Object-centric Approach Research Articles

Object-centred automated compliance checking: a novel, bottom-up approach

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is changing how built assets are delivered and operated. A built asset is represented as a set of objects, each with an identity, attributes, and relations. This object-oriented nature enables new approaches for ensuring compliance with a range of requirements: e.g. industry guidelines; pro-ject and client-specific requirements; and building codes and standards. Furthermore, bottom-up design ap-proaches are known to be more suitable for quality control and design errors detection. Based on an adapted version of simulated annealing concept, this paper proposes an automated compliance checking classification and identifies a set of desired characteristics these methods should fulfil. It then demonstrates a bottom-up object-centred approach for automated model checking and the corresponding plugin prototype. The approach and the prototype enable four key processes and satisfy all desired characteristics of compliance checking methods including content validation, model completeness, smart object, and design option checking. To demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of the approach, two case studies are processed using existing BIM objects libraries one of which is created by a major French manufacturer. All four steps were successfully completed, and the results show savings of around 125 minutes per object between the automated approach and traditional manual methods of working.

Schröpfkopf, Spritze und „stumme Schwester“ – „Hybride Objekte“ und „Grenzobjekte“ zwischen Pflege und Medizin

The paper aims to show how an object-centred approach to the history of nursing can help toprovide a new perspective on the historical development of the professionalisation of nursingand its demarcation from both the medical profession and non-professional care. Nursing practicesand the material objects closely related to them are analysed in their historical context.We analyse in particular such objects that were used not only by professional nurses but alsoin home care by family members or caregivers and doctors.Indeed, the investigation of the objects and the practices linked to them enables us to showthat professional nursing distinguished itself from non-professional care not necessarily throughspecific nursing objects but through the use of them. Furthermore, professional nurses alwaystook on tasks that belonged to the physicians’ domain without receiving clear instructions asto their authority. While nurses were trained more thoroughly than doctors in handling theseobjects, the practices were both legally and in practice defined as doctors’ tasks.

The material culture of burial and its microgeography: A Luxembourg cemetery as a methodological example of an object-centred approach to quantitative material culture studies

This article uses a novel quantitative methodology to examine sepulchral material culture. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of social spatialization and art as agency, the authors contend that variations in grave designs and materiality cannot simply be explained in terms of changes in fashion and mentality. Other factors also need to be taken into account. Using a digital data collection tool, the Cemetery Surveyor Application (CSA) developed at the University of Luxembourg, they compile a set of data encompassing all the material aspects of each grave in a cemetery in Luxembourg (Western Europe), the setting of their case study. The graves are dated from the 1850s to 2015. |The authors compare the chronological evolution of the most recurrent material features with a GIS-based spatial analysis of the same features. The results of the spatial analysis not only largely confirm the chronological study, but also allow them to be more precise (dating is often problematic) and include undated graves (a third of the sample). The digital data collection tool also allows them to compare cemeteries and to highlight variations in these that cannot merely be imputed to chronology, but also to spatial proximity and material agency.

Janus-headed intaglio

The traditional use of research methods is to provide a framework for constructing a project to address particular questions or interests. The idea behind this is that, by utilising these frameworks, research will be assessable by other researchers who are then able to judge any given research output through a common framework, while still allowing each project to stand (or fall) on its own merits. At risk of getting lost, or silenced, in this process is any attention to how the individual researcher understands their own project. This article explores the potential for developing a self-reflective research method. How does the researcher engage with, and understand, their own work? How does this provide a new pathway for disseminating research to others within the academic community? How does an object-centred approach to this self-reflection aid in engaging both the researcher and the audience in a shared experience?

Subject–object perceptions of heritage: a framework for the study of contrasting railway heritage regeneration strategies

A railway or any other form of heritage site may be perceived as a subject or an object-orientated experience. While the former invites an emotional reaction based on personal association, the later suggests a detached response grounded in a transfer of knowledge. This paper considers the role of heritage legislation in shaping such perceptions. Using archival research and site observations, the paper specifically examines the impact of different State-based heritage legislation on the adoption of contrasting redevelopment and site management strategies at two historic railway workshop complexes in Australia. The two sites are the Eveleigh Railway Workshops in New South Wales where an object-centred approach was adopted, and the Ipswich Workshops in Queensland where a subject-centred approach was employed. Although both sites are comparable in terms of their history, scale and cultural significance, the alternative approaches to redevelopment and management have resulted in different perceptual experiences for visitors. The paper reveals the subliminal impact of heritage legislation and suggests the need to consciously manage perceptual experiences, firstly, as a strategic objective in any redevelopment process and, secondly, as a means to integrating meaningful site-specific interpretation into the longer term management of cultural significance.

From object to encounter: Aesthetic politics and visual criminology

Recent criminological research has engaged with images of crime such that there increasingly appears to exist a need for a specifically visual criminology. Within visual criminology, however, images are frequently constructed as objects of analysis rather than as constitutive elements of the discursive field. This article draws upon the specific context of the social, cultural and legal responses to uncommissioned words and images in public space—street art and graffiti writing. Focusing on one instance of unauthorized image making, I argue for the dynamic role of the image in the constitution of crime in contemporary society and culture, thanks to the affective dimension of the encounter between spectator and image. The complex range of responses to street art and graffiti highlights ways in which visual criminology must ensure that it eschews an object-centred approach to the image, and conceptualize it instead by means of an aesthetic politics of the encounter.

Accountability in Distributed Environment For Data Sharing in the Cloud

Cloud computing enables highly scalable services to be easily consumed over the Internet on an as-needed basis. A major feature of the cloud services is that users‘ data are usually processed remotely in unknown machines that users do not own or operate. While enjoying the convenience brought by this new emerging technology, users‘ fears of losing control of their own data (particularly, financial and health data) can become a significant barrier to the wide adoption of cloud services. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel highly decentralized information accountability framework to keep track of the actual usage of the users data in the cloud. In particular, we propose an object-centred approach that enables enclosing our logging mechanism together with users‘ data and policies. We leverage the JAR programmable capabilities to both create a dynamic and travelling object, and to ensure that any access to users‘ data will trigger authentication and automated logging local to the JARs. To strengthen user‘s control, we also provide distributed auditing mechanisms. Keywords—Cloud computing, accountability, data sharing.

Revisiting the dataflow principle for chemical information processing

Dataflow systems, such as Pipeline Pilot or KNIME have become important mainstream tools for data processing in chemistry. These established systems are all implemented relying on a data model emphasizing a strict row/column-centric data table view which does not facilitate interaction with individual chemistry objects, or non-uniform data contents. Resuming our pioneering work which resulted in the implementation of the first dataflow system for chemistry [1], we present in this contribution a different, object-centric approach for the design of re-usable chemical information processing sequences. Our system is based on the metaphor of a factory floor, instead of opaque pipelines. Individual machining stations perform configurable processing steps on objects such as structures, reactions, datasets or tables. Objects are transported between these - or temporarily set on the factory floor for storage or inspection. The combination of this general concept with the extensive scripting functionality of the Cactvs Chemoinformatics toolkit results in a system with capabilities notably different and more flexible than standard pipelining systems.

A flexible, object-centric approach for business process modelling

Mainstream business process modelling techniques often promote a design paradigm wherein the activities that may be performed within a case, together with their usual execution order, form the backbone on top of which other aspects are anchored. This Fordist paradigm, while effective in standardised and production-oriented domains, breaks when confronted with processes in which case-by-case variations and exceptions are the norm. We contend that the effective design of flexible processes calls for a substantially different modelling paradigm. Motivated by requirements from the human services domain, we explore the hypothesis that a framework consisting of a small set of coordination concepts, combined with established object-oriented modelling principles, provides a suitable foundation for designing highly flexible processes. Several human service delivery processes have been designed using this framework, and the resulting models have been used to realise a system to support these processes in a pilot environment.

Belongings: Oral History, Objects and an Online Exhibition

The New South Wales Migration Heritage Centre was established in 1998. Since 2003 its physical presence has been located within Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and it has had the strategic brief to record the memories of ageing migrants before their stories are lost. The Centre is, however, a museum without a collection; a heritage authority without heritage sites; a cultural institution whose main presence is in cyberspace. Among its high profile projects is one entitled Objects through time and another Belongings. Both focus on the ways in which objects can convey aspects of the migration experience. Belongings, the focus of this article, presents the remembered experiences of people who migrated to Australia after World War II, and seeks to highlight significant features of their experiences through asking them to share their memories and to nominate and talk about significant objects. As a project it grew out of movable heritage policy work within state government agencies, and its initiators – John Petersen, Kylie Winkworth and Meredith Walker – were central players in this development. It was also inspired by the National Quilt Register of the Pioneer Women’s Hut at Tumbarumba.
 
 With its object-centred approach and accompanying edited interview transcripts, Belongings provides a focus for exploring the messages and emphases that emerge when oral history interviews concerned with migration have the specific brief to ask about material culture and its significance. Belongings also enables an exploration of the layering of those messages that emerges when object captions are located back in the context of the oral history interviews from which they were extracted. As a virtual exhibition, Belongings also provides the opportunity to consider the challenges for museums (virtual and real) when they need to condense the richness of migrant oral histories and life stories to captioned objects that can be put on display.

Automated inspection of textured ceramic tiles

An innovative object-centred approach for the visual inspection of textured ceramic tiles has been developed for the acquisition of product quality control data. A demonstrator system has been constructed for the analysis of complex surfaces, surfaces which possess detailed three-dimensional topographic features, which are concealed by coincident regular or random chromatic patterns. The technique is able to isolate mixed topographic and chromatic surface features in order to allow for subsequent separate analysis. Surface topography is captured as an array of perturbed surface normals, known as a surface bump map, while the surface reflectance is isolated as a separate albedo image. Synthetically rendered images of the bump map description allow surface topography to be viewed off-line under user defined virtual illumination conditions, and in isolation from the surface albedo. Topographic features defined by the bump map description may be subject to analysis in terms of perturbation thresholding, or integrated to recover their three-dimensional relief. The technique has application for the quality inspection of a wide range of manufactured and processed surfaces, uses a low-cost fixed lighting configuration, requires no initial training, is largely pose invariant, and has been tested on a representative range of real tile samples. Experimental results are presented in the paper.

Working in the field: The psychiatric nurse as a 'libero' in the community health services

The present article explores the characteristics of community psychiatric nursing as it is revealed in 2 Norwegian counties. Sixteen psychiatric nurses participated in a qualitative research interview, based on a phenomenological and hermeneutic understanding. The findings show that the psychiatric nurses act as ‘liberos’ in the community health services. Paraphrasing the nurse as a ‘libero’, is done to depict her functions: a libero is the hindmost defence player on a football field, who has the freedom to establish interplay and unorthodox alliances. The libero can move freely all over the field, varying between attack and defence. In this study, the nurses show that expectations of being socially involved are understood as something they ought to incorporate both in their professional knowledge and practice. The obligation towards the individual client is, however, deeply rooted in their attitudes. Community psychiatric nursing seemed to develop in a dialectical process between a humanistic-existential approach and an object-centred approach. Based on the findings, one can differentiate 2 modes of practice: i) the relation model and ii) the public health model. Most of the nurses have their anchorage in the first model, but they are apparently moving in the direction of the second.

THE STUDY OF PATRONAGE AT THE ITALIAN COURTS

In recent years, the study of patronage of Renaissance music has come into vogue and perhaps gone out of fashion again. Not surprisingly, many of these studies have dealt with music at courts: in most cases, the extant documentation is informative and, since the courts were im portant supporters of music, the results often yield new discoveries con cerning major composers and their works. In investigating these courts, however, musicologists have adopted strategies closer to those of art historians than to cultural and political historians. This is understandable, since the gulf that separates musico logists from historians of art is much narrower than that which separat es them from historians of culture: scholars of art and music share a common belief that the center of their labors should be the interpreta tion and exegesis of the art work itself, whether it is an altar triptych or a polyphonic mass. There are problems inherent in such an object-cen tric approach, however. Even at best, it causes us to neglect documen tation that does not relate directly to the art work; at worst, it can de generate into a kind of narrow Kermanism that admits only "criticism" of the art work as a valid field of study. Cultural and political historians, on the other hand, even when dealing with the arts, seem more interest ed in the systems that produced the art work than with the object itself. They are concerned with the political theories and organizations of a state that viewed patronage of the arts as a desideratum and in the mo tives for commissioning particular types of art works in the first place. This difference in approach conditions both the nature of the studies undertaken and their results. Musicologists tend to shy away from any court or time in which there are few extant art works ?or, indeed, an insufficient number of sufficiently subtle art works? to provide the cen terpiece of their discussion. The lack of extant monuments, however, is not a valid criterion for avoiding the study of a court, since the systems

An intelligent, object-oriented geographical information system

Abstract The authors report a novel interface to a spatial analysis system which allows the underlying geographical domain to be represented using a high-level, feature-or object-oriented model. The system incorporates an intelligent, data-driven reporting technique which analyses the domain characteristics in order to highlight significant trends. A second novel feature is the use of data held in our extended data model for the purpose of query optimization. The interface is based on object-oriented techniques, which have been enhanced to capture contextual data and knowledge, including general patterns of data behaviour, general geographical knowledge and database domain-specific characteristics. A geographical information system can offer more flexibility when it can handle searches in both a spatial and object-centred way. Our current work is concerned with increasing the functionality and efficiency of the object-centred approach, and hence increasing the effectiveness of geographical information systems as an aid to analysis and decision-making, especially where very large volumes of data are involved.