Search Results (5)

In this article, we contextualise, describe and analyse the last attempt at land reform in Spain—the one passed by the Autonomous Parliament of Andalusia in 1984. The Andalusians had passed their Statute of Autonomy by referendum in 1981, incorporating the mandate to carry out an agrarian reform that would boost the rural economy, generate employment and balance the agricultural structure of this region in Southern Spain, peripheral to both national and European centres of power. The Andalusian socialist government complied with this mandate, pushing the agrarian reform law through and applying a package of reform measures, which met with resistance from landowners and conservative political forces from the outset. Political, economic, legal and administrative obstacles swiftly discouraged the Andalusian socialists from persevering in the endeavour, and at the beginning of the nineties, its dismantling began. Finally, in 2011 the end of the agrarian reform was declared, and with it, the waiver of the right to consider alternative models to the liberal management of the agricultural sector. Archives and newspaper libraries, as well as administrative and legal sources, have been consulted, and the information has been examined using content analysis and cross-checked and triangulated with the specialised literature. This article hails a breakthrough in the understanding of the socio-territorial scopes of an agrarian reform little studied to date. Full article

Recently there has been an exponential growth of the number of publicly available legal resources. Portals allowing users to search legal documents, through keyword queries, are now widespread. However, legal documents are mainly stored and offered in different sources and formats that do not facilitate semantic machine-readable techniques, thus making difficult for legal stakeholders to acquire, modify or interlink legal knowledge. In this paper, we describe Solon, a legal document management platform. It offers advanced modelling, managing and mining functions over legal sources, so as to facilitate access to legal knowledge. It utilizes a novel method for extracting semantic representations of legal sources from unstructured formats, such as PDF and HTML text files, interlinking and enhancing them with classification features. At the same time, utilizing the structure and specific features of legal sources, it provides refined search results. Finally, it allows users to connect and explore legal resources according to their individual needs. To demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of our approach, Solon has been successfully deployed in a public sector production environment, making Greek tax legislation easily accessible to the public. Opening up legislation in this way will help increase transparency and make governments more accountable to citizens. Full article

Based on existing literature, this article makes a case for open (government) data as supporting political efficiency, socio-economic innovation and administrative efficiency, but also finds a lack of measurable impact. It attributes the lack of impact to shortcomings regarding data access (must be efficient) and data usefulness (must be effective). To address these shortcomings, seven key activities that add value to data are identified and are combined into the 7R Data Value Framework, which is an applied methodology for linked data to systematically address both technical and social shortcomings. The 7R Data Value Framework is then applied to the international Fusepool project that develops a set of integrated software components to ease the publishing of open data based on linked data and associated best practices. Real-life applications for the Dutch Parliament and the Libraries of Free University of Berlin are presented, followed by a concluding discussion. Full article

The web and the social web play an increasingly important role as an information source for Members of Parliament and their assistants, journalists, political analysts and researchers. It provides important and crucial background information, like reactions to political events and comments made by the general public. The case study presented in this paper is driven by two European parliaments (the Greek and the Austrian parliament) and targets an effective exploration of political web archives. In this paper, we describe semantic technologies deployed to ease the exploration of the archived web and social web content and present evaluation results. Full article

Monitoring mine waste from sulfide deposits by hyperspectral remote sensing can be used to predict surface water quality by quantitatively estimating acid drainage and metal contamination on a yearly basis. In addition, analysis of the mineralogy of surface crusts rich in soluble salts can provide a record of annual humidity and temperature. In fact, temporal monitoring of salt efflorescence from mine wastes at a mine site in the Iberian Pyrite Belt (Huelva, Spain) has been achieved using hyperspectral airborne Hymap data. Furthermore, climate variability estimates are possible based on oxidation stages derived from well-known sequences of minerals, by tracing sulfide oxidation intensity using archive spectral libraries. Thus, airborne and spaceborne hyperspectral remote sensing data can be used to provide a short-term record of climate change, and represent a useful set of tools for assessing environmental geoindicators in semi-arid areas. Spectral and geomorphological indicators can be monitored on a regular basis through image processing, supported by field and laboratory spectral data. In fact, hyperspectral image analysis is one of the methods selected by the Joint Research Centre of the European Community (Ispra, Italy) to study abandoned mine sites, in order to assess the enforcement of the European Mine Waste Directive (2006/21/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council 15 March 2006) on the management of waste from extractive industries (Official Journal of the European Union, 11 April 2006). The pyrite belt in Andalucia has been selected as one of the core mission test sites for the PECOMINES II program (Cracow, November 2005), using imaging spectroscopy; and this technique is expected to be implemented as a monitoring tool by the Environmental Net of Andalucía (REDIAM, Junta de Andalucía, Spain). Full article