‘Neptune’ between ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Vulcan’: On descriptive names and non-existence

[EN]This work will focus on some aspects of descriptive names. The New Theory of Reference, in line with Kripke, takes descriptive names to be proper names. I will argue in this paper that descriptive names and certain theory in reference to them, even when it disagrees with the New Theory of Reference, can shed light on our understanding of (some) non-existence statements. I define the concept of descriptive name for hypothesised object (DNHO). My thesis being that DNHOs are, as I will specify, descriptions: a proposition expressed by the utterance ‘n is F’, where ‘n’ is a DNHO, is not singular at all; it is a descriptive proposition. To sum up, concerning proper names, the truth lies closer to the New Theory of Reference, but descriptivism is not altogether false. As for DNHOs descriptivism is, in some cases, the right fit.

Open Personalization: Involving Third Parties in Improving the User Experience of Websites

Traditional software development captures the user needs during the requirement analysis. The Web makes this endeavour even harder due to the difficulty to determine who these users are. In an attempt to tackle the heterogeneity of the user base, Web Personalization techniques are proposed to guide the users’ experience. In addition, Open Innovation allows organisations to look beyond their internal resources to develop new products or improve existing processes. This thesis sits in between by introducing Open Personalization as a means to incorporate actors other than webmasters in the personalization of web applications. The aim is to provide the technological basis that builds up a trusty environment for webmasters and companion actors to collaborate, i.e. "an architecture of participation". Such architecture very much depends on these actors’ profile. This work tackles three profiles (i.e. software partners, hobby programmers and end users), and proposes three "architectures of participation" tuned for each profile. Each architecture rests on different technologies: a .NET annotation library based on Inversion of Control for software partners, a Modding Interface in JavaScript for hobby programmers, and finally, a domain specific language for end-users. Proof-of-concept implementations are available for the three cases while a quantitative evaluation is conducted for the domain specific language.