Domain-specific Approach Research Articles

IT Service Management for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: A Domain Specific Approach

Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) are socially and economically important, since they represent 99 % of all enterprises in the European Union (EU). They provide around 65 million jobs and contribute to entrepreneurship and innovation. Being an essential ingredient of presentday business, information technology (IT) on one hand works as an enabler for company’s success but on the other, it is a source of many threats. This implies the need for an effective and efficient management of IT function within the organization. Over the past years, big corporations together with academia have elaborated a set of good practices, known in the literature as ‘IT services methodology (ITSM) or ITSM frameworks. Due to their scope and complexity, these frameworks are not sufficiently tailored for SMEs needs. Effective and efficient management of IT function within SMEs requires the elaboration of more appropriate ITSM framework. The research project presented in this paper is aimed at closing this gap and fostering the utilization of IT Service Management in SMEs by means of a customized ITSM method. The research methodology is based on the three fundamental pillars: quantitative analysis, qualitative research and triangulation. Data gathered from160 surveys and 24 case studies conducted in SMEs across Central Europe have been analyzed in order to identify relevant barriers and requirements for ITSM application in the domain of SME. Based on these findings, a simplified ITSM method was developed and a BPM tool was also customized to support an effective and efficient use of the method.

Examining the Sources for our Understandings about Science: Enduring conflations and critical issues in research on nature of science in science education

This position paper addresses some enduring, as well as emerging issues, associated with the crucial question of benchmarking understandings about nature of science (NOS) for precollege science education. The question of benchmarking NOS understandings is revisited in light of the often cited, continuing debates among historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science, which are invoked to undermine the current widely accepted, domain-general, consensus-based, aspects approach to NOS. The paper explicates the underlying assumptions of, and argues for, this consensus approach. However, the paper calls for extending the current framework and advances a developmental perspective that allows for incorporating controversial NOS issues into this framework. The paper also examines recent calls to altogether abandon the domain-general approach to NOS research and development in science education in favor of a domain-specific approach. The paper argues that, contrary to what its advocates assume, a domain-specific approach is susceptible to the same criticisms often invoked against a domain-general approach. Instead, the paper argues for complementarity and reciprocity between the two approaches, and explicates how the latter can be achieved. Finally, the paper critiques current calls to privilege accounts of context-specific, day-to-day scientific practice and scientists' accounts of their enterprise as sources for deriving understandings about NOS in lieu of scholarship in history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS). The paper argues that, while important, these can only supplement rather than replace HPSS scholarship as a major source for deriving understandings about NOS.

Domain-Specific Trajectories of Involvement Among Fathers of Children Born to Young, Low-Income, African American Mothers

Although research on low-income, nonresidential fathers is expanding, fathers’ involvement with their children over time has mainly been studied using composite measures of involvement. This study examines 3 domains of father involvement (financial support, child care, decision making) with a sample of young, low-income African American mothers (N = 248). These domains are examined separately to assess the extent to which unique patterns and predictors of involvement emerge over time from 4 months to 2 years postpartum. Trajectory analyses provide a similar set of trajectories for child care and decision making, and suggest that stability in either high or low levels of involvement was more common than decline over time. We identify only 2 trajectories of financial support. Relationship features, both prenatal and at 4-months postpartum, significantly predicted high involvement versus sustained low involvement for all 3 domains; however, a unique set of predictors of trajectory membership was found for each domain. Domain-specific findings are compared with findings from a supplemental, composite involvement approach to evaluate the utility of a domain-specific approach.

Metaphors as a Tool for Diagnosing Beliefs about Teaching and Learning in Social Studies Teacher Education

Do domain specific teaching/learning beliefs and epistemological beliefs exist and do they explain a domain specific approach to teaching and learning the social sciences? This paper reports on the first stage of an exploratory qualitative study carried out at the University of Bielefeld in 2010/11 on pre-service social studies teachers (PSST, n=61). It has a threefold aim: First, providing a very short overview of relevant trends in recent research on epistemological beliefs and teaching/learning beliefs and presenting some plausible hypotheses on if and how these belief dimensions are related to each other in the field of social studies education; second, presenting and discussing metaphors as a suitable qualitative research method for diagnosing and analysing the teaching and learning beliefs in the field; third, presenting the general outline of the Bielefeld project and a comparison of two emblematic cases of the project to evaluate the potential advantages and shortcomings of the research design and methods, especially of metaphor analysis.

Optimism–pessimism and adjustment in college students: Is there support for the utility of a domain-specific approach to studying outcome expectancies?

Over the past 30 years, researchers have increasingly focused on the study of general optimism–pessimism. In this research, we examined the validity and usefulness of a domain-specific model of optimism–pessimism. We examined whether the addition of domain-specific measures of optimism–pessimism would add to the prediction of self-reported GPA, health status, family life satisfaction, financial satisfaction, and general life satisfaction. Results of regression analyses indicated that domain-specific optimism–pessimism added significantly, beyond general optimism–pessimism, in predicting each of these outcomes. Some implications for research and practice are discussed.

High-Level Synthesis for FPGAs: From Prototyping to Deployment

Escalating system-on-chip design complexity is pushing the design community to raise the level of abstraction beyond register transfer level. Despite the unsuccessful adoptions of early generations of commercial high-level synthesis (HLS) systems, we believe that the tipping point for transitioning to HLS msystem-on-chip design complexityethodology is happening now, especially for field-programmable gate array (FPGA) designs. The latest generation of HLS tools has made significant progress in providing wide language coverage and robust compilation technology, platform-based modeling, advancement in core HLS algorithms, and a domain-specific approach. In this paper, we use AutoESL's AutoPilot HLS tool coupled with domain-specific system-level implementation platforms developed by Xilinx as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of state-of-art C-to-FPGA synthesis solutions targeting multiple application domains. Complex industrial designs targeting Xilinx FPGAs are also presented as case studies, including comparison of HLS solutions versus optimized manual designs. In particular, the experiment on a sphere decoder shows that the HLS solution can achieve an 11-31% reduction in FPGA resource usage with improved design productivity compared to hand-coded design.

A domain-specific approach to heterogeneous parallelism

Exploiting heterogeneous parallel hardware currently requires mapping application code to multiple disparate programming models. Unfortunately, general-purpose programming models available today can yield high performance but are too low-level to be accessible to the average programmer. We propose leveraging domain-specific languages (DSLs) to map high-level application code to heterogeneous devices. To demonstrate the potential of this approach we present OptiML, a DSL for machine learning. OptiML programs are implicitly parallel and can achieve high performance on heterogeneous hardware with no modification required to the source code. For such a DSL-based approach to be tractable at large scales, better tools are required for DSL authors to simplify language creation and parallelization. To address this concern, we introduce Delite, a system designed specifically for DSLs that is both a framework for creating an implicitly parallel DSL as well as a dynamic runtime providing automated targeting to heterogeneous parallel hardware. We show that OptiML running on Delite achieves single-threaded, parallel, and GPU performance superior to explicitly parallelized MATLAB code in nearly all cases.

A domain-specific approach to architecturing error handling in pervasive computing

The challenging nature of error handling constantly escalates as a growing number of environments consists of networked devices and software components. In these environments, errors cover a uniquely large spectrum of situations related to each layer ranging from hardware to distributed platforms, to software components. Handling errors becomes a daunting task for programmers, whose outcome is unpredictable. Scaling up error handling requires to raise the level of abstraction beyond the code level and the try-catch construct, approaching error handling at the software architecture level. We propose a novel approach that relies on an Architecture Description Language (ADL), which is extended with error-handling declarations. To further raise the level of abstraction, our approach revolves around a domain-specific architectural pattern commonly used in pervasive computing. Error handling is decomposed into components dedicated to platform-wide, error-recovery strategies. At the application level, descriptions of functional components include declarations dedicated to error handling. We have implemented a compiler for an ADL extended with error-handling declarations. It produces customized programming frameworks that drive and support the programming of error handling. Our approach has been validated with a variety of applications for building automation.

Modules, Theories, or Islands of Expertise? Domain Specificity in Socialization

The domain-specific approach to socialization processes presented by J. E. Grusec and M. Davidov (this issue) provides a compelling framework for integrating and interpreting a large and disparate body of research findings, and it generates a wealth of testable new hypotheses. At the same time, it introduces core theoretical questions regarding the nature of social interactions, from the perspective of both children and their caregivers. This commentary draws on the literature regarding domain specificity in cognitive development, applauds what is innovative and exciting about applying a domain-specific approach to socialization processes, and points to questions for future research. Foremost among these is what is meant by "domain specificity."

Dealing with variability within a family of domain-specific languages: comparative analysis of different techniques

Almost a decade has passed since the OMG has issued the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative. It soon became obvious that raising the level of abstraction in development and reasoning at the model level would help in asking the right questions at the right time. Based on a concrete problem, we discuss four alternative solutions to a multi-language system design problem. These solutions use a traditional approach, a technique based on modeling, a domain-specific approach, and a mix of modeling and domain-specific techniques, respectively. The solutions depend on the problem, but they are representative for the situations we encounter in practice, therefore giving us a good basis for a larger discussion on the appropriateness of using modeling techniques and on the place of MDA in current software engineering practice and design.

Subword-based Semantic Retrieval of Clinical and Bibliographic Documents

The increasing amount of electronically available documents in bibliographic databases and the clinical documentation requires user-friendly techniques for content retrieval. A domain-specific approach on semantic text indexing for document retrieval is presented. It is based on a subword thesaurus and maps the content of texts in different European languages to a common interlingual representation, which supports the search across multilingual document collections. Three use cases are presented where the semantic retrieval method has been implemented: a bibliographic database, a department EHR system, and a consumer-oriented Web portal. It could be shown that a semantic indexing and retrieval approach, the performance of which had already been empirically assessed in prior studies, proved useful in different prototypical and routine scenarios and was well accepted by several user groups.

A domain-specific approach to adolescent reporting of parental control

This study evaluated the psychometric properties of a newly developed adolescent-reported domain-specific measure of parental behavioral control. In addition, this study examined the relationships between domains of perceived behavioral control and adolescent problem behaviors and tested whether psychological control played a mediating role in these associations. Participants were 267 students, ranging in age from 9 to 16 years. Both high maternal and paternal use of behavioral control in the friendship domain were positively associated with externalizing behaviors. Low paternal use of control in the prudential and multifaceted domains was also positively associated with externalizing behaviors. Psychological control mediated the association between behavioral control in the friendship domain and externalizing behaviors, suggesting a potential overlap between perceptions of parental behavioral and psychological control. These findings highlight the need to study adolescents' perceptions of parental control in specific domains to fully understand its relationship with adolescent outcomes.

Blowing in the (social) wind: Implications of extrinsic esteem contingencies for terror management and health.

In 4 studies, the role of extrinsic esteem contingencies in adjusting to shifting health-relevant standards when managing existential fears was examined. Study 1 demonstrated that after reminders of death, higher dispositional focus on extrinsic self-esteem contingencies predicted greater interest in tanning. Using a more domain-specific approach, Study 2 showed that, after being reminded of death, the more individuals smoke for social esteem reasons, the more compelling they find an antismoking commercial that exposes adverse social consequences of smoking. Study 3 explored how situational factors (i.e., priming a contingent relational schema) that implicate extrinsic contingencies facilitated the impact of shifting standard primes on tanning intentions after mortality salience. Finally, Study 4 found that mortality salience led to increased endorsement of exercise as a basis of self-worth when participants who derive self-esteem from extrinsic sources visualized someone who exercises. Together, these studies demonstrate that reminders of death interact with prevalent social standards to influence everyday health decisions.

Subword-based Semantic Retrieval of Clinical and Bibliographic Documents

Objectives The increasing amount of electronically available documents in bibliographic databases and the clinical documentation requires user-friendly techniques for content retrieval. Methods A domain-specific approach on semantic text indexing for document retrieval is presented. It is based on a subword thesaurus and maps the content of texts in different European languages to a common interlingual representation, which supports the search across multilingual document collections. Results Three use cases are presented where the semantic retrieval method has been implemented: a bibliographic database, a department EHR system, and a consumer-oriented Web portal. Conclusions It could be shown that a semantic indexing and retrieval approach, the performance of which had already been empirically assessed in prior studies, proved useful in different prototypical and routine scenarios and was well accepted by several user groups.

A domain-specific approach for software development on Manycore platforms

The programming complexity of increasingly parallel processors calls for new tools that assist programmers in utilising the parallel hardware resources. In this paper we present a set of models that we have developed as part of a tool for mapping dataflow graphs onto manycores. One of the models captures the essentials of manycores identified as suitable for signal processing, and which we use as target for our algorithms. As an intermediate representation we introduce timed configuration graphs, which describe the mapping of a model of an application onto a machine model. Moreover, we show how a timed configuration graph by very simple means can be evaluated using an abstract interpretation to obtain performance feedback. This information can be used by our tool and by the programmer in order to discover improved mappings.

Applying Psychological Theories to Educational Practice

Two approaches to the application of psychological theories to education might be referred to as domain-general and domain-specific. The domain-general approach seeks a general theory of cognitive and other skills that apply across subject-matter areas. The domain-specific approach seeks to apply specific theories within given domains, such as reading or mathematics. The latter approach is more widely used. But it fails to provide a unified model of learning and instruction. One of the greatest challenges facing modern research in learning and instruction is devising and then empirically testing domain-general theories. This article describes efforts to devise and test one such model, the theory of successful intelligence.

An Automated Approach for the Interpretation of Counter-Examples

Model checking is an automatic technique used for the verification of finite systems. A model checker explores the full state space of a given model and checks it against a set of requirements. If a state exists in which a requirement is not satisfied most tools will generate a counter-example. Counter-examples are useful for debugging a model and determining if an error exists in the modelled system. However, they can be difficult for end users to understand and this may limit the take-up of model checking in industry.This paper describes a domain-specific approach to automatically interpreting counter-examples and presenting the results in an intuitive form to the end user. Our research extends previous work on model checking railway signalling control tables with signalling engineers from Queensland Rail.

How theologizing with children can work

‘Theologizing with children’ has arisen from influences of philosophizing with children, from research in the Piagetian tradition and also from the interest of the Evangelical Church in Germany to ‘change to the child’s perspective’. It searches for the theological quality of children’s remarks which are considered to be a precious contribution next to university theology. In this article the author, as a supporter of this approach, aims to raise a sensitivity for the children’s starting points in theological considerations and for the concrete and imaginatively rich character of their oral language. Concerning the content of theological communication, the author refers to Wittgenstein’s concept of a ‘language game’. In terms of theology’s ‘grammar’, which assigns a place to a topic’s single elements in relation to reality, it is helpful for a child to know a variety of biblical stories (in order to orient oneself towards coherent narrative patterns in the case of a special theological question and to speculate and to solve problems independently). Teaching in class may benefit from the suggestion to draw ‘mindmaps’ of the children’s orientations within theological language and structures of discourse in comparison with classical theology. A collection of interpretations about the question of God’s omnipotence is given as an example. The discussion refers to ‘story‐structure’, ‘script’ and ‘scenes’ as three ways to organize and remember impressions and to the ‘domain specific approach’ of Hirschfeld and Gelman.

The design and performance of component middleware for QoS-enabled deployment and configuration of DRE systems

Quality of Service (QoS)-enabled component middleware can help reduce the complexity of deploying and configuring QoS aspects, such as priorities and rates of invocation. Few empirical studies have been conducted, however, to guide developers of distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems in choosing among alternative designs and performance optimizations. Moreover, few empirical studies have been conducted to examine the performance and flexibility trade-offs between standards-based and domain-specific DRE middleware solutions. This paper makes three key contributions to research on QoS-enabled component middleware for DRE systems. First, it describes optimizations applied to an implementation of the OMG’s Deployment and Configuration (D&C) of Components specification that enable performance trade-offs between QoS aspects of DRE systems. Second, it compares the performance of several dynamic and static configuration mechanisms to help guide the selection of suitable configuration mechanisms based on specific DRE system requirements. Third, it compares the performance of our static standards-based approach to an avionics domain-specific approach. Our results show that these optimizations (1) provide developers improved control over key trade-offs between flexibility and performance at different stages of the DRE system lifecycle, (2) enhance trustworthiness of component-based DRE systems by supporting greater customization of how they are configured to meet specific requirements of each application, and (3) offer greater flexibility at a reasonable performance cost, compared to a domain-specific approach.

ON THE PHENOMENON OF INFORMATION DILUTION

Innovations in information technology (IT) have affected all aspects of modern life. The quantity of information available is increasing exponentially. Simultaneously, it is becoming much easier to access these vast amounts of information. Unfortunately, in some cases, this information explosion has also made it harder to get the relevant and accurate information needed for good decision-making. The present day transactional engines generate abundant information, but we still observe problems in decision-making at higher levels of management. There is a need to be wary of sub-optimal decisions based on information culled from the transactional level of management in addition to data quality problems that are inevitable due to the volume of data available. In spite of the tremendous increase in the available information for decision makers, some decisions at the strategic level turn out to be of poor quality. At the macro level, we find senior managers failing to seek answers for critical questions. At the micro level, we have not fully succeeded in monitoring the quality of the components that make the data-information-decision chain. In this paper, we analyze some of the factors that are responsible for this information dilution that is directly responsible for poor quality decision-making. We study the problem from both macro and micro perspectives and propose a domain specific approach to alleviate the problem.