The increasing digitisation that we have witnessed in the past few years has resulted in increased information and communications technology (ICT) hardware manufacturing, which is not sustainable due to the growing demand for critical materials and the greenhouse emissions associated with it. A solution is transitioning to a circular economy (CE). To facilitate this, boost the data economy and digital innovation, the European Union has introduced digital product passports (DPPs), which should provide information about a product’s lifetime to bring more transparency into supply chains. However, several challenges, namely the lack of findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable ICT and materials data and tools to support its interpretation for decision-making, are present. Utilising ontologies and knowledge graphs is a possible solution. Although the ontology work in the ICT and materials domains has been on the rise, there is a lack of a unified semantic model that can capture the complex, heterogeneous cross-domain data needed for building DPPs of ICT devices such as laptops and data servers. Motivated by this, we present the RePlanIT ontology for ICT DPPs, which captures knowledge on several levels – ICT device, hardware components, materials and the CE itself. RePlanIT’s specification is based on a literature survey, interviews and inputs from domain experts from both industry and academia. The ontology, its utilisation for building a knowledge graph of DPPs of laptops and data servers and its application have been successfully validated in a real-world case focusing on supporting more sustainable ICT procurement in government. ... Read more

As we navigate the physical and digital world, we unknowingly leave behind an immense trail of data. We are informed about this via lengthy documents (e.g., privacy policies) or short statements (e.g., cookie popups). However, even when we know that data is collected, we remain largely unaware of its nature; what information it contains and how it relates to us. Data is highly personal. It contains and reveals information about our behavior and experiences scattered over time, which can be abstract and opaque even to us. Dataslip is an interactive installation where the construct of personal data is translated into a material and tangible representation in the form of a receipt or ‘personal data slip’. The receipt contains detailed information and illustrative examples of the data generated from our interactions with five different categories of products and services: (1) personalized public transport cards, (2) supermarket loyalty cards, (3) credit and debit cards, (4) wearables, and (5) mobile apps. Its length is proportional to the amount of data collected about us. With dataslip, we aim to reduce the distance between individuals and their personal data, elicit confrontation and invite people to question their role within the personal data ecosystems in which they are embedded. ... Read more

Crowdworker online communities -- operating in fora like mTurkForum and TurkerNation -- are an important actor in microwork markets. Albeit central to market dynamics, how the behavior of crowdworker communities and the dynamics of online marketplaces influence each other is yet to be understood. To provide quantitative evidence of such influence, we performed an analysis on 6-years worth of mTurk market activities and community discussions in six fora. We investigated the nature of the relationships that exist between activities in fora, tasks published in mTurk, requesters for such tasks, and task completion speed. We validate -- and expand upon -- results from previous work by showing that (i) there are differences between market demand and community activities that are specific to fora and task types; (ii) the temporal progression of HIT availability in the market is predictive of the upcoming amount of crowdworker discussions, with significant differences across fora and discussion categories; (iii) activities in fora can have a significant positive impact on the completion speed of tasks available in the market. ... Read more