Interpreting Judgements using Knowledge Representation Methods and Computational Models of Argument

The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, by using knowledge extracted from text, metadata, and rules, while maintaining a strong text-to-knowledge morphism between legal text and legal concepts, in order to fill the gap between legal document and its semantics. The framework is composed of four different models that make use of standard languages from the Semantic Web stack of technologies: a document metadata structure, modelling the main parts of a judgement, and creating a bridge between a text and its semantic annotations of legal concepts; a legal core ontology, modelling abstract legal concepts and institutions contained in a rule of law; a legal domain ontology, modelling the main legal concepts in a specific domain concerned by case-law; an argumentation system, modelling the structure of argumentation. The input to the framework includes metadata associated with judicial concepts, and an ontology library representing the structure of case-law. The research relies on the previous efforts of the community in the field of legal knowledge representation and rule interchange for applications in the legal domain, in order to apply the theory to a set of real legal documents, stressing the OWL axioms definitions as much as possible in order to enable them to provide a semantically powerful representation of the legal document and a solid ground for an argumentation system using a defeasible subset of predicate logics. It appears that some new features of OWL2 unlock useful reasoning features for legal knowledge, especially if combined with defeasible rules and argumentation schemes. The main task is thus to formalize legal concepts and argumentation patterns contained in a judgement, with the following requirement: to check, validate and reuse the discourse of a judge - and the argumentation he produces - as expressed by the judicial text.

La migrazione del chagas: Costruzione bio-medica e socio-politica delle malattie tropicali dimenticate

Questo studio propone un'esplorazione dei nessi tra processi migratori ed esperienze di salute e malattia a partire da un'indagine sulle migrazioni provenienti dall'America latina in Emilia-Romagna. Contemporaneamente indaga i termini del dibattito sulla diffusione della Malattia di Chagas, “infezione tropicale dimenticata” endemica in America centro-meridionale che, grazie all'incremento dei flussi migratori transnazionali, viene oggi riconfigurata come 'emergente' in alcuni contesti di immigrazione. Attraverso i paradigmi teorico-metodologici disciplinari dell'antropologia medica, della salute globale e degli studi sulle migrazioni, si è inteso indagare la natura della relazione tra “dimenticanza” ed “emergenza” nelle politiche che caratterizzano il contesto migratorio europeo e italiano nello specifico. Si sono analizzate questioni vincolate alla legittimità degli attori coinvolti nella ridefinizione del fenomeno in ambito pubblico; alle visioni che informano le strategie sanitarie di presa in carico dell'infezione; alle possibili ricadute di tali visioni nelle pratiche di cura. Parte della ricerca si è realizzata all'interno del reparto ospedaliero ove è stato implementato il primo servizio di diagnosi e trattamento per l'infezione in Emilia-Romagna. È stata pertanto realizzata una etnografia fuori/dentro al servizio, coinvolgendo i principali soggetti del campo di indagine -immigrati latinoamericani e operatori sanitari-, con lo scopo di cogliere visioni, logiche e pratiche a partire da un'analisi della legislazione che regola l'accesso al servizio sanitario pubblico in Italia. Attraverso la raccolta di narrazioni biografiche, lo studio ha contribuito a far luce su peculiari percorsi migratori e di vita nel contesto locale; ha permesso di riflettere sulla validità di categorie come quella di “latinoamericano” utilizzata dalla comunità scientifica in stretta correlazione con il Chagas; ha riconfigurato il senso di un approccio attento alle connotazioni culturali all'interno di un più ampio ripensamento delle forme di inclusione e di partecipazione finalizzate a dare asilo ai bisogni sanitari maggiormente percepiti e alle esperienze soggettive di malattia.

Negoziazioni intergenerazionali dell'autonomia abitativa in contesti di working class

Nell’ambito della riflessione sui processi di riproduzione e trasmissione intergenerazionale delle disuguaglianze sociali, la presente tesi dottorale propone un’analisi in prospettiva intersezionale dei percorsi verso l’indipendenza abitativa dei giovani bolognesi di origine popolare, e il ruolo svolto dalle loro famiglie in questi percorsi. Nell’approfondimento teorico si offre una ricostruzione del dibattito sociologico nazionale e internazionale sul tema delle disuguaglianze sociali e abitative delle giovani generazioni, nonché dello studio della classe sociale e i principali approcci presenti in letteratura. La ricerca sul campo si concentra, in particolare, sui modi in cui le famiglie appartenenti ad una determinata classe sociale, intesa nel senso conferito al termine da Bourdieu, negoziano e sostengono la transizione all’indipendenza abitativa dei loro figli. L’approfondimento empirico consiste in una ricerca qualitativa longitudinale retrospettiva, condotta nel bolognese nel 2013-2014 su un campione di famiglie working class. Ai giovani-adulti coinvolti e ai loro genitori è stato chiesto di ricostruire le loro biografie attraverso lo strumento delle life histories. La ricerca evidenzia il delinearsi di “micro sistemi economici” familiari specifici e creativi. Le molteplici forme di sostegno genitoriale nei percorsi di autonomizzazione dei figli, individuate nel corso dell’analisi del materiale raccolto, si innestano quindi all’interno di un più ampio sistema di supporto intergenerazionale, che continua anche dopo l’uscita dalla famiglia di origine, a conferma dello stretto legame che caratterizza le famiglie italiane. Nello studio una particolare attenzione viene rivolta alle logiche di legittimazione del sostegno genitoriale, adottate dalle famiglie per orientare i propri interventi di aiuto. Infine, mettendo a confronto la concezione di indipendenza dei giovani adulti con quella dei loro genitori, l’indagine rileva l’esistenza di una apparente contraddizione tra le rappresentazioni dell’indipendenza e dell’autonomia abitativa e i comportamenti attuati nella vita quotidiana, contraddizione che trova una risoluzione nella negoziazione, tra le due diverse generazioni, del concetto stesso di indipendenza.

Privatization in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Insights from and into the craft of interorganizational process analysis.

International efforts to help Bosnia and Herzegovina privatize its state-owned enterprises proved dif.cult, but the complex web of interorganizational relationships (IORs) among international donors, implementers, contractors, and local players, at times, seemed even more daunting to effective implementation of reforms than the technical dif.culties of the task itself. By employing a theoretical framework of IOR development over time, important stages in the evolution of the International Advisory Group on Privatization were identi.ed, and variables within each discussed. Analysis employed linear and nonlinear process logics to help explain what linked some variables withinand betweenthese various phases. Insights seemed valuable for practitioners seeking to implement interdependent tasks, organizational representatives trying to form relationships with others, and scholars trying to understand process theories of IOR formation. In addition, this research provides an introduction to the complexities of international development assistance — a crucially important and under-researched arena.

Social Work in an Ethnically Diverse Europe: The Shifting Challenges of Difference

This article addresses the inherently politicised context of social work practice located within the contested logics and values of national social policy and professional values and identities. Noting the key role of social work in delivering the state’s promise of social citizenship, it is argued that the increasing neo-nationalist sentiments and politics in European states generate significant pressures upon the universalist, inclusive, values of social work in a multiethnic Europe. The academic and policy debate around social cohesion is explored to illustrate how an assimilationist drift in multicultural state policies undermines the capacity of social work services to deliver appropriate, ethnically sensitive, services. It is further argued that the pervasive spread of populist counter-narratives to multiculturalism erode support for anti-racist and transcultural social work practice. In this context it is argued that social work must acknowledge its compromised situation and explicitly develop a political agenda committed to guaranteeing substantive equality in service delivery.

Semantic Methods for Intelligent Distributed Design Environments

Continuous advancements in technology have led to increasingly comprehensive and distributed product development processes while in pursuit of improved products at reduced costs. Information associated with these products is ever changing, and structured frameworks have become integral to managing such fluid information. Ontologies and the Semantic Web have emerged as key alternatives for capturing product knowledge in both a human-readable and computable manner. The primary and conclusive focus of this research is to characterize relationships formed within methodically developed distributed design knowledge frameworks to ultimately provide a pervasive real-time awareness in distributed design processes. Utilizing formal logics in the form of the Semantic Web’s OWL and SWRL, causal relationships are expressed to guide and facilitate knowledge acquisition as well as identify contradictions between knowledge in a knowledge base. To improve the efficiency during both the development and operational phases of these “intelligent” frameworks, a semantic relatedness algorithm is designed specifically to identify and rank underlying relationships within product development processes. After reviewing several semantic relatedness measures, three techniques, including a novel meronomic technique, are combined to create AIERO, the Algorithm for Identifying Engineering Relationships in Ontologies. In determining its applicability and accuracy, AIERO was applied to three separate, independently developed ontologies. The results indicate AIERO is capable of consistently returning relatedness values one would intuitively expect. To assess the effectiveness of AIERO in exposing underlying causal relationships across product development platforms, a case study involving the development of an industry-inspired printed circuit board (PCB) is presented. After instantiating the PCB knowledge base and developing an initial set of rules, FIDOE, the Framework for Intelligent Distributed Ontologies in Engineering, was employed to identify additional causal relationships through extensional relatedness measurements. In a conclusive PCB redesign, the resulting “intelligent” framework demonstrates its ability to pass values between instances, identify inconsistencies amongst instantiated knowledge, and identify conflicting values within product development frameworks. The results highlight how the introduced semantic methods can enhance the current knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, and knowledge validation capabilities of traditional knowledge bases.

Admissibility in Finitely Generated Quasivarieties

Checking the admissibility of quasiequations in a finitely generated (i.e., generated by a finite set of finite algebras) quasivariety Q amounts to checking validity in a suitable finite free algebra of the quasivariety, and is therefore decidable. However, since free algebras may be large even for small sets of small algebras and very few generators, this naive method for checking admissibility in Q is not computationally feasible. In this paper, algorithms are introduced that generate a minimal (with respect to a multiset well-ordering on their cardinalities) finite set of algebras such that the validity of a quasiequation in this set corresponds to admissibility of the quasiequation in Q. In particular, structural completeness (validity and admissibility coincide) and almost structural completeness (validity and admissibility coincide for quasiequations with unifiable premises) can be checked. The algorithms are illustrated with a selection of well-known finitely generated quasivarieties, and adapted to handle also admissibility of rules in finite-valued logics.

Transition and Justice: An Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War, political new beginnings have increasingly been linked to questions of transitional justice. The contributions to this collection examine a series of cases from across the African continent where peaceful ‘new beginnings’ have been declared after periods of violence and where transitional justice institutions played a role in defining justice and the new socio-political order. Three issues seem to be crucial to the understanding of transitional justice in the context of wider social debates on justice and political change: the problem of ‘new beginnings’, of finding a foundation for that which explicitly breaks with the past; the discrepancies between lofty promises and the messy realities of transitional justice in action; and the dialectic between logics of the exception and the ordinary, employed to legitimize or resist transitional justice mechanisms. These are the particular focus of this Introduction.

Censors for Boolean Description Logic

Protecting different kinds of information has become an important area of research. One aspect is to provide effective means to avoid that secrets can be deduced from the answers of legitimate queries. In the context of atomic propositional databases several methods have been developed to achieve this goal. However, in those databases it is not possible to formalize structural information. Also they are quite restrictive with respect to the specification of secrets. In this paper we extend those methods to match the much greater expressive power of Boolean description logics. In addition to the formal framework, we provide a discussion of various kinds of censors and establish different levels of security they can provide.

Exact Unification and Admissibility

A new hierarchy of "exact" unification types is introduced, motivated by the study of admissible rules for equational classes and non-classical logics. In this setting, unifiers of identities in an equational class are preordered, not by instantiation, but rather by inclusion over the corresponding sets of unified identities. Minimal complete sets of unifiers under this new preordering always have a smaller or equal cardinality than those provided by the standard instantiation preordering, and in significant cases a dramatic reduction may be observed. In particular, the classes of distributive lattices, idempotent semigroups, and MV-algebras, which all have nullary unification type, have unitary or finitary exact type. These results are obtained via an algebraic interpretation of exact unification, inspired by Ghilardi's algebraic approach to equational unification.

Y... ¿ qué queda de la industria conservera?

La apertura económica y la integración regional de mercados implicaron para la agroindustria mendocina una serie de reestructuraciones. El objetivo de este trabajo es conocer las diversas estrategias que los empresarios implementan para adaptarse a las nuevas reglas de juego. Se busca comprender la situación de la industria conservera desde la perspectiva de los actores. Para lo cual, en primer lugar, se realiza una breve reseña de las etapas que atravesó esta industria y se describe el contexto mediante de datos secundarios. La caracterización del escenario permite reconstruir las lógicas empresariales relevadas mediante entrevistas de profundidad.

Capricultura y desarrollo local : análisis y evaluación de dos experiencias en Argentina central

Enfocado como un estudio de caso, el artículo analiza dos iniciativas agroindustriales que se proponen brindar una solución «local» a la crisis que enfrenta la producción caprina en Argentina central: i) el «Proyecto de Leche Caprina» encabezado por la Cooperativa de Productores Capricultores del Valle de Punilla que planea desarrollar una cuenca láctea; y ii) el «Proyecto del Ente Caprino» liderado por la Municipalidad de Quilino que propone instalar un frigorífico para el faenamiento de ganado caprino. Si bien ambos proyectos comparten la idea de promover el desarrollo regional a través del fomento de la capricultura, poseen características muy diferentes en cuanto al sistema de actores presentes y la estrategia que implementan para alcanzar los objetivos propuestos. Ambas experiencias fueron estudiadas considerando las mismas dimensiones: origen de la iniciativa, trayectoria del proyecto y del sistema de actores presentes, y evaluación de la experiencia en relación con los objetivos propuestos. El acompañamiento sistemático de cada uno de los proyectos permitió comprender la lógica subyacente en cada uno de ellos y las principales fortalezas y debilidades que los caracterizan. Finalmente, se analizaron las causas que explican la escasa relación que existe entre proyectos que en teoría deberían estar estrechamente vinculados y se formularon algunas reflexiones que permiten adelantar la posible trayectoria de cada uno de ellos.