Publikationen Institute und Zentren - FH Graubünden

Abstract: This paper aims to shed light on how sustainable entrepreneurs perceive their stakeholder relationships. Entrepreneurial cognition theory has emphasized the need to better understand how individual perception drives the behaviour of entrepreneurs. In particular, within this field an important research stream has concentrated on opportunity seeking in the early stages of business formation. Within the emerging field of sustainable entrepreneurship individuals are viewed as a creative force apt to catalyse sustainable development. Similar to any business formation, the start-up phase for sustainable ventures is of particular interest since strategic positioning defines the manoeuvring space for any positive social, ecological, and economic contributions that will originate from there into the future. Much of the freedom sustainable entrepreneurs will experience in successfully developing their businesses depends on the appropriate management of stakeholders in support of their business ideas. Therefore, an important research question focuses on how critical stakeholders are identified and addressed in this phase. Against the background of entrepreneurial cognition theory, we argue that sustainable entrepreneurs are distinct in the way they deal with this particular task due to the constraint of the triple-bottom-line nature of their ventures.

Abstract: K3 ist ein offenes, auf Open Source Software basierendes E-Learning System, das in der universitären Ausbildung eingesetzt wird und kollaboratives Erarbeiten von Wissen durch gruppenbasierte elektronische Kommunikationsforen ermöglicht. Die Lernenden erhalten über ein flexibles Gratifikationssystem Anreize, sowohl auf Gruppen- als auch auf der Individualebene, um positive motivationale und kognitive Effekte zu erzielen und somit die Kommunikations- und Informations-kompetenz der Teilnehmer zu verbessern.

Abstract: The identification and labeling of non-hierarchical relations are among the most challenging tasks in ontology learning. This paper describes an approach for suggesting ontology relationship types to domain experts based on implicitly learned relations from a domain corpus. The learning process extracts verb- vectors from sentences containing domain concepts. It computes centroids for known relationship types and stores them in the knowledge base. Vectors of unknown relationships are compared to the stored centroids using the cosine similarity metric. The system then suggests the relationship type of the most similar centroid. Domain experts evaluate these suggestions to refine the knowledge base and constantly improve the component's accuracy. Using four sample ontologies on "energy sources", this paper demonstrates how link type suggestion aids the ontology design process. It also provides a statistical analysis on the accuracy and average ranking performance of batch learning versus online learning.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76888-3_12 

Abstract: Ontology evolution is an intrinsic phenomenon of any knowledge-intensive system, which can be addressed either implicitly or explicitly. This paper describes an explicit, data-driven approach to capture and visualize ontology evolution by semi-automatically extending small seed ontologies. This process captures ontology changes reflected in large document collections. The visualization of these changes helps characterize the evolution process, and distinguish core, extended and peripheral relations between concepts.

Abstract: Analyzing the check-in information of open source software projects which use a version control system such as CVS or SUBVERSION can yield interesting and important insights into the programming behavior of developers. As in every major project tasks are assigned to many developers, the development must be coordinated between these programmers. This paper describes three visualization techniques that help to examine how programmers work together, e.g. if they work as a team or if they develop their part of the software separate from each other. Furthermore, phases of stagnation in the lifetime of a project can be uncovered and thus, possible problems are revealed. To demonstrate the usefulness of these visualization techniques we performed case studies on two open source projects. In these studies interesting patterns of developers' behavior, e.g. the specialization on a certain module can be observed. Moreover, modules that have been changed by many developers can be identified as well as such ones that have been altered by only one programmer.

Abstract: Mobile technology becomes an increasingly important issue for tourists as well as tour operators. A proof for the importance of location based services and mobile applications in tourism are a recognisable number of studies which were conducted during the past years and funded by the European Union. Interestingly enough, there was no breakthrough of location based mobile applications in tourism from a user perspective up to date. This paper raises the question if evaluation procedures and methods of location based mobile devices fit the user perspective in tourism. An analysis of past projects is used to find the gaps in evaluation methods and results in learning for future projects of this kind.

Abstract: This paper is about valuating direct intercontinental flights as opposed to non-direct ones, taking an individual travelers' perspective. The methodology of this study is derived from a hedonic approach which tries to explain actual expenditures (in our case of air transport) by means of a number of non-divisible characteristics (origin and destination, number of stopovers, choice of travel class). The results reveal that direct flights are valued higher than non-direct ones. However, the share of this advantage in relation to other characteristics by which a flight can be valued is limited, ranging from 15 to 20 per cent (in the context of travel in economy class; ceteris paribus) to less than 10 per cent (in the context of travel in business class; ceteris paribus). In contrast, and to put those numbers into perspective, choosing business class (instead of economy) adds 240% to an economy air fare (ceteris paribus).

Abstract: This paper is about the importance of purchasing criteria in intercontinental air transport as exemplified by origin and destination between Switzerland and selected destinations in the Far East. Passengers waiting to board their flights from Switzerland to Far Eastern destinations were invited to participate in a choice experiment. Subsequently, they were offered choice sets where they had to choose among two different flight tickets from Zurich to one specific destination within each set. To statistically analyse the data a variance decomposition method was performed to learn about the importance of the different purchasing criteria. The results show that for both the business and economy class passengers alike and the business and leisure travellers the most important criteria is the price, even before the direct connection, which is the second most important criteria. In comparison with transatlantic travellers, the Far East travellers value the direct flight more and the price is a somewhat less important.

DOI: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?doi=10.1117/12.668023 

Abstract: Spatially Modulated Illumination (SMI) microscopy was applied to determine changes of the local refractive index at discrete fluorescently labeled sites within the cell nucleus. We present measurements on polymerase II complexes, where we found a variation of the local refractive index of 1.38 - 1.55 (standard deviation interval) throughout the nucleus. This variability is not correlated to the accumulations and the extensions of the polymerase II complexes, which have been determined in a previous experiment.1 Local protein accumulations such as adherent transcriptionally active proteins could possibly contribute to such variations, as could also different compactions of the DNA fiber. Altogether, we present a method to precisely obtain a map of the local refractive index inside of cell nuclei, which provides another contrasting mechanism for visualizing sub cellular structures.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1117/12.643272 

Abstract: This paper deals with the visual representation of a particular kind of structured data: trees where each node is associated with an object (leaf node) of a taxonomy. We introduce a new visualization technique that we call Trees In A Treemap. In this visualization edges can either be drawn as straight or orthogonal edges. We compare our technique with several known techniques. To demonstrate the usability of our visualization techniques, we apply them to find interesting patterns in decision trees and network routing data.