Papers by Federico Morando
This paper shows the effectiveness of a DBpedia-based approach for text categorization in the e-g... more This paper shows the effectiveness of a DBpedia-based approach for text categorization in the e-government field. Our use case is the analysis of all the speech transcripts of current White House members. This task is performed by means of TellMeFirst, an open-source software that leverages the DBpedia knowledge base and the English Wikipedia linguistic corpus for topic extraction. Analysis results allow to identify the main political trends addressed by the White House, increasing the citizens' awareness to issues discussed by politicians. Unlike methods based on string recognition, TellMeFirst semantically classifies documents through DBpedia URIs, gathering all the words that belong to a similar area of meaning (such as synonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms of a lemma) under the same unambiguous concept.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2013
Questo articolo offre un punto di vista sull"'interoperabilità giuridica" tra licenze (aperte) pe... more Questo articolo offre un punto di vista sull"'interoperabilità giuridica" tra licenze (aperte) per i dati, ovvero sulla possibilità di mescolare (legalmente) dati provenienti da fonti diverse (es. dati pubblici, generati dagli utenti o aziendali) ed utilizzarli nell'ambito di un ampio spettro di modelli di business e di comunità online. La mia prospettiva parte dal punto di vista dell'analisi economica del diritto. Si noti, tuttavia, che questa è solo una delle possibili prospettive sul tema dell'interoperabilità tra licenze. Per esempio, alcuni autori (es. Fujita e Tsukada o Krötzsch e Speiser) hanno tentato una formalizzazione della questione dalla prospettiva disciplinare dell'ingegneria informatica, della logica matematica e dei linguaggi formali. Il resto dell'articolo è organizzato come segue. Nella sezione 2, descrivo le ragioni per cui è necessario utilizzare delle licenze per aprire i dati (pubblici). La sezione 3 tratteggia il panorama delle licenze Cdi diritto d'autore". La sezione 4 rappresenta il cuore di
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2018
The Italian anti-corruption Act (law n. 190/2012) requires all public administrations to spread p... more The Italian anti-corruption Act (law n. 190/2012) requires all public administrations to spread procurement information as open data. Each body is obliged to yearly release standardized XML files, on its public website, containing data that describes all issued public contracts. Though this information is currently available on a machinereadable format, the data is fragmented and published in different files on different websites, without a unified and human-readable view of the information. The ContrattiPubblici.org project aims at developing a semantic knowledge graph based on linked data principles in order to overcome the fragmentation of existent datasets, to allow easy analysis, and to enable the reuse of information. The objectives are to increase public awareness about public spending, to improve transparency on the public procurement chain, and to help companies to retrieve useful knowledge for their business activities.
This paper applies some hints coming from the literature concerning default rules and contractual... more This paper applies some hints coming from the literature concerning default rules and contractual menus to the field of copyright (with a particular attention to the role of Creative Commons or similar modular copyright licenses). The paper discusses the efficiency of the current legal regime, which is automatically granting (without any formality) full copyright to authors of intellectual works. The analysis would encourage the introduction of some formalities in order to enjoy full copyright, but changing the existing “no formalities” default is likely incompatible with the literal text of the Berne Convention. For this reason, I propose a “second best” solution, compatible with the Berne Convention. Without eliminating the current “all rights reserved default”, the law could favour the adoption of alternative copyright regimens just by explicitly recognizing a menu of alternative rules (like the modules of Creative Commons licences) and some simple altering rules, to shift from t...
There are now almost 700 Open Access policies around the world, two thirds of them in universitie... more There are now almost 700 Open Access policies around the world, two thirds of them in universities and research institutes. There is considerable variation across these policies in terms of the conditions they lay down for authors and of their effectiveness. This briefing paper lays out the main issues that affect the effectiveness of a policy in providing high levels of Open Access research material.
The CoBiS is a network formed by 65 libraries. The project is a pilot for Piedmont aiming to prov... more The CoBiS is a network formed by 65 libraries. The project is a pilot for Piedmont aiming to provide the libraries with an infrastructure for LOD publishing, creating a triplification pipeline designed to be easy to automate and replicate. This was realized with open source technologies, such as the TARQL and JARQL tools that use SPARQL queries to describe the conversion of tables (CSV) or trees (JSON) into graphs (RDF data). The first challenge consisted in making possible the dialog of heterogeneous data sources, coming from four different library applications and different types of data. As a second step, the information contained in the catalogs was interlinked with external data sources.
The dissertation project proceeds through three papers, analyzing issues related to software inte... more The dissertation project proceeds through three papers, analyzing issues related to software interoperability and respectively pertaining to one of the three following interdependent levels of analysis. The first level addresses the legal status of software interoperability information under current intellectual property law (focusing on copyright law, which is the main legal tool for the protection of these pieces of code), trying to clarify if, how and to what extent theses pieces of code (and the associated pieces of information) are protected erga omnes by the law. The second level complements the first one, analyzing legal and economic issues related to the technical possibility of actually accessing this interoperability information through reverse engineering (and software decompilation in particular). Once a de facto standard gains the favor of the market, reverse engineering is the main self-help tool available to competitors in order to achieve interoperability and compete...
Research impact is the demonstrable contribution that research makes to society and the economy. ... more Research impact is the demonstrable contribution that research makes to society and the economy. PASTEUR4OA Briefing Paper: Research Impact Measurement in Higher Education W ork ing Together to Pr om ote O pen Acc ess Polic y Ali gnm ent in Eur ope 2 focusing funding on relevant outputs rather than inputs." 3 Research impact is also of importance to individual researchers, playing a role on CVs and in funding applications. Despite the recognised importance of research impact, however, there is still a lack of understanding of how research quality and research impact are measured. The approaches used often lack transparency leading many to ask: can we measure better? Research Impact Measurement: An overview Research bibliometrics continue to be a divisive issue in research communities. While most involved recognise the need for accountability and assessment of research impact, many question whether bibliometrics serve the objectives they are supposed to, with some expressing general hostility to measurement and its implications. While bibliometrics are depicted as an objective measure that use quantitative methods, there is debate over interpretation and adoption of different approaches. It is important to recognise that no one method is the definitive approach and that most researchers and institutions will use a combination of techniques. As EU Research Commissioner Janez Potočnik wrote in the opening to the 2010 report on Assessing Europe's University-Based Research "coexistence of different models to assess university-based research is not only inevitable, but healthy."
Internet Policy Review, 2014
The EU General Data Protection Regulation is supposed to introduce several innovations, including... more The EU General Data Protection Regulation is supposed to introduce several innovations, including the right of data portability for data subjects. In this article, we review recent literature documenting experiments to assess users' valuation of personal data, with the purpose to provide policy-oriented remarks. In particular, contextual aspects, conflicts between declared and revealed preferences, as well as the suggestion that personal data is not conceivable as a single good, but instead as a bundle, are taken into account, also discussing potential shortcomings and pitfalls in the surveyed experiments. Data portability is supposed to increase consumer empowerment; still, several technological preconditions need to apply to make this right actually enforceable.
Internet Policy Review, 2013
EPJ Web of Conferences, 2018
The CoBiS is a network formed by 65 libraries. The project is a pilot for Piedmont that is aiming... more The CoBiS is a network formed by 65 libraries. The project is a pilot for Piedmont that is aiming to provide the Committee with an infrastructure for LOD publishing, thus creating a triplification pipeline designed to be easy to automate and replicate. This is being realized with open source technologies, such as the RML mapping language or the JARQL tool that uses Linked Data to describe the conversion of XML, JSON or tabular data into RDF. The first challenge consisted in making possible the dialog of heterogeneous data sources, coming from four different library software (Clavis, Erasmo, SBNWeb and BIBLIOWin 5.0web) and different types of data (bibliographic, multimedia, and archival). The information contained in the catalogs is progressively interlinked with external data sources, such as Wikidata, VIAF, LoC and BNF authority files, Wikipedia and the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Partners of the CoBiS LOD Project are: National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Turin Ac...
JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 2014
An open reuse of public data and tools can turn the government into a powerful ‘platform’ also in... more An open reuse of public data and tools can turn the government into a powerful ‘platform’ also involving external innovators. However, the typical information system of a public agency is not open by design. Several public administrations have started adopting technical solutions to overcome this issue, typically in the form of middleware layers operating as ‘buses’ between data centres and the outside world. Open-DAI is an open source platform designed to expose data as services, directly pulling from legacy databases of the data holder. The platform is the result of an ongoing project funded under the EU ICT PSP call 2011. We present the rationale and features of Open-DAI, also through a comparison with three other open data platforms: the Socrata Open Data portal, CKAN, and ENGAGE.
Government Information Quarterly, 2016
The diffusion of Open Government Data (OGD) in recent years kept a very fast pace. However, evide... more The diffusion of Open Government Data (OGD) in recent years kept a very fast pace. However, evidence from practitioners shows that disclosing data without proper quality control may jeopardize datasets reuse and negatively affect civic participation. Current approaches to the problem in literature lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework. Moreover, most of the evaluations concentrate on open data platforms, rather than on datasets. In this work, we address these two limitations and set up a framework of indicators to measure the quality of Open Government Data on a series of data quality dimensions at most granular level of measurement. We validated the evaluation framework by applying it to compare two cases of Italian OGD datasets: an internationally recognized good example of OGD, with centralized disclosure and extensive data quality controls, and samples of OGD from decentralized data disclosure (municipalities level), with no possibility of extensive quality controls as in the former case, hence with supposed lower quality. Starting from measurements based on the quality framework, we were able to verify the difference in quality: the measures showed a few common acquired good practices and weaknesses, and a set of discriminating factors that pertain to the type of datasets and the overall approach. On the basis of this evaluation, we also provided technical and policy guidelines to overcome the weaknesses observed in the decentralized release policy, addressing specific quality aspects.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Jan 15, 2013
Questo articolo offre un punto di vista sull"'interoperabilità giuridica" tra licenze (aperte) pe... more Questo articolo offre un punto di vista sull"'interoperabilità giuridica" tra licenze (aperte) per i dati, ovvero sulla possibilità di mescolare (legalmente) dati provenienti da fonti diverse (es. dati pubblici, generati dagli utenti o aziendali) ed utilizzarli nell'ambito di un ampio spettro di modelli di business e di comunità online. La mia prospettiva parte dal punto di vista dell'analisi economica del diritto. Si noti, tuttavia, che questa è solo una delle possibili prospettive sul tema dell'interoperabilità tra licenze. Per esempio, alcuni autori (es. Fujita e Tsukada o Krötzsch e Speiser) hanno tentato una formalizzazione della questione dalla prospettiva disciplinare dell'ingegneria informatica, della logica matematica e dei linguaggi formali. Il resto dell'articolo è organizzato come segue. Nella sezione 2, descrivo le ragioni per cui è necessario utilizzare delle licenze per aprire i dati (pubblici). La sezione 3 tratteggia il panorama delle licenze Cdi diritto d'autore". La sezione 4 rappresenta il cuore di
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015
To explore the socio-technical aspects of the Internet requires infrastructures to properly foste... more To explore the socio-technical aspects of the Internet requires infrastructures to properly foster interdisciplinary work and the development of appropriate research methods. To this end we present a platform called EINS Evidence Base (EINS-EB) which is developed as part of the EINS project. The EINS-EB also aims to empower researchers, academics, organisations and society to engage with Internet Science research independent of background. Currently, it provides for the collection and discovery of data resources, of analytic and simulation tools, and, in the future, of the methodologies behind those tools an of relevant scholarly activity. We explore issues of data representation, dataset description, dataset catalogues and method catalogues for Internet Science. The evidence base adopts semantic technologies to provide an interoperable catalogue of online resources related to Internet science. We also present activities on making the evidence base interoperable with related e-Science activities by communities engaging in relevant interdisciplinary collaboration.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009
P2P technologies enable dissemination of content in an efficient way, especially if compared to t... more P2P technologies enable dissemination of content in an efficient way, especially if compared to the traditional techiques of content transmission over the Internet (by means of server-client network protocols, such as FTP, HTTP, etc). However, such efficiency must face the limits imposed by the law. In particular, file-sharing of protected subject matter is prohibited in all those cases where a prior authorization by right holders is absent. Such authorization is almost always missing, due to the extremely high transactive costs connected with its negotiation. This situation represents a huge market failure and restricts the freedom to access knowledge as granted by art. 27 sec. 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with consequences that have a heavy negative impact on the cultural and economic development of our society. There has been few efforts in seeking mechanisms intended to ease the meeting between supply and demand of digital content. On the contrary, much effort has, in recent years, been put into limiting such a phenomena by leverage of the dissuasive power of criminal laws, and to involve access providers (ISP) in surveillance activities. This approach is clearly in contrast with fundamental and constitutional rights, and does not represent a solution to the market failure above mentioned. International and EU Community legislation allows for exceptions to the exclusive 1 The present work represents the expanded outcome of the conversation held during the 3 rd "NEXA Wednesday" meeting, Turin (Italy), 12 th November 2008 (for more information on "NEXA Wednesdays" see: http://nexa.polito.it/events). This English translation was prepared by Thomas Margoni in April 2009. 2 rights of reproduction and of making available to the public on-demand, provided that right holders are remunerated. This paper seeks to address the issue of file-sharing of copyrighted works, by analysing a variety of legal mechanisms and their compliance with international and European law. Among the possible solutions that can be taken (general taxation, special purpose tax, mandatory or voluntary licenses), we suggest that a system of collective extended licenses, if properly tuned, may solve the problems connected with the current situation of P2P, benefit the affected players economically, and increase the general welfare of society through a more efficient, fair, and open dissemination of culture and knowledge.
Survey of Private Copyright Documentation Systems and Practices page 9 helping to define and iden... more Survey of Private Copyright Documentation Systems and Practices page 9 helping to define and identify what requires protection. This implies that while authors are required to fulfill a formality before their works are effectively protected, they are also obliged to make an initial judgment of whether or not their creations are sufficiently commercially valuable to warrant protection.12 The substantive requirements for protection may be still verified by national courts, but these formalities, such as registration and legal deposit, are demanded before an author can proceed to exercise his/her rights. For instance, in Argentina, the registration of the work is still compulsory for the efficacy of economic rights regarding national works. Renewal Formalities This requirement demands that authors renew the registration after a number of years, forcing the reassessment of costs versus benefits of the registration procedure compared to the extension of copyright protection. The underlying rationale here is that after a period, works that were commercially viable cease to do so and continuing the copyright protection after that point impoverishes the public domain with little countervailing benefit to the author.13 For instance, in the U.S. between 1883 and 1964, the copyright term could be extended (doubled) filing for renewal. Specifying Formalities This formality refers to certain aspects of copyright usually pertinent to a specific category or use of the work, regarded by a "notice of reservation of rights". This notice describes, for example, the circumstances under which articles in periodicals may be reproduced without the authorization of the author or publisher, or inform that public performances of a musical composition or play retain copyright protection. Legislation in Austria (but similar provisions apply in Italy and many other countries) provides for the reproduction and distribution-without previous consent-of published articles on economic, political, religious or contemporary matters in other periodicals unless there is a notice of reservation of rights on the footnote of the work or in the heading of the publication. Declarative Formalities These kind of formalities provide for evidentiary functions that enable authors to establish prima facie proof of authorship/ownership of copyright. They might contribute, thus, to alleviate right clearance problems such as those of creations with no identifiable author ("orphan works") and to provide more legal certainty, specifically where the anteriority of authorship or the priority of a claim to the title must be resolved. The timely accomplishment of declarative formalities, particularly registration, enhances 12 Idem, 11.
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Papers by Federico Morando