Fernand Vandamme

Self-Organization and Autonomy in a Post-Cybernetic Perspective Epistemological Issues

Knowledge of a domain can be seen as a structuration of a domain. Maximal efficient knowledge of a domain can be seen as the minimal structuration which is sufficient for fulfilling the relevant functions, taking into account the context and situation in which the domain is embedded. This minimal structuration guarantees a maximal adaptivity to new opportunities or threats of the environment, without falling into chaos. This requirement of minimality can eventually be loosened locally for the sake of protection of the ‘self’, self being defined in terms of a symbolic identification of the unity of the structure. The structure can be a culture, a political entity, a research group or an individual. Relative to the optimal minimal structuration, dependent on and relative to an environment, we can define in this context self-organizational options, in terms of operators that eliminate structures, generate structures, or a combination of both.

New Trends in Information Technologies and Their Integration in University Curricula: a Brief Study in the Context of the FETCH European Thematic Network

Starting from general considerations about the fast evolution of Information Technology, in this paper we focus on the need for integrating new up-to-date topics in existing computing curricula. In particular, we summarize the data obtained from surveys developed within the FETCH European thematic network and directed to professors, alumni and industry representatives. We also provide suggestions derived from the FETCH European Strategic Framework for Computing Education and Training (ESFCET 2020), stressing the importance of computing curricula that incorporate timely technological targets.

Onto-thesauri: an efficient ontology!

There is an eternal problem for enterprise content management: “Everyday living is too fast, too busy, too complicated. More than at any time in history, it’s important to have good information on just about every aspect of life. And, An onto-thesaurus based document and content management platform is very successful. It provides an improvement of recall and precision of information retrieval by ISO mono-lingual or multilingual thesauri indexing, homonymy resolution and onto-thesaurus.