Contributions in Merlin

he SciMantic project aims at designing and developing a modular software infrastructure termed Semantic Content Infrastructure (SCI) which enables secure sharing of distributed contents. This SCI consists of independent nodes which interact with each other through Web services to share their contents. To develop a modular SCI, system requirements must be known and available technologies must be studied. This deliverable has the purpose to derive functional requirements of an SCI based on two real-world scenarios which make use of this software infrastructure. This deliverable also describes key technologies needed to build an SCI. The two scenarios presented in this deliverable are a distributed Web Content Management System (WCMS) and a Knowledge Sharing System (KSS). In a distributed WCMS, instances of WCMS are controlled by independent but co-operating organizations which want to share their Web contents. An example is the various (national) WWF organizations supporting each other in conducting their projects. Each of this organization deploys its own WCMS instance, and raw information on activities of a WWF organization can be accessed by a WCMS instance of another WWF organization to be presented in a specific form. While the set of instances of distributed WCMS can be considered static, the situation is different in KSS where its instances can join and leave at any time. Furthermore, knowledge shared by KSS instances can be stored in a distributed manner into the system database in order to achieve higher availability. Driven by these two scenarios, a set of key functional requirements is derived. Additionally, performance and security requirements are discussed. The key functional requirements include user and content management, keyword-based content tagging and search, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) mechanisms. Finally, respective mechanisms and technologies are analyzed which can be used to develop the SCI. They comprise technologies for building modular software architecture as well as technologies for data modeling, for implementing functionalities required, and to provide security.

This deliverable presents the design of the architecture of a secure and scalable Semantic Content Infrastructure (SCI). The SCI is a service-based infrastructure which provides a set of functionality for management and sharing of semantically linked data (content). SCI is a network of co-operating and independent nodes, where each node may join and leave the network at any time. Each SCI node implements an instance of a Semantic Content Sharing System (SCSS). The SCSS is an extensible service platform based on OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative). It provides a framework to expose OSGi services as RESTful Web services and a number of interfaces to allow for secured access and manipulation of semantic contents. Furthermore, it enables content annotations with keywords and searching of shared content based on keywords. The Apache Project Clerezza initiated by trialox AG is developing a platform which serves as a basis for SCSS. In this deliverable, architectural components of SCSS and their interfaces are described in detail.

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In diesem Artikel werden die Grundzüge der Geldpolitik der Schweizerischen Nationalbank (SNB) und der Inflationsentwicklung seit ihrer Gründung 1907 dargestellt. Vereinfachend lassen sich drei geldpolitische Phasen unterscheiden, die der jeweils vorherrschenden internationalen Währungsordnung entsprechen. In der ersten Phase bestimmte der Goldstandard die Geldpolitik. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg löste das Bretton-Woods-System den Goldstandard ab. In beiden Phasen waren die Wechselkurse fest. Die dritte Phase hat in der ersten Hälfte der 1970er-Jahre begonnen und ist durch flexible Wechselkurse charakterisiert.

In many countries, tax authorities treat building savings favorably, in order to incentivize homeownership. A solution that addresses home price risk can be provided by using property derivatives. Index-linked mortgages thus provide Pareto improvements by allocating collateral risk more optimally and by reducing the number of default and related costs. Housing is one of the biggest financial assets that most households will ever own. However, management of housing risk is difficult, since there are virtually no instruments that insure against rising or falling home prices. The financial solutions which are described in this chapter would be able to allocate risks and returns more appropriately. Linking the financial instruments that are commonly used in the context of housing, building savings, and mortgages, to a home price index addresses the issues naturally.

Framing effects are said to indicate irrationality in decision making because they illustrate that linguistically different descriptions of equivalent options lead to inconsistent choices. A review of the literature on the effects of adding, or subtracting, implicated complements of the sure option shows that this leads to a classic framing effect, a reversal of the classic effect, or no framing effect. Thus, the assumption of equivalence of formulations is not justified. In addition we provide a test of two major, but opposing theories on framing, prospect theory and fuzzy-trace theory. Based on an online study we investigated the effects of subtracting complements of the risky option. The results are more consistent with fuzzy-trace theory than with prospect theory. The consequences of these findings for the application of formal models like prospect theory, and for rationality, are discussed.

Objective – This chapter examines the performance of the market to discover efficient equilibrium under alternative auction designs. Background – Auctions are increasingly being used to allocate emissions allowances (“permits”) for cap and trade and common-pool resource management programs. These auctions create thick markets that can provide important information about changes in current market conditions. Methodology – This chapter uses experimental methods to examine the extent to which the predicted increase in the Walrasian price due to a shift in willingness to pay (perhaps due to a shift in costs of pollution abatement) is reflected in observed sales prices under alternative auction formats. Results – Price tracking is comparably good for uniform-price sealed-bid auctions and for multi-round clock auctions, with or without end-of-round information about excess demand. More price inertia is observed for “pay as bid” (discriminatory) auctions, especially for a continuous discriminatory format in which bids could be changed at will, in part because “sniping” in the final moments blocked the full effect of the demand shock. Conclusion – Uniform-price auctions (clock and sealed-bid uniform-price, and continuous uniform-price) generate changes in purchase prices that are reasonably close to predicted changes. There is some evidence of tacit collusion causing prices to be too low relative to predictions in most cases. The worst price tracking was observed for discriminatory auctions. Application – Uniform-price auctions appear to perform at least as well as other auction designs with respect to discovery of efficient market prices when there are unexpected and unannounced changes in willingness to pay for permits.

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