Angela Locoro

• Professor
• Associate Professor at University of Brescia

With the advent of the data era, and of new, more intelligent interfaces for supporting decision making, there is a growing need to define, model and assess human ability and data visualizations usability for a better encoding and decoding of data patterns. Data Visualization Literacy (DVL) is the ability of encoding and decoding data into and from...

With the advent of the data era and of new, more intelligent interfaces for supporting decision-making, there is a growing need to define, model and assess human ability and data visualization usability for better encoding and decoding of data patterns. Data Visualization Literacy (DVL) is the ability to encode and decode data into and from a visua...

Functional size measures are widely used for estimating software development effort. After the introduction of Function Points, a few “simplified” measures have been proposed, aiming to make measurement simpler and applicable when fully detailed software specifications are not yet available. However, some practitioners believe that, when considerin...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used to expand the concept of End-User Development (EUD), allowing end users to describe their needs related to the creation, modification, extension or testing of digital artifacts in natural language. This paper presents a survey on recent papers that explore the integration of EUD with LLMs. The final aim i...

Functional size measures are often used as the basis for estimating development effort, because they are available in the early stages of software development. Several simplified measurement methods have also been proposed, both to decrease the cost of measurement and to make functional size measurement applicable when functional user requirements...

In this paper, we present the DEA (Design for EUDability) methodology, which is derived from the need to design End-User Development (EUD) environments for specific domains and workplaces, by taking into account workers’ Computational Thinking (CT) skills. After introducing the concept of EUDability, we outline the phases of the DEA methodology and...

Measuring software functional size via standard Function Points Analysis (FPA) requires the availability of fully specified requirements and specific competencies. Most of the time, the need to measure software functional size occurs well in advance with respect to these ideal conditions, under the lack of complete information or skilled experts. T...

The sustainable and digital future of work may imply a dramatic equilibrium change between social factors and technological ones. We argue that providing suitable tools to support End-User Development (EUD) in the workplace could represent a way to cope with such future changes. The contributions of this paper include the analysis and characterizat...

In software engineering, measuring software functional size via the IFPUG Function Point Analysis using the standard manual process can be a long and expensive activity. To solve this problem, several early estimation methods have been proposed and have become de facto standard processes. Among these, a prominent one is High-level Function Point An...

Data visualization made of multiple visualization techniques, e.g., dashboards and small multiples, is taking the scene as data, AI algorithms and their analysis are becoming more complex and articulated. However, still too little is said about what are the core dimensions of these interactions that may contribute to characterize visualization tech...

In this paper, we introduce the main topics and the initial settings of an Italian PRIN project aimed at investigating how the systematic adoption of systems for the evaluation of research in the Italian academic context may influence research outcomes. We motivate the need to adopt and adapt a conceptual framework, which may identify, define and d...

This paper investigates the managerial competencies played at different phases of digital metamorphosis projects. We define digital metamorphosis as the socio-technical counterpart of digital transformation in organizations, where the former focuses more on people’s skills, managerial attitudes and organizational behaviours rather than on mere tech...

Visual objects made of multiple views, e.g., dashboards and small multiples, are taking the scene in information communication and visual patterns design, but still vague are the studies that try to abstract away from characterizing them at the level of their single charts, and rather focus on their structural characteristics and the resulting inte...

A major problem in education and visual information design is that, while tools to measure people’s reading and writing ability with texts and numbers are ripe, the ability to properly process information from data graphics – an ability that can be called Visual Information Literacy – is still off the radar, and even less interest is apparently dev...

This paper investigates the managerial competencies played at different phases of digital metamorphosis projects. We define digital metamorphosis as the socio-technical counterpart of digital transformation in organizations, where the former focuses more on people's skills, managerial attitudes and organizational behaviours rather than on mere tech...

This paper reports the assessment of the infographics-value (IGV) short scale, designed to measure the value in the use of infographics. The scale was made to assess the implicit quality dimensions of infographics. These dimensions were experienced during the execution of tasks in a contextualized scenario. Users were asked to retrieve a piece of i...

This paper reports of an experimental crossover between two different perspectives of organizational activities: decision making and data management. Although there are ever-growing contact points between the two, it is also true that in enterprises data-driven decision making often shows room for improvements. A converging direction of these two a...

In this paper, we address the problem of assessing the social value of open data. While the number of open data initiatives increases and many data sets are currently available to lay people, common citizens and end users, a still limited number of studies specifically address how to improve open data understandability, their usability by common us...

In this work, we challenge the concept of design in the development of information systems. Information systems are usually considered to be so complex systems that they simply cannot be developed outside of a specific activity of planning. However, in the specialized literature, some voices have also been raised saying that it is this situated and...

In this chapter, we focus on an emerging strand of IT-oriented research, namely Human-Data Interaction (HDI) and on how this can be applied to healthcare. HDI regards both how humans create and use data by means of interactive systems, which can both assist and constrain them and the operational level of data work, which is both work on data and by...

In the last thirty years, agent-based modelling has become a well-known technique for studying and simulating dynamical systems. Still, there are some open issues to be addressed. One of these is the substantial absence of studies about the sensitivity to initial conditions, that is the effect of small variations at the beginning of simulation on t...

This article focuses on the production side of clinical data work, or data recording work, and in particular, on its multiplicity in terms of data variability. We report the findings from two case studies aimed at assessing the multiplicity that can be observed when the same medical phenomenon is recorded by multiple competent experts, yet the reco...

In this work, we provide an overview of contemporary perspectives of design that may challenge the traditional design of IT and socio-technical systems. Our starting metaphor is that of ‘wicked problems’, where the singularity, incompleteness and intrinsic uncertainty of real world settings foregrounds how the worldview that designers offer to prac...

This paper discusses the role of redundancy in hospital work, especially in facilitating the cognitive and coordinative tasks of health practitioners in clinical settings. It also investigates the ways in which health information technology can preserve, support and even enhance this role by being grounded in the observations and analyses that two...

In this paper, a socio-technical perspective on the roles of Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Digital Officer (CDO) is introduced, and a model of interpretation of their respective roles, their potential interplay and idiosyncrasies is presented and discussed. We start our analysis by proposing a socio-technical model based on typologies o...

The paper reports on two different adoption experiences of an in-house Enterprise Social Media (ESM), at the local and global level in a big company. It compares the deployment strategies and their impact on the users appropriation of the ESM in the two settings. Our observations let emerge how the local level design strategy aimed to link the init...

In this work, we challenge the concept of design in the development of information systems. Information systems are usually considered to be so complex systems that they simply cannot be developed outside of a specific activity of planning. However, in the specialist literature, some voices have also been raised saying that it is this situated and...

This paper sheds light on an overlooked aspect of Digital Transformation processes and projects: the managerial competences necessary to make them happen, evolve and be achieved. Many technology maturity models are discussed in the literature, but little or no mention is done regarding how to model and assess the broader set of managerial competenc...

This paper is an overview of the use of data based on their “value chain” and about the need to design proper interaction tools for whomever is interested in a rich, direct and purposeful interaction with them; from their origin of production, to the formal passages they undergo, to the open data formats through which they are freely available on t...

In this paper we present the findings of a systematic literature review covering the articles published in the last two decades in which the authors described the application of a machine learning technique and method to an orthopedic problem or purpose. By searching both in the Scopus and Medline databases, we retrieved, screened and analyzed the...

Data privacy refers to ensuring that users keep control over access to information, whereas data accessibility refers to ensuring that information access is unconstrained. Conflicts between privacy and accessibility of data are natural to occur, and healthcare is a domain in which they are particularly relevant. In the present article, we discuss h...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phenomenon of the digital do-it-yourself (DiDIY) in the medical domain. In particular, the main contribution of the paper is the analysis and discussion of a questionnaire-based user study focused on 3D printing (3DP) technology, which was conducted among clinicians of one of the most import...

This paper reports the first validation steps of the prototype of a Time Accounting System (TAS), which has been designed and developed to investigate how a technology that facilitates service exchanges using local currency can be accepted in a developing country, namely in Bangladesh. The paper describes the results of two Confirmatory Focus Group...

In this paper, a socio-technical perspective on the roles of Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Digital Officer (CDO) is introduced, and a model of interpretation of their respective roles, their potential interplay and idiosyncrasies is presented and discussed. We start our analysis by proposing a socio-technical model based on typologies o...

Digital Do-It-Yourself (“DiDIY” for short) stands at the intersection of maker and hacker cultures, nourished in their turn by the DIY (Do-it-yourself) practices. In this paper, we briefly introduce these historical phenomena, which flow in the stream of subculture to the present days. We outline DiDIY as a complex mingling, involving social, cultu...

This paper is an overview of the feminist studies in computer science and technologies and, in particular, on the feminine perspectives of the relational foundations of reality, of an "embodied knowledge", which mediate the interactions with and the interpretations of the world. The feminist studies about the sociality with objects, the interaction...

In this chapter, we focus on an emerging strand of IT-oriented research, namely Human-Data Interaction (HDI) and on how this can be applied to healthcare. HDI regards both how humans create and use data by means of interactive systems, which can both assist and constrain them and the operational level of data work, which is both work on data and by...

Infographics are a common visual means to inform users. This paper investigates how lay people of different age, gender and educational background perceive the use of infographics for information visualization in daily tasks. We chose three topics of general interest: weather, study and work, and three infographics, one for each topic. We administe...

Stimulated by the maturity and ease-of-use of online psychometric questionnaire platforms, in this paper we discuss their exploitation as tools to gather representative indications, collect preferences and elicit requirements from the members of online communities for the design of their Web-based technologies. To this practical aim, we suggest an...

Stimulated by the maturity and ease-of-use of online psychometric questionnaire platforms, in this paper we discuss their exploitation as tools to gather representative indications, collect preferences and elicit requirements from the members of online communities for the design of their web-based technologies. To this practical aim, we suggest an...

Two methods are proposed for collective knowledge extraction from questionnaires with ordinal scales and dichotomous questions. Both methods are based on a three-way decision procedure and a statistical method aimed at attaining statistical significance of the above decision. One method is aimed at giving an (absolute) assessment of “objects” acco...

The paper illustrates the adoption of an Enterprise Social Media in a multinational corporation: the primary goal was to support the sharing of experiences among its members and to facilitate their collaboration. The paper highlights the outcomes and the problems that have been encountered in the effort to link this initiative to the achievement of...

In this paper, we start by deconstructing the widely-mentioned concept of care in the IS literature, to unveil its inherent shortcomings and ambiguities, and find opportunities to go beyond it while preserving its value for the development of better socio-technical systems. We find an important strand in the feminist studies tradition, and in parti...

Big data analytics in healthcare would be almost useless, without suitable tools allowing users "see" them, and gain insight for their situated decisions. The VVH (Valuable Visualization in Healthcare) workshop focuses on the role of interactive data visualization tools by which people can make sense of healthcare data; these data include sensor da...

We undertook a user study to evaluate whether the perceived utility of some common open data sets for family doctors would increase if they are rendered in interactive heat maps. We also investigated whether Parallel Coordinates (PC) are perceived as a convenient diagram to summarize multiple patients data; and whether making PCs interactive would...

The paper illustrates the adoption of an Enterprise Social Media in a multinational corporation: the primary goal was to support the sharing of experiences among its members and to facilitate their collaboration. The paper highlights the outcomes and the problems that have been encountered in the effort to link this initiative to the achievement of...

This paper focuses on the main question whether social media specifically conceived to enable local exchange trading schema can be adopted in different contexts than the western digitized society, where those systems have been considered a feasible alternative to money-based capitalism. We report a qualitative study employing focus groups to study...

In this paper, we focus on an emerging strand of IT-oriented research, namely Human-Data Interaction (HDI) and how this can be applied to healthcare. HDI regards both how humans create and use data by means of interactive systems, which can both assist and constrain them, as well as to passively collect and proactively generate data. Healthcare pro...

This paper aims to shed light on an emerging class of phenomena that are re-lated to the abundance of data, which either come from personal life records or from open data portals, and to the strategies to tame this abundance to enable the human making of sense and decision. In particular, a new catego-ry can be introduced for these kind of data, wh...

In this paper, we propose an original methodology by which to assess the construct of the situated social value of open data and we apply it to the healthcare domain in regard to information by which hospitals can be ranked to compare service providers. Our methodology encompasses a questionnaire-based user study and a method by which to rank infor...

In this paper, we report the experimentation of QUESt, a web-based tool designed to disseminate case-based knowledge in communities of experts, in the domain of medical training. To this aim, QUESt allowed the teachers of a specialization medical school to create a virtual patient in the form of interactive online questionnaires and have students i...

In this paper, we discuss the concept of tacit collective knowledge and focus on how to externalize it to inform discussion and reflective thinking within a community of expert practitioners about their own distributed practices. We draw our approach from a series of studies undertaken in different large communities, by outlining the one we underto...

In this paper, we present a method by which to build a metaphorical map of a portion of the scholarly literature along conceptual dimensions that have been previously characterized in terms of positive, negative and neutral terms. The method allows to “locate” scholarly works in this space, according to multiple criteria, like the definitions that...

Knowledge Artifact (KA) is an analytical construct denoting material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use, sharing and representation of knowledge. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing literature by providing a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the heterogeneous scholar contributions proposed on this concept...

Linked data are becoming one of the most adopted model used to publish data on the Web. Thanks to the possibility to connect different datasets by means of the RDF features, linked data are suitable to fully exploit the nature of the Web. Even if a lot of tools are available supporting the publication of linked data, in the literature there is a la...

In this paper, we start by deconstructing the widely-mentioned concept of care in the IS literature, to unveil its inherent shortcomings and ambiguities, and find opportunities to go beyond it while preserving its value for the development of better socio-technical systems. We find an important strand in the feminist studies tradition, and in parti...

In a previous paper, we have investigated the different dimensions of a classificatory framework suitable to support the assessment and benchmarking of the social value of open data initiatives. In this paper, we propose a methodology that compares and evaluates open data social value, and we apply it to the specific domain of hospital care. Throug...

Understanding and describing past or present societies is a complex task, as it involves a multi-faceted analysis of the norms, interactions, and evolutions that characterize them. This serves as the motivation for developing a tool, named Herodotus, aiming at supporting domain experts, such as historians or archaeologists, in the reasoning tasks o...

Knowledge Artifact (KA) is an analytical construct by which analysts, researchers and designers from different disciplines usually denote those material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use, sharing and representation of knowledge. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing literature by providing a conceptual framework for the...

Knowledge Artifact is an analytical construct by which analysts, researchers and designers from different disciplines usually denote those material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use, sharing and representation of knowledge. This makes this concept central to understanding organizational ecologies and to the design of IT artifac...

Context-based matching finds correspondences between entities from two ontologies by relating them to other resources. A general view of context-based matching is designed by analysing existing such matchers. This view is instantiated in a path-driven approach that (a) anchors the ontologies to external ontologies, (b) finds sequences of entities (...

This paper presents the architecture of a holonic multi-agent system for rock art interpretation and discusses the results achieved within the "Indiana MAS" project. We show how the AgentSketch and the ImageRec holons belonging to the Indiana MAS, able to cope with hand drawn sketches and images respectively, have been tested in the domain of Mount...

In this paper we present an original position on how knowledge is created and shared in organizational domains. We propose a metaphor of diffusion, borrowed from genetics, and a four phase model, which aims to be as simple as the SECI model proposed within the OKCT, but also more comprehensive and sociologically-informed. Our model takes into accou...

Unambiguous definition of spatial position and orientation has crucial importance for robotics. In this paper we propose an ontology about positioning. It is part of a more extensive core ontology being developed by the IEEE RAS Working Group on ontologies for robotics and automation. The core ontology should provide a common ground for further ont...

In this paper, we present the current results of the newly formed IEEE-RAS Working Group, named Ontologies for Robotics and Automation. In particular, we introduce a core ontology that encompasses a set of terms commonly used in Robotics and Automation along with the methodology we have adopted. Our work uses ISO/FDIS 8373 standard developed by the...

This paper presents the "Ontologica" system, a forefront project born from a joint effort between the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and System Engineering of Genoa university and Ansaldo STS from the same city in the design of advanced information systems. The aim of the project is twofold: the adoption of ontologies to manage...

In this paper we present an approach for the translation and classification of short texts in one step. Our work lays in the tradition of Domain-Driven Word Sense Disambiguation, though a major emphasis is given to domain ontologies as the right tool for sense-tagging and topic detection of short texts which, by their nature, are known to be reluct...

This paper discusses some of the challenges raised by multilinguality in the Public Administration field and shows how the MUSE system addresses them by combining speech to text, text to speech, and machine translation techniques, utilizing domain ontologies throughout a complex system designed as a Multi-Agent System and deployed by exploiting res...

BOwL applies word sense disambiguation techniques for tagging ontology entities with WordNet words. Boolean operators that appear in names of ontology entities are interpreted based on their semantics and are used during the ontology matching stage accordingly. Experimental results are shown, demonstrating the feasibility of the approach.

The research presented in this paper describes an automated approach for extracting concepts from annotated shared contents within a collaborative web environment, and matching them with domain ontologies. Feedback on the domain ontology suitability for the environment purposes is provided as a result of the automatic matching between the domain on...

This paper presents the "Ontologica" system, a forefront project born from a joint effort between university and industry in the design of advanced information systems. The aim of the project is twofold: to adopt ontologies and new technologies to manage the Centralized Traffic Control logic in a railway and all the rules making the physical elemen...

The Indiana MAS project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research "Futuro in Ricerca 2010" program, aims at providing a framework for the digital protection and conservation of rock art natural and cultural heritage sites, by storing, organizing and presenting information about them in such a way to encourage scientific...

This paper describes how natural language processing and ontologies are exploited for automatic text categorisation. The approach introduced is part of the MANENT system, an infrastructure for integrating, structuring and searching Digital Libraries. The procedure of structural information extraction, and of the automatic classification of the reco...

Digital Libraries represent the commitment of research communities to preserve authoritative and well structured sources of knowledge, and to share archival organisations, methods and resources thanks to systems relying on standard metadata formats. This chapter describes some natural language processing techniques exploited for automatically extra...

The use of WordNet Domains is confined in the present days to Text Mining field. Moreover, the tagging of WordNet synsets with WordNet Domain labels is a crisp one. This paper introduces an approach for automatically tagging both ontologies and their concepts with WordNet domains in a fuzzy fashion, for topic classification purposes. Our fuzzy Word...

The correct management of resources that can become unavailable over time and the efficient (in terms of both cost and time) re-allocation of the services they provided before becoming unavailable, is an open problem that arises in a wide range of application domains. Despite to some differences, many scenarios spanning very different domains, from...

In this paper we present a work dealing with opinion analysis carried out thanks to an innovative approach based on ontology matching. The aim of this work is to allow two enterprises to share and merge the results of opinion analyses on their own products and services.

In this paper we present a work dealing with opinion analysis carried out thanks to an innovative approach based on ontology matching. The aim of this work is to allow two enterprises to share and merge the results of opinion analyses on their own products and services.

Ontology matching" is the process of finding correspondences between entities belonging to different ontologies. This paper describes a set of algorithms that exploit upper ontologies as semantic bridges in the ontology matching process and presents a systematic analysis of the relationships among features of matched ontologies (number of simple an...

This paper introduces a system, named "Knowledge Practice Environment", which focuses on innovative practices in knowledge creation and evolution. Design and implementation are based on the "trialogical" approach, an innovative pedagogical theory which aims at modelling collaborative knowledge-intensive activities around shared artefacts. In partic...

In an ideal world, an ontology matching algorithm should return all the correct correspondences (it should be complete) and should return no wrong correspondences (it should be correct). In the real world, no imple- mented ontology matching algorithm is both correct and complete. For this reason, repairing wrong corre- spondences in an ontology ali...