Suchergebnisse

Die suahelische Welt erstreckt sich über 3000 km entlang der ostafrikanischen Küste. In dieser Region haben Menschen unterschiedlicher Herkunft eine gemeinsame Geschichte geprägt. Der Kosmopolitismus der Bevölkerung erklärt sich vor allem durch die alten regelmäßigen Beziehungen zwischen den beiden Kontinenten Afrika und Asien. Diese Interaktion hat die suahelische Welt durch die Entwicklung einer Religion (Islam), einer Sprache (Kisuaheli) und einer Identität (Ushirazi) geprägt. Zanzibar nimmt dabei aufgrund der engen Verbindungen zum Sultanat Oman einen besonderen Platz ein. Zanzibar, seit 1964 Bestandteil der Vereinigten Republik Tansania, betrachtet sich als Verteidiger der Shirazi-Identität, die an den alten Einfluß Persiens erinnert. (DÜI-Ott)

Überblick über das Steuersystem und seine Bedeutung für die Regierung als Mittel zur Entwicklungspolitik (Sdt)

Aufgrund von Strukturschwächen im gegenwärtigen Sechs-Jahres-Plan (1977/78-1982/83) wurden die "Three Year Public Investment Programmes" eingeführt, um den Entwicklungsplan zu korrigieren und einen Wechsel im Wirtschaftsklima herbeizuführen. (DÜI-Sdt)

The most challenging question today for the citizens of any country in the Gulf region is whether it is heading in the right direction to become a durable, sustainable system, fully supported by its people and capable of being defended from internal and external threats. Mohamed A.J. Althani analyzes the domestically important areas of demography, security, provision of food and water, and the political and economic systems of the Arab countries at the center of the turmoil that has spread throughout the region since early 2011

Violence against women and girls continues to be a global epidemic that kills, tortures, and injures physically, psychologically, sexually, and economically. It is one of the most pervasive of human rights violations, denying women and girl"s equality, security, dignity, self-worth, and their right to enjoy fundamental freedoms. The study was guided by the following objectives; the first objective was to explore the causes of gender-based violence and how they affect women"s lives, the second objectives is to investigate the socio-cultural factors that accelerate the increase and institutionalization of violence against women and the third objectives is to explore government efforts in reducing inequality and violence against women and girls in Puntland. This study was conducted through a descriptive survey research design by using both quantitative and qualitative research methods in two-parts: A questionnaire and key informant interviews (KIIs) for collecting data and from selected respondents. Data were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) and Microsoft Excel. The study utilized snowball and purposive sampling to select a population sample size of 133. The study utilized Mean, Standard deviation and percentages; tables. In addition to that, data collection was analyzed using themes and explanations. The study revealed the women are not aware about the fact that their rights are being violated and that majority of the perpetrators are men and boys. Most incidences of violence occur due to patriarchal tendencies in the African societies, which fuel the believe that women must be disciplined. Other factors revealed in the study include Alcohol and drug use, Individual /Group Interest, discriminatory Culture, Weak state judicial institutions and depending on Traditional justice systems and Socio-cultural factors. The study further showed that government efforts to control violence against women exist in the Puntland as a whole, although with many weaknesses. Records showed that many women having reported to police, but the legal systems restrict the speedy conclusion of cases while other women choose to withdraw cases owing to fear of being hated by the family members. The study, therefore, recommends that the government should improve the state judicial institutions and police enforcement also the study recommended that a multi-sectoral approach that involves victims of physical abuse, perpetrators of physical violence, community members, religious leaders, government, non-governmental organizations, media, police, criminal justice, should be put in place in eliminating violence against women.

From its establishment, Puntland restored public institutions after the collapse of the central state in 1991 and civil servants were recruited to delivery public services. However, the civil servants were not recruited based on formal procedures rather based on clan quotas and recommendations by the key traditional elders and other informal powerholders. Most of the civil servants earned low wages and worked with very meagre budgets. These conditions affected service delivery and the performance of the civil servants. Recognizing challenges, the World Bank partnered with the government and launched Puntland Civil Service Reform Strategy (2015-2017). The Strategy is expected to bring tangible changes in the structure and functions of the government. Recruitment of civil servants based on merit is one of the ambitious objectives of this reform strategy. However, the main challenge could be deeply embedded clan quotas. It is agaist this backdrop that this study aims to establish the challenges and opportunities of Puntland civil service sector reform.

Over the last years, the Linked Open Data (LOD) has evolved from a mere 12 to more than 10,000 knowledge bases. These knowledge bases come from diverse domains including (but not limited to) publications, life sciences, social networking, government, media, linguistics. Moreover, the LOD cloud also contains a large number of crossdomain knowledge bases such as DBpedia and Yago2. These knowledge bases are commonly managed in a decentralized fashion and contain partly verlapping information. This architectural choice has led to knowledge pertaining to the same domain being published by independent entities in the LOD cloud. For example, information on drugs can be found in Diseasome as well as DBpedia and Drugbank. Furthermore, certain knowledge bases such as DBLP have been published by several bodies, which in turn has lead to duplicated content in the LOD . In addition, large amounts of geo-spatial information have been made available with the growth of heterogeneous Web of Data. The concurrent publication of knowledge bases containing related information promises to become a phenomenon of increasing importance with the growth of the number of independent data providers. Enabling the joint use of the knowledge bases published by these providers for tasks such as federated queries, cross-ontology question answering and data integration is most commonly tackled by creating links between the resources described within these knowledge bases. Within this thesis, we spur the transition from isolated knowledge bases to enriched Linked Data sets where information can be easily integrated and processed. To achieve this goal, we provide concepts, approaches and use cases that facilitate the integration and enrichment of information with other data types that are already present on the Linked Data Web with a focus on geo-spatial data. The first challenge that motivates our work is the lack of measures that use the geographic data for linking geo-spatial knowledge bases. This is partly due to the geo-spatial resources being described by the means of vector geometry. In particular, discrepancies in granularity and error measurements across knowledge bases render the selection of appropriate distance measures for geo-spatial resources difficult. We address this challenge by evaluating existing literature for point set measures that can be used to measure the similarity of vector geometries. Then, we present and evaluate the ten measures that we derived from the literature on samples of three real knowledge bases. The second challenge we address in this thesis is the lack of automatic Link Discovery (LD) approaches capable of dealing with geospatial knowledge bases with missing and erroneous data. To this end, we present Colibri, an unsupervised approach that allows discovering links between knowledge bases while improving the quality of the instance data in these knowledge bases. A Colibri iteration begins by generating links between knowledge bases. Then, the approach makes use of these links to detect resources with probably erroneous or missing information. This erroneous or missing information detected by the approach is finally corrected or added. The third challenge we address is the lack of scalable LD approaches for tackling big geo-spatial knowledge bases. Thus, we present Deterministic Particle-Swarm Optimization (DPSO), a novel load balancing technique for LD on parallel hardware based on particle-swarm optimization. We combine this approach with the Orchid algorithm for geo-spatial linking and evaluate it on real and artificial data sets. The lack of approaches for automatic updating of links of an evolving knowledge base is our fourth challenge. This challenge is addressed in this thesis by the Wombat algorithm. Wombat is a novel approach for the discovery of links between knowledge bases that relies exclusively on positive examples. Wombat is based on generalisation via an upward refinement operator to traverse the space of Link Specifications (LS). We study the theoretical characteristics of Wombat and evaluate it on different benchmark data sets. The last challenge addressed herein is the lack of automatic approaches for geo-spatial knowledge base enrichment. Thus, we propose Deer, a supervised learning approach based on a refinement operator for enriching Resource Description Framework (RDF) data sets. We show how we can use exemplary descriptions of enriched resources to generate accurate enrichment pipelines. We evaluate our approach against manually defined enrichment pipelines and show that our approach can learn accurate pipelines even when provided with a small number of training examples. Each of the proposed approaches is implemented and evaluated against state-of-the-art approaches on real and/or artificial data sets. Moreover, all approaches are peer-reviewed and published in a conference or a journal paper. Throughout this thesis, we detail the ideas, implementation and the evaluation of each of the approaches. Moreover, we discuss each approach and present lessons learned. Finally, we conclude this thesis by presenting a set of possible future extensions and use cases for each of the proposed approaches.