanism and impetus behind the process of concept network development suggest that semantic senses in concept networks are closely intertwined with pragmatic contexts and discourse structure. The interrelation and permeability of the semantic senses of concept networks are captured on a continuum scale based on three linguistic parameters: concrete shared semantic sense; discourse and text structure; and contextualized pragmatic information.

Research findings signify the critical need for linking discourse structure and contextualized pragmatic information to knowledge representation and organization schemes.

The idea of linguistic characteristics, principles, motivation and mechanisms underlying the evolution of concept networks provides theoretical ground for developing a model for integrating knowledge representation and organization schemes with discourse structure and contextualized pragmatic information.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate indexers’ evaluation on the usability of ontology vs thesaurus in representation of concepts and semantic relations. To do so, “searching” category of ASIS&T thesaurus was selected and ASIS&TOnto was built based on it.

The usability examination method is used in order to compare the two semantic tools. Nine indexers were recruited as participants, who were proficient in English language, had experience in using the thesaurus and all had successfully passed the course of “information representation.” They were asked to think aloud while working with the tools and to answer a semi-structured interview. The data gathering was continued until it reached its saturation point.

The results of this study revealed that the definitions and scope notes represented in indexing tools such as thesauri and ontologies have an important role in improvement of indexers’ understanding. On comparing the hierarchical relations, results show that converting the structure of hierarchical relationships of ASIS&T thesaurus can enhance the indexers understanding of them, and also enriching the associative relations of ASIS&T thesaurus can cause indexers to have a better understanding and evaluation of the presented concepts and relations.

This study shares our findings on the usability of ASIS&T thesaurus as a core set of vocabulary for building a “searching” domain as a prototype ontology in the area of library and information science and provides the indexers viewpoints of the two semantic tools in this area.

The Subject‐Object Relationship Interface model (SORI) described in this paper is a novel approach that displays many of the structures necessary to map between the conceptual level and the external level in a database management system, which is an information‐oriented view of data. The model embodies a semantic synthesiser, which is based on an algorithm that maps the syntactic representation of a tuple or a record onto a semantic representation. This is based on table‐driven semantics which are embedded in the database model. The paper introduces a technique for translating tuples into natural language sentences, and discusses a system that has been fully implemented in PROLOG.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an expressive query language, called relational XML query language (RXQL), capable of dealing with heterogeneous Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents in data‐centric applications. In RXQL, data harmonization (i.e. the removal of heterogeneous factors from XML data) is integrated with typical data‐centric features (e.g. grouping, ordering, and aggregation).

RXQL is based on the XML relation representation, developed in the authors' previous work. This is a novel approach to unambiguously represent semistructured data relationally, which makes it possible in RXQL to manipulate XML data in a tuple‐oriented way, while XML data are typically manipulated in a path‐oriented way.

The user is able to describe the result of an RXQL query straightforwardly based on non‐XML syntax. The analysis of this description, through the mechanism developed in this paper, affords the automatic construction of the query result. This feature increases significantly the declarativeness of RXQL compared to the path‐oriented XML languages where the user needs to control the construction of the result extensively.

The authors' formal specification of the construction of the query result can be considered as an abstract implementation of RXQL.

RXQL is a declarative query language capable of integrating data harmonization seamlessly with other data‐centric features in the manipulation of heterogeneous XML data. So far, these kinds of XML query languages have been missing. Obviously, the expressive power of RXQL can be achieved by computationally complete XML languages, such as XQuery. However, these are not actual query languages, and the query formulation in them usually presupposes programming skills that are beyond the ordinary end‐user.

Improving healthcare services by developing assistive technologies includes both the health aid devices and the analysis of the data collected by them. The acquired data modeled as a knowledge base give more insight into each patient’s health status and needs. Therefore, the ultimate goal of a health-care system is obtaining recommendations provided by an assistive decision support system using such knowledge base, benefiting the patients, the physicians and the healthcare industry. This paper aims to define the knowledge flow for a medical assistive decision support system by structuring raw medical data and leveraging the knowledge contained in the data proposing solutions for efficient data search, medical investigation or diagnosis and medication prediction and relationship identification.

The solution this paper proposes for implementing a medical assistive decision support system can analyze any type of unstructured medical documents which are processed by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks followed by semantic analysis, leading to the medical concept identification, thus imposing a structure on the input documents. The structured information is filtered and classified such that custom decisions regarding patients’ health status can be made. The current research focuses on identifying the relationships between medical concepts as defined by the REMed (Relation Extraction from Medical documents) solution that aims at finding the patterns that lead to the classification of concept pairs into concept-to-concept relations.

This paper proposed the REMed solution expressed as a multi-class classification problem tackled using the support vector machine classifier. Experimentally, this paper determined the most appropriate setup for the multi-class classification problem which is a combination of lexical, context, syntactic and grammatical features, as each feature category is good at representing particular relations, but not all. The best results we obtained are expressed as F1-measure of 74.9 per cent which is 1.4 per cent better than the results reported by similar systems.

The difficulty to discriminate between TrIP and TrAP relations revolves around the hierarchical relationship between the two classes as TrIP is a particular type (an instance) of TrAP. The intuition behind this behavior was that the classifier cannot discern the correct relations because of the bias toward the majority classes. The analysis was conducted by using only sentences from electronic health record that contain at least two medical concepts. This limitation was introduced by the availability of the annotated data with reported results, as relations were defined at sentence level.

The originality of the proposed solution lies in the methodology to extract valuable information from the medical records via semantic searches; concept-to-concept relation identification; and recommendations for diagnosis, treatment and further investigations. The REMed solution introduces a learning-based approach for the automatic discovery of relations between medical concepts. We propose an original list of features: lexical – 3, context – 6, grammatical – 4 and syntactic – 4. The similarity feature introduced in this paper has a significant influence on the classification, and, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it has not been used as feature in similar solutions.

The literature on managing inter‐organisational relationships typically suggests managing these relationships based on the formalised exchange of information across the organisational boundary with due respect to trust build‐up through successive interactions. The purpose of this paper is to argue that a focus on trust reduces the flexibility and accessibility of resources and hence ruins the advantages of inter‐organisational relationships. The paper focuses on power as a means for absorbing uncertainty when managing inter‐organisational relationships.

The paper is based on findings from a case study of inter‐organisational relationships. Governmentality is used as a framework for analysing the practise of managing inter‐organisational relationships.

A number of representations are employed along the boundary between the case study parties and thereby the boundary is emphasised. These representations are used to set the discourse for negotiating the terms of the cooperation. During negotiations a common understanding of cooperation is constructed and thereby fine‐grained information is assembled. In this specific case, the contract plays a central role as a representation of the project in focus. In the construction of the price for the product, open book and benchmark data are used. Information does not cross‐organisational boundaries at face value. Information is applied to the representations and brought into play during negotiations. Thereby managing and management accounting become significant components of the boundary between the parties.

The paper shows that power, as a means for absorbing uncertainty in inter‐organisational relationships, can solve the dilemmas regarding flexibility and access to resources that trust can cause.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the developments which have characterized Italy’s industrial relations from post-war Fordism to neo-liberal hegemony and recent crisis, with a particular focus on the major changes occurred in the twenty-first century, especially those concerning concertative (tripartite) policy making between the government, the employers’ organizations and the trade unions.

This study is a conceptual paper which analysis of main development trends.

Italy’s industrial relations in the twenty-first century are characterized by ambivalent features which are the heritage of the past. These are summarized as follows: “collective autonomy” as a classical source of strength for trade unions and employers’ organization, on the one hand. On the other hand, a low level of legislative regulation and weak institutionalization, accompanied by little engagement in a generalized “participative-collaborative” model. Due to the instability in the socio-political setting in the twenty-first century, unions and employers encounter growing difficulties to affirm their common points of view and to build up stable institutions that could support cooperation between them. The result is a clear reversal of the assumptions that had formed the classical backdrop of the paradigm of Italy’s “political exchange.” This paradigm has long influenced the way in which the relationships between employers, trade unions and the state were conceived, especially during 1990s and, to some extent, during 2000s, that is the development of concertative (tripartite) policy making. However, since the end of 2000s, and particularly from 2010s onwards national governments have stated their intention to act independently of the choices made by the unions (and partially the employers). The outcome is the eclipse of concertation. The paper explores how the relationships among the main institutional actors such as the trade unions (and among the unions themselves), the employers, and the state and how politics have evolved, within a dynamic socio-political and economic context. These are the essential factors needed to understand Italy’s industrial relations in the twenty-first century.

It shows that understanding the relationship among the main institutional actors such as the trade unions (and among the unions themselves), the employers and the state and their politics is essential to understand the change occurred in contemporary Italy’s industrial relations.

The common understanding of generalization/specialization relations assumes the relation to be equally strong between a classifier and any of its related classifiers and also at every level of the hierarchy. Assigning a grade of relative distance to represent the level of similarity between the related pairs of classifiers could correct this situation, which has been considered as an oversimplification of the psychological account of the real-world relations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The evaluation followed an end-user perspective. In order to obtain a consistent data set of specialization distances, a group of 21 persons was asked to assign values to a set of relations from a selection of terms from the AGROVOC thesaurus. Then two sets of representations of the relations between the terms were built, one according to the calculated concept of specialization weights and the other one following the original order of the thesaurus. In total, 40 persons were asked to choose between the two sets following an A/B test-like experiment. Finally, short interviews were carried out after the test to inquiry about their decisions.

The results show that the use of this information could be a valuable tool for search and information retrieval purposes and for the visual representation of knowledge organization systems (KOS). Furthermore, the methodology followed in the study turned out to be useful for detecting inconsistencies in the thesaurus and could thus be used for quality control and optimization of the hierarchical relations.

The use of this relative distance information, namely, “concept specialization distance,” has been proposed mainly at a theoretical level. In the current experiment, the authors evaluate the potential use of this information from an end-user perspective, not only for text-based interfaces but also its application for the visual representation of KOS. Finally, the methodology followed for the elaboration of the concept specialization distance data set showed potential for detecting possible inconsistencies in KOS.

Companies inevitably interact and entrench in complex organic systems of business relationships with other. These business networks are not objectively defined, instead they are shaped by the subjective perception of actors. This inherent subjectivity is associated with the notion of network pictures, that is, a research tool that researchers or managers can use to grasp practitioner theories. In this chapter, we discuss how the importance of identifying these theories results mainly from underlying principles of sense-making theory, as well as from the idea around performativity. Drawing on these theoretical groundings, this chapter has two objectives: to explore how practitioners actually perceive their business surroundings and to assess the extent of overlapping between (IMP Group) academic theories and practitioner theories. To achieve these objectives, the researchers use a dimensional network pictures model previously developed in the literature to analyze the network pictures of 49 top-level managers across 17 companies from two very distinct contexts or networks: a product-based network and a project-based network. Among other practices, findings illustrate how practitioners tend to simplify what is going on in their complex surroundings, to personalize their relationships with those surroundings, and to think in a stereotyped way. Moreover, the juxtaposition between the captured practitioner theories and academic (IMP Group) theories show that these are not always overlapping, and are in some cases quite the opposite. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the importance of grasping actors’ views of the world, arguing that sense-making theory and the notion of performativity are the two main conceptual drivers justifying the urgency in making those views more visible. This research also adds to the research on the impact and suitability of IMP Group theories on managerial thinking and practice. Finally, this research reinforces the current call for further practice-based research in business network contexts.

To date, the cultural and societal effects of controversial advertising have been insufficiently considered. This study aims to investigate how advertising that uses violent representations of women transgresses the taboo of gender-based violence.

This study encompasses a visual analysis of the subject positions of women in five violent advertising representations and a critical discourse analysis of the defensive statements provided by the client organisations subsequent to the public outrage generated by the campaigns.

The authors identify taboo transgression in the Tease, Piece of Meat and Conquered subject positions, wherein women are represented as suggestive, dehumanised and submissive. Client organisations seek to defend these taboo transgressions through the use of three discursive strategies – subverting interpretations, making authority claims and denying responsibility – which legitimise the control of the organisations but simultaneously work to obscure the power relations at play.

The representational authority that advertisers hold as cultural intermediaries in society highlights the need for greater consideration of the ethical responsibilities in producing controversial advertisements, especially those which undermine the status of women.

Controversial advertising that transgresses the taboo of violence against women reinforces gender norms and promotes ambiguous and adverse understandings of women’s subjectivities by introducing pollution and disorder to gender politics.

This paper critically assesses the societal implications of controversial advertising practices, thus moving away from the extant focus on managerial implications. Through a conceptualisation of controversial advertising as transgressing taboo boundaries, the authors highlight how advertising plays an important role in shifting these boundaries whereby taboos come to be understood as generative and evolving. However, this carries moral implications which may have damaging societal effects.