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This article aims to explore how to incorporate similarity joins into XML database management systems (XDBMSs). The authors aim to provide seamless and efficient integration of similarity joins on tree-structured data into an XDBMS architecture.

The authors exploit XDBMS-specific features to efficiently generate XML tree representations for similarity matching. In particular, the authors push down a large part of the structural similarity evaluation close to the storage layer.

Empirical experiments were conducted to measure and compare accuracy, performance and scalability of the tree similarity join using different similarity functions and on the top of different storage models. The results show that the authors’ proposal delivers performance and scalability without hurting the accuracy.

Similarity join is a fundamental operation for data integration. Unfortunately, none of the XDBMS architectures proposed so far provides an efficient support for this operation. Evaluating similarity joins on XML is challenging, because it requires similarity matching on the text and structure. In this work, the authors integrate similarity joins into an XDBMS. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first to leverage the storage scheme of an XDBMS to support XML similarity join processing.

“I'm afraid I don't often have the opportunity, myself, of showing people around” explained the director of Multi‐Media Amenity Resources, “but most of my staff are taking industrial action today … oh, some minor dispute about my plan to convert branch libraries into games 'n disco bars.” In fact he hadn't been to the building for three months due to the pressure of committee, sub‐committee, advisory group, interdepartmental, forward planning, twinning, budget trimming, directorate, joint steering committee, management, community profile, section, heads of departments and ‘don't minute that’ decision making meetings. In addition, were day, weekend, short course, refresher, local, regional, national, schools, courses, seminars and conferences which he felt obliged to attend in order to supplement his collection of handy‐packed hotel beverages, and, incidentally, to keep up with all that was new and wonderful in the field of librarianship.

This “mini-case” summarizes the beloved Chicago Cubs' many years of futility and remarkable turnaround in the early teens of the twenty-first century. Central to the case is the concept that despite being an incredibly popular, billion-dollar franchise holding a special place in the hearts of Chicagoans for more than a century, the organization's sale from the Tribune Company in 2009 to the Ricketts family effectively required a full reboot of the company's infrastructure, akin to a startup or to a “carve-out” situation popular in the private equity world. The case resonates because the brand is easily recognizable in an industry with the unique dynamics of professional sports, and yet the company's situation features similarities to any lower-profile organization trying to build or rebuild its SG&A infrastructure from scratch.

Presents over sixty abstracts summarising the 1999 Employment Research Unit annual conference held at the University of Cardiff. Explores the multiple impacts of globalization on work and employment in contemporary organizations. Covers the human resource management implications of organizational responses to globalization. Examines the theoretical, methodological, empirical and comparative issues pertaining to competitiveness and the management of human resources, the impact of organisational strategies and international production on the workplace, the organization of labour markets, human resource development, cultural change in organisations, trade union responses, and trans‐national corporations. Cites many case studies showing how globalization has brought a lot of opportunities together with much change both to the employee and the employer. Considers the threats to existing cultures, structures and systems.

The purpose of this paper is to model the critical success factors of construction project management (CPM). Despite the emergence of construction project management as an academic discipline, existing instrument found in literature were for measuring the importance of Construction Managers and Project Managers skills or attributes yet the combined dual role of Construction Project Management as a discipline or profession remains under researched. After collecting 58 empirical observations from within the South African construction related organisations, the paper tests the theoretical relationships by using the structural equation modelling (SEM) technique. The research identifies six factors which are critical for the effectiveness of CPM. The study also highlights the benefits of modelling the factors using tradition methods such as bivariate correlation and multiple regression analysis techniques to extract factors of CPM. The results indicate that correlation between the “hard” and “soft” skills is necessary for the effective implementation of Construction Project Management. The proposed theoretical model not only has the potential to enhance competitive success but can act as a valuable diagnostic tool in addressing the effectiveness of construction project management.

The awarding of terminals to private operators is considered a prime task of landlord port authorities. Yet, terminal concessions in seaports have only recently gained interest in academic circles. The awarding process poses a complex set of managerial challenges to port authorities, one of the key issues being the determination of the duration of the concession.

Despite the importance of the duration of terminal concessions in seaports, the issue has not received much attention in academic circles. Factors impacting on the duration of contracts, leases or concessions have, however, been studied extensively in other research areas, such as agriculture, coal contracts, franchising and natural gas. This paper uses insights from these academic studies to obtain a better understanding of the impact of concession duration on the stakeholders involved and relates them to empirical evidence on concession length in European seaports. The paper then proposes a classification scheme for the exogenous determination of concession duration, based on techniques developed for Public-Private-Partnerships in large infrastructure projects. In the last section the paper discusses the importance of concession durations to various stakeholders in seaports and illustrates these principles using a case study.

This paper features a narrative case study of a leadership team engaged in an effort to transform both culture and instructional practice at an urban charter school. The paper describes the team's effort to align their decision-making with two frameworks selected to anchor the school's institutional change process: restorative justice and deeper learning. Interweaving rich case data with analysis, the paper explores the dilemmas that emerged as leaders struggled to “walk the talk” of these two frameworks, using this to theorize about the synergies between them and to explore the broader leadership challenges involved in transforming schools from authoritarian to humanizing institutions.

The researcher employed an ethnographic approach with the goal of generating a thickly-textured single case study. Data-gathering activities included more than 400 h of participant-observation, in-depth interviewing and artifact collection, conducted over the course of a ten-month academic year. Data analysis was iterative and included frequent member checks with participants.

The paper finds that restorative justice and deeper learning have powerful epistemological connections that school leaders can harness in order to ensure a coherent approach to change processes. The paper also illuminates several of the core dilemmas that school leaders should anticipate facing when embracing these two frameworks: the dilemma of responding to feedback, the dilemma of power-sharing and the dilemma of balancing expectations with support.

The case study approach employed in this paper allows for rich understandings of specific phenomena while also providing a platform for exploring the general qualities that these phenomena might illustrate. This approach does not allow for statistical generalizability.

The paper suggests that it is imperative for school leaders to explore what it means to lead in ways that are coherent with their vision for change, e.g. to cultivate symmetry. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that the value of such explorations lies in the process of grappling with the tensions that arise when humanizing frameworks are implemented within systems that uphold traditional power hierarchies. Additionally, the paper affirms the value of de-siloing the transformation of school culture from the transformation of instructional practice.

This paper offers an unusually textured account of the messy and uncertain processes that constitute the work of school change. This paper also draws together two educational paradigms which are rarely brought into conversation with each other despite their epistemological synergy.

This paper presents a generic framework on port logistics development and its interaction with hinterland regions. Although earlier work on the topic (e.g. by Ferrari et al., 2006; Kuipers and Eenhuizen, 2004) offers valuable insights in the subject, it contains limitations in geographical applicability. Ports indeed face dissimilarities in, for instance, locational characteristics (a.o. distance from the sea and nautical accessibility) and hinterland connections. Only when a model for determining seaport-located logistics activities takes into account these issues of dissimilarity among ports, the framework could be applied to a variety of seaport ranges worldwide. In this paper we aim to provide a first version of such a framework. More particularly, by means of a survey conducted in the Port of Busan the shortcomings of traditional approaches are illustrated. We then propose a more encompassing model, which seems to explain fairly well the attractiveness of Busan in terms of logistics activities. This framework explicitly adds port and hinterland characteristics to the list of factors decisive in the choice of the location of logistics activities. Finally, we would like to remark that our research on this topic is still ongoing and results for surveys planned in New York and Antwerp will be reported in a later stage.