In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Ontologies and Information Systems co-located with 13th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research (BIR 2014)
We address the existing gap between business process models and lawful states of business objects. This gap hinders compliance of business process models with internally and externally imposed regulations. Existing modelling methods such as BPMN and ArchiMate lack an explicitly declarative approach for capturing flow of business objects, their states and laws of state transitions. Such deficiency can cost organization potential legal problems, make the ability of BPMN and ArchiMate to capture real-world phenomena questionable and drive modellers to employ additional standards. This paper proposes a formalized solution for closing the gap between business process models and states of business objects by using BWW model. Our approach includes means for explicit definition of states of business objects, automatic generation of conceivable state space at a process model design-time, and automatic generation of lawful state space and compliance checking at a process run-time.
A characteristic of the news market is that consumers often cross-check information, i.e. observe several news outlets. At the same time, data on political media suggest that more partisan consumers are more likely to cross-check. We explore these phenomena by building a model of horizontal competition in newspaper endorsements. Without cross-checking, outlets are unbiased and minimally differentiated. When cross-checking is allowed, we show that cross-checkers are indeed more partisan than those who only acquire one report. Furthermore, cross-checking induces outlets to differentiate, and the degree of differentiation is increasing in the dispersion of consumer beliefs. Differentiation is detrimental to consumer welfare, and a single monopoly outlet may provide higher consumer welfare than a competitive duopoly.
Analyzing legal policies for many laws, such as taxes and social benefits, is a common way for governments to identify risks, e.g., risk of legal policies not achieving expected revenue. A typical analysis includes validation of policies and the verification of the systems implementing them. One efficient way to validate policies is simulation, e.g., by simulating whether a proposed law reform would realize target objectives. Once validated, policies are implemented into public administration procedures and eGovernment applications. Systems implementing legal policies also need to be analyzed and verified, e.g., through testing, to ensure that they are compliant with the underlying policies. Currently, legal policy analysis is conducted using a combination of spreadsheets and software code. Such strategy suffers mainly from being hard to use by legal experts due to the lack of adequate background. This is partly rooted in the fact that available techniques to formalize legal policies are based on complex logical expressions and code. The main goal of this research project, that this paper describes, is to narrow the aforementioned expertise gap by proposing convenient, systematic and automated techniques to support analysis of legal polices from their design to their implementation.
Purpose Fact-checking has been changing in recent years from an initial stage in which fact-checkers were more concerned with political discourse to a stage in which combating misinformation becomes the primary purpose. This work examines more closely the standardizing and the customizing aspects of active fact-checking outlets in Portuguese-speaking countries, focusing on the verification methods and organizational models in use.
Design/methodology/approach Based on Content Analysis, we collected manually 318 posts during June 2019 from each fact-checking outlets website and then examined each post according to six general concepts: discourse, sources, context, classification, graphic representation, and financing. There were 15 active fact-checking outlets in Brazil (13) and Portugal (2). No active outlets were found in the African countries.
Findings Although there is room for inventiveness in fact-checking practices, it is restricted to the classification models adopted and the graphic representation demanded by them. Only two largest Portuguese-speaking countries (Brazil and Portugal) have active fact-checking initiatives during the study period. In Mozambique, we found the outlet named Mozcheck that was inactive with no published content during the research period. From our analysis, we detected a pattern between the type of misinformation and the media to which it is most often linked: false information was circulated mainly in texts, while false contexts were mainly circulated in videos and images led to more manipulated content. In addition, in relation to the sources used to verification of the content, we noticed a large volume of posts relied only on sources came from contacts with press offices – this was especially true for political issues.
Practical implications The analyzed data indicates that the standardization tendencies are related to the connection of these initiatives with traditional media. While the contrasting aspects of the fact-checking practices are related to the classification models and the graphic representation created by the outlets.
Social implications It indicates that fact-checking outlets is still tied to traditional media in terms of its organizational and institutional business model. Inventiveness and innovation are restricted to the practice of fact-checking conducted by journalists and other professionals.
Originality/value This is the first study to compare the practice of fact-checking in Portuguese-speaking countries and, besides looking at aspects of journalistic practice, it also seeks to analyze organizational elements of fact-checking outlets.
Due to the variations of design and protocol in qualitative inquiry, researchers may inadvertently create problems for themselves in terms of the trustworthiness of their research. Miscommunication between participants and researchers can especially arise from the unique and unpredictable nature of human dynamics. In this paper I contend that such problems, or traps, can easily and at times unknowingly be set during the qualitative process known as member checking, threatening the researcher/participant relationship and possibly the stability of the study. In this paper, I examine member checking through five vignettes personally experienced. These vignettes are preceded by a presentation of common procedures for increasing trustworthiness, and are followed by several recommendations for avoiding the setting and triggering of member checking traps.
AbstractThis article suggests that fact checking is a useful but incomplete framework for delivering an epistemically healthy public sphere. Through a brief history of the fact/value distinction, it is argued that there is no secure justification for limiting interventions aimed at improving the emergent digital public sphere only to factual claims. On this basis, the heuristic principle of 'value checking' is outlined, as a complement to fact checking in the epistemic regulation of democratic discourse. Value checking would accept that more sophisticated and deliberative communication is a vital requirement for a well‐functioning public sphere, and that this can be promoted through new forms of epistemic regulation. However, it would reject the notion that fact checking is sufficient to achieve this, suggesting that the promotion of healthy political communication should also extend to value‐based reasoning. The principle of value checking could be added to the fact‐checking paradigm as a means of further enriching the public sphere in the 'post‐truth' age.
