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This chapter explores clean language interviewing for qualitative market research. It focuses primarily on how clean language interviewing was used within a process devised by the authors called ‘value-strings’. The chapter describes this process and how it was used in a client project for a food company that wanted to understand their customers' motivations and decision-making in relation to buying and using tinned sweetcorn.

Value-strings provided insights that went beyond the practical, functional attributes of the product to those that related to the benefits to the respondents of consuming sweetcorn and through to more tacit, often difficult-to-reach information about their values and beliefs. The client used the outcomes to develop a new TV advertising campaign.

The steps of the value-strings process, along with the optional metaphor elicitation steps, are described and illustrated using examples from the project. We show how we integrated opportunities for metaphor elicitation into value-strings, adding to the flexibility of the process and accommodating the client's requirement for the project to provide visual metaphors as well as verbal information.

Time being always in short supply in market research projects, we also describe the quick approach we used to enable respondents to access and generate metaphors. Some findings from the project, along with challenges and learnings are offered.

This paper aims to analyze and provide insight on the algorithms for the optimization of construction site layout planning (CSLP). It resolves problems, such as the selection of suitable algorithms, considering the optimality, optimization objectives and representation of layout solutions. The approaches for the better utilization of optimization algorithms are also presented.

To achieve the above, existing records (results = 200) were selected from three databases: Web of Science, ScienceDirect and Scopus. By implementing a systematic protocol, the articles related to the optimization algorithms for the CLSP (results = 75) were identified. Moreover, various related themes were collated and analyzed according to a coding structure.

The results indicate the consistent and increasing interest on the optimization algorithms for the CLSP, revealing that the trend in shifting to smart approaches in the construction industry is significant. Moreover, the interest in metaheuristic algorithms is dominant because 65.3% of the selected articles focus on these algorithms. The optimality, optimization objectives and solution representations are also important in algorithm selection. With the employment of other algorithms, self-developed applications and commercial software, optimization algorithms can be better utilized for solving CSLP problems. The findings also identify the gaps and directions for future research.

The selection of articles in this review does not consider the industrial perspective and practical applications of commercial software. Further comparative analyses of major algorithms are necessary because this review only focuses on algorithm types.

This paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of articles published in the recent decade. It significantly contributes to the demonstration of the status and selection of CLSP algorithms and the benefit of using these algorithms. It also identifies the research gaps in knowledge and reveals potential improvements for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a modification of the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) model to accommodate names in non-Roman languages with diverse writing systems.

The model modifies and clarifies the attributes and relationships regarding non-Roman languages of the current FRAD model, based on the definitions of transliteration, transcription, and Romanization in ISO 5127:2001. The modified model overcomes the problems inherent in the current FRAD model when handling writing systems in non-Roman languages.

The proposed model clearly shows the hierarchy of Controlled Access Points (CAPs). CAPs are either based directly on names or derived from other CAPs. For name or person identification, a CAP and its derivations should be treated as a set. The proposed model also resolves ambiguity in the definition of the word transliteration in the current FRAD model.

By establishing new relationships and amending the attributes of the FRAD model, the proposed model better expresses personal names in non-Roman languages as well as names in western languages. It also organizes complex writing systems of non-Roman languages. The proposed model could lead to an improved format for authority data and will facilitate international sharing of data.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the metadata standards available worldwide and to study those in detail. The paper presents the detailed analysis of these standards.

The methodology adopted was investigative. Data were collected through e‐mails and visiting the relevant web sites.

No one existing metadata standard covers all the required facets. In such cases, an implementer is require to create a new scheme with the desired metadata elements but such schemes create a number of issues in interoperating. Another solution to this problem is to create extra elements to fill gaps in the coverage. Interoperability problems can be overcome by publications of new elements declaring their definitions, formats and so on.

Few studies have compared some of the well‐known standards. This study gives a detailed analysis of the metadata standards available worldwide and it will help in comparing and adopting the required standard for the repositories.

In this book the terms ‘clean language’ and ‘clean language interviewing’ are written using lower case, according to the convention of the American Psychological Association (sixth edition). ‘Clean language interviewing’ is sometimes abbreviated to CLI.

This chapter outlines how the comprehensive North American and European datasets were collected and explains the ensuing data cleaning process outlining three alternative methods applied to deal with missing values, the complete case, the multiple imputation (MI), and the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) methods. The complete case method is the conventional approach adopted in many mainstream management studies. We further discuss the implied assumption underlying use of this technique, which is rarely assessed, or tested in practice and explain the alternative imputation approaches in detail. Use of North American data is the norm but we also collected a European dataset, which is rarely done to enable subsequent comparative analysis between these geographical regions. We introduce the structure of firms organized within different industry classification schemes for use in the ensuing comparative analyses and provide base information on missing values in the original and cleaned datasets. The calculated performance indicators derived from the sampled data are defined and presented. We show how the three alternative approaches considered to deal with missing values have significantly different effects on the calculated performance measures in terms of extreme estimate ranges and mean performance values.

Information storage and retrieval (IS&R) programming is often hindered by the lack of specialized facilities in traditional computer languages. This article describes a portable programming language, derived from the C and Mumps languages and designed to meet the needs of IS&R applications. The language allows the user to deal with an IS&R database at a level of abstraction consistent with many theoretical models commonly in use. Examples from a pilot implementation of a statistically‐based retrieval system are given which demonstrate that this approach results in substantial savings in disk storage and greater coding efficiency when compared with traditional implementation techniques.

A layout problem may deal with the assignment and arrangement of buildings in a green field, location and/or relocation of machines/departments in manufacturing facilities, and so on. If multi‐periods are considered, the problem is called a dynamic layout problem in manufacturing environments. Designing web pages, especially internet newspaper layouts, might also be considered dynamic layout problems. This study aims to introduce a layout procedure for the front page of internet newspapers.

The news contents are ranked and selected based on their characteristic attributes. Then they are assigned to locations on dynamic content area of the front page. Layout optimization is made by use of Clonal Selection Algorithm (CSA). Finally, an illustrative example is provided and concepts for real life applications are discussed. The proposed method is based on CSA, which is a nature‐inspired technique. The novel heuristic is applied to a simulated system to depict how the news content layouts can be optimized in dynamic environments.

The capacity for addition of new news contents and removal of the old turns the internet newspaper environment into a dynamic structure. A systematic layout method for internet newspapers is developed to fill the gap.

The results are encouraging for real life applications of internet newspapers. The study has also introduced a new site for the manufacturing area. In the classic dynamic layout model, the machine locations and the number of available machines are assumed to be fixed. But the concept of introducing/removing news contents can be adapted to the machines at the manufacturing facilities.

The paper's value lies in showing that the front page layout is not considered to optimize the locations of the articles. Also, the proposed algorithm is applied to solve these kinds of problems.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Records in Contexts proposal of a conceptual model (RiC-CM) from the International Council on Archives’ (ICA) archival description and to propose an OWL ontology for its implementation in the semantic web.

The various elements of the model are studied and are related to earlier norms in order to understand their structure and the modeling of the ontology.

The analysis reveals the integrating nature of RiC-CM and the possibilities it offers for greater interoperability of data from archival descriptions. Two versions of an OWL ontology were developed to represent the conceptual model. The first makes a direct transposition of the conceptual model; the second optimizes the properties and relations in order to simplify the use and maintenance of the ontology.

The proposed ontology will follow the considerations of the final version of the ICA’s RiC-CM.

The analysis affords an understanding of the role of RiC-CM in publishing online archival data sets, while the ontology is an initial approach to the semantic web technologies involved.

This paper offers an overview of Records in Contexts with respect to the advantages in the field of semantic interoperability, and supposes the first proposal of an ontology based on the conceptual model.