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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Provenance Tracking In A Commons Of Geographic Data, David B. Mccurry Dec 2007

Provenance Tracking In A Commons Of Geographic Data, David B. Mccurry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advancement in digital archiving technologies provides researchers with a multitude of methods for sharing their research and data digitally with others. However, when acquiring data from others directly or indirectly the law often imposes an assumption of copyright in the dataset acquired. This creates a difficult legal situation affecting future use and creation of derivative works from the data. A digital commons may be defined as a shared resource in which creators of contributed materials (data) grant a legal right for all others to use the material under the provisions of an open-access license. This thesis hypothesizes that an approach …


Combining Geospatial And Temporal Ontologies, Kripa Joshi Dec 2007

Combining Geospatial And Temporal Ontologies, Kripa Joshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Publicly available ontologies are growing in number at present. These ontologies describe entities in a domain and the relations among these entities. This thesis describes a method to automatically combine a pair of orthogonal ontologies using cross products. A geospatial ontology and a temporal ontology are combined in this work. Computing the cross product of the geospatial and the temporal ontologies gives a complete set of pairwise combination of terms from the two ontologies. This method offers researchers the benefit of using ontologies that are already existing and available rather than building new ontologies for areas outside their scope of …


Sharing A Landscape: The Construction Of Sense Of Place On The Maine Coast, Andrea Jane Ednie Dec 2007

Sharing A Landscape: The Construction Of Sense Of Place On The Maine Coast, Andrea Jane Ednie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Motivated by interest and concern over the changing coastline in Maine, this study uses the concept of sense of place to develop an understanding of how a range of users share the resource, and to explore how place meanings are associated with their social experiences and perceptions. The site for this study was the Stonington region archipelago, an area that has not yet experienced the same amount of development as seen on the southern Maine coast, yet one that has witnessed a boom in recreational use and an influx of people from other areas. Using a mixed methodology, two groups …


Exercise And Mood: Exploring The Role Of Exercise In Regulating Stress Reactivity In Bipolar Disorder, Teresa M. Edenfield Aug 2007

Exercise And Mood: Exploring The Role Of Exercise In Regulating Stress Reactivity In Bipolar Disorder, Teresa M. Edenfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bipolar Disorder (BD) is a recurrent and debilitating psychological disorder characterized by a chronic dysregulation of mood with fluctuations between extremely low (e.g., depression) and extremely elevated mood states (e.g., mania), and ranks as the 6th leading cause of disability in the world. Although research has consistently shown that exercise may have antidepressant and stress-attenuating benefits in other psychiatric illnesses (e.g., depression, anxiety), these benefits have not been directly investigated for BD. The current study represents the first known investigation to examine this relationship. Single-participant designs, with crossover and interaction treatment components (i.e., A/B/A/B/A, A/C/A/C/A, A/B/A/C/A, or A/C/A/B/A) were utilized …


Assessing The Sustainability Of Agricultural Systems, Laura L. Kramar Aug 2007

Assessing The Sustainability Of Agricultural Systems, Laura L. Kramar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work constructs and tests a comparative technique that can be used to determine the ability of agricultural systems to meet multiple objectives of sustainability. Assessments are based on an agricultural system's ability to maintain five system stocks that represent environmental capital, social capital, human capital, physical capital, and financial capital. The capital stocks are measured as stock objectives, which are decomposed as indicators to calculate agricultural system scores. An examination of the complexity of agro-ecosystems and the multiple equilibria produced by balancing multiple objectives is used to explain the alternative criteria used in this comparative technique to evaluate agricultural …


Touching Is Good: An Eidetic Phenomenology Of Interface, Interobjectivity, And Interaction In Nintendo's "Animal Crossing: Wild World", Bryan G. Behrenshausen May 2007

Touching Is Good: An Eidetic Phenomenology Of Interface, Interobjectivity, And Interaction In Nintendo's "Animal Crossing: Wild World", Bryan G. Behrenshausen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Situating video games and the meaningful practice of playing video games for future study by the discipline of communication, this eidetic phenomenology centers the focus of such inquiry at the site of the body. As video game studies have heretofore largely ignored or presupposed a bifurcation between player and video game, a phenomenology is likewise crucial to investigating the lived experience of video gaming as an embodied activity by theoretically eschewing such subject/object distinctions and methodologically generating genuinely new, heuristic spaces for thinking about this phenomenon. In particular, the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which emphasizes the body as necessarily …


Semantic Interoperability Of Geospatial Ontologies: A Model-Theoretic Analysis, James A. Farrugia May 2007

Semantic Interoperability Of Geospatial Ontologies: A Model-Theoretic Analysis, James A. Farrugia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

People sometimes misunderstand each other, even when they use the same language to communicate. Often these misunderstandings happen when people use the same words to mean different things, in effect disagreeing about meanings. This thesis investigates such disagreements about meaning, considering them to be issues of semantic interoperability. This thesis explores semantic interoperability via a particular formal framework used to specify people’s conceptualizations of a given domain. This framework is called an ‘ontology,’ which is a collection of data and axioms written in a logical language equipped with a modeltheoretic semantics. The domain under consideration is the geospatial domain. Specifically, …