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The objective of this chapter is to analyze diabetes onset in Mexico in terms of work relations and family. The authors examined the impacts of diabetes on inequalities, practices of violence among the Mexican population, analyzing gender relations in the context of having diabetes. Our research is based on mixed method approach. First, the authors conducted a survey among 110 diabetic persons in Chiapas and Nuevo León, two Mexican states from the North and the South. Results show that gender violence has impacts in both Mexican states despite of socioeconomical differences. Overall, diabetes is a complex social process that need to be analyzed on different social and socioeconomical levels. Gender violence is a particularly strong factor that has an impact on diabetes. The contribution of this research is based on understanding of diabetes onset as a social construction where gender violence, social cohesion and subjective wellbeing play a significant role in diabetes in the Mexican context. The outcomes of this research might have an impact on transformation of public health policy in Latin America and the Caribbean, from a medical approach to a sociocultural one in terms of diabetes as a chronic illness. Moreover, our results suggest that quality of life depends on the level of interacting within social groups, as diabetes is no longer a disease that affects an individual, but it is more a social phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an in‐depth discussion of reference tools in the virtual world of Second Life.

A description is given of the scripted functions employed by the author, a community virtual library reference desk volunteer of three years.

The paper finds that each tool can meet the information needs of community virtual library patrons.

The paper reveals that reference desk tool programs that run in the virtual world have implications for real world reference desks of the future.

The definition of modeling languages is a key‐prerequisite for model‐driven engineering. In this respect, Domain‐Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) defined from scratch in terms of metamodels and the extension of Unified Modeling Language (UML) by profiles are the proposed options. For interoperability reasons, however, the need arises to bridge modeling languages originally defined as DSMLs to UML. Therefore, the paper aims to propose a semi‐automatic approach for bridging DSMLs and UML by employing model‐driven techniques.

The paper discusses problems of the ad hoc integration of DSMLs and UML and from this discussion a systematic and semi‐automatic integration approach consisting of two phases is derived. In the first phase, the correspondences between the modeling concepts of the DSML and UML are defined manually. In the second phase, these correspondences are used for automatically producing UML profiles to represent the domain‐specific modeling concepts in UML and model transformations for transforming DSML models to UML models and vice versa. The paper presents the ideas within a case study for bridging ComputerAssociate's DSML of the AllFusion Gen CASE tool with IBM's Rational Software Modeler for UML.

The ad hoc definition of UML profiles and model transformations for achieving interoperability is typically a tedious and error‐prone task. By employing a semi‐automatic approach one gains several advantages. First, the integrator only has to deal with the correspondences between the DSML and UML on a conceptual level. Second, all repetitive integration tasks are automated by using model transformations. Third, well‐defined guidelines support the systematic and comprehensible integration.

The paper focuses on the integrating direction DSMLs to UML, but not on how to derive a DSML defined in terms of a metamodel from a UML profile.

Although, DSMLs defined as metamodels and UML profiles are frequently applied in practice, only few attempts have been made to provide interoperability between these two worlds. The contribution of this paper is to integrate the so far competing worlds of DSMLs and UML by proposing a semi‐automatic approach, which allows exchanging models between these two worlds without loss of information.

This paper aims to discuss a new tool for requirements gathering in the Web 2.0 era. It seeks to investigate the features that this kind of tool should have in order to be as widely applicable and useful as possible. Further, it aims to explore the extent to which business requirements for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can be collected and discussed collaboratively in a worldwide community of business process experts.

The paper is a combination of empirical research, hermeneutics and design research.

The proposed Living Requirements Space (LRS) platform has the potential of becoming an international forum for collecting and discussing business requirements for ERP systems.

The LRS platform will allow ERP developers, ERP systems implementers, and academics to better understand the evolution of business requirements for ERP systems. It will create a knowledge base of ERP business requirements, that is, a repository that guarantees open and unrestricted access to content. It will thus allow for more international ERP systems and far more comprehensive education on and understanding of business processes and ERP systems.

LRS is an open access tool that allows for the gathering of ERP systems requirements in a vendor‐ and project‐independent approach that is unbiased towards any geographic region.

Development assurance level (DAL) is the measurement of the rigor of development assurance tasks performed to functions or items. The DAL assignment is an important process of aircraft system development that can make the reliability and safety of the system stay at acceptable levels. This paper aims to propose an optimization approach for the DAL assignments to minimize the development cost of aircraft systems.

The mathematical model for the DAL assignment optimization has been developed on the basis of the given expressions of objective function and constraints. In addition, a hybrid algorithm model synthesizing the advantages of genetic algorithm (GA) and Tabu search (TS) has been proposed to solve the optimization problem of the DAL assignment.

The results of the case study show that the proposed hybrid algorithm is more efficient and effective than the exhaustive method as well as the pure GA.

The proposed approach can be applied in the development of aircraft systems, and it has great significance in minimizing the development cost as well as keeping the system reliability and safety at an acceptable level.

The constrained optimization method has been applied in the DAL assignments, the corresponding mathematical model has been built and a hybrid evolutionary algorithm has been proposed to solve the optimization problem.