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The research reported in this paper concerns the ongoing development of a Knowledge Intensive Sketching (KiS) framework through which designers are supported in foreseeing directly from their paper-based sketches the relevant life-cycle consequences of their ‘component form’ solution concepts. The goal of the KiS framework is to retain the important characteristics of freehand sketching, i.e. pencil and paper, whilst at the same time exploit the benefits of Knowledge Intensive CAD technology for proactively guiding designers in generating life-oriented solutions as from early design.

The notion of computational model is central to the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing. It defines an abstract model for distributed computations and characterizes at the same time the functionality of a supporting distributed virtual machine. Most current distributed systems, including e.g. the CORBA platforms, have converged on a subset of this computational model. In this paper, we review the model, providing a formal characterization for it, and we discuss various directions for extensions, considering in particular different trends in distributed systems construction.

A search was made on the CAB ABSTRACTS database for all scientific papers by the 16 speakers at this Symposium (Intercellular Signalling in the Mammary Gland, Hannah Research Institute, Ayr, UK, 13–15 April 1994) published since 1984. A total of 475 records was retrieved from the database.

This paper presents a schema that attempts to embrace all graphic language. The essence of the schema is shown in a matrix which presents a number of theoretical possibilities in terms of approaches to graphic language. One axis of the matrix describes the methods of configuration of graphic language, using such terms as pure linear, linear interrupted, list, linear branching, matrix, non-linear directed, non-linear open. The other axis describes the modes of symbolization of graphic language, using four somewhat crude categories: verbal/numerical, pictorial and verbal/numerical, pictorial, schematic. Numerous, examples are shown to clarify terms and the underlying concepts they describe. It is emphasized that the matrix is a device for directing thinking, rather than a means of defining graphic language. The paper is written from the standpoint of a practising graphic designer. The matrix is used to illustrate the wide range of approaches open to us in graphic language and the effect this is assumed to have on reading/viewing strategies and cognitive processes. It is mggested that the matrix is useful in focusing attention on two fundamental questions that ought always to be asked when deciding how a graphic message should be communicated: What should be the mode of symbolization and what should be the method of configuration? Legibility and related research is briefly reviewed in order to establish what light it throws on these questions; with a few notable exceptions it is found wanting. It is suggested that there is a need for more research that crosses the boundaries of the cells of the matrix. This paper is not the culmination of a sustained programme of research and brings no firm evidence to bear on any aspect of graphic language. It is the contribution of a graphic designer who has had the opportunity of associating with research workers concerned with the evaluation of graphic language, and is written as a tutorial paper to stimulate thought and discussion. It is an attempt to define the scope of graphic language and to show relationships between different approaches to it that have been, and can be, used. Throughout the paper, the totality of graphic language and its specifically graphic variables are emphasized. Though the approach may appear to be somewhat theoretical, it is intended that it should have practical implications.

A technological display is the interface between the human and technological systems. This tutorial is concerned with computer-based systems and displays that enable humans to interact with computers, and most of the examples are taken from real-time systems. It is with these systems that display design becomes most critical, since the human must respond accurately under speed stress. The displays must help the human comprehend complex and rapidly changing system events. Due to limitations in display size, the data are often highly coded and difficult to interpret. The learn- ability and memorability of displays are therefore important aspects of display design. The field of technological displays can be described in terms of certain broad categories. From a presentation point of view, displays can be classified as either alphanumeric or graphic. Within the field of alphanumeric CRT displays, a further distinction occurs between the conversational mode, where input is limited to a specific CRT location, and the formatted display that allows entry at pre-specified locations anywhere on a fixed mask. These types of displays are illustrated with examples from real-time telephone traffic management systems. The fundamental display design process consists of eight major steps that carry the designer from the initial analysis of the operating system to the detailed formatting of each display. At each stage the designer makes decisions based on adequate knowledge of human needs and limitations. Specific areas for additional psychological research are pointed out. In its broadest sense, the technological display is any presentation of data associated with an engineering or scientific discipline. To narrow things somewhat, it is necessary to distinguish between real-time displays and non-real-time displays. The distinction has more to do with the intended mode of use by the human than with the data or their method of generation. A display is an aid to the performance of some task. The user of the real-time display is involved in tasks that force him to decode and encode information within a rapidly changing environment. The speedometer in a car is an example. It is updated frequently and the driver needs to obtain information in a brief glance. If the display lags behind the speed of the auto or if it is difficult to determine quickly the current reading, the display is poorly designed. Thus, in general, real-time displays have the advantage that they can be objectively evaluated by the criteria of speed and accuracy of use.

In the last few years bureaucratic procedures didn't show a significant reduction in the volume of paper documents created. In order to reduce the huge amount of space for archiving and preserving documents and to speed up the secarh process, a semantic-based dematerialization process should be performed. In this paper we describe a novel system that manages several kind of bureaucratic documents in the e-gov domain, automatically extracts several interesting information and produces a suitable semantic representation that may be considered as the first step towards a full automated document management system. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

The handling of insider attacks is a significant technical challenge as little assurance theory and design practice exists to guide the design of effective, credible countermeasures for large systems and applications. Much of the relevant theory has focused on insider attacks on individual security protocols and smallscale applications. In this position paper, we suggest that confidence in a system’s resilience to insider attacks can emerge by the application of well-accepted survivability principles and design methods. We caution, however, that different tradeoffs emerge in applying these principles to practical designs, thereby requiring a careful balance among the costs of countering insider attacks, recovery from attack, and attack deterrence, and between the fine granularity of access permissions and ability to administer these permissions is a safe manner. In view of the dearth of practical solutions for surviving insider attacks in any significant-size system, we suggest that experiments in applying well-accepted principles and design methods to critical subsystems (e.g., user authentication, DNS) are necessary to provide effective and quantifiable assurances.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the electronic exchange of standard business documents in a structured and computer-processable form. The purpose of EDI is to enable a quick way to process business documents. EDI also facilitates paperless trading and it is a new way to conduct business. EDI solves some problems in the traditional paper document flow, including: Process delay caused by physical delivery of documents, and the reentering of data by the trading partners; Low accuracy of data that have been re-entered by the trading partners; High labor cost for re-entering data; Unexpected document loss; Uncertainty of payment source.

Due to growing interest in using natural language interfaces, it is appropriate to begin discussing their evaluation. This position paper presents the point of view that natural language interfaces offer special problems for evaluation, compared to problems encountered with other computer software. If ignored, such problems will make evaluation ineffectual. First, the paper describes the purposes and dimensions of problems in such an evaluation; differing purposes dictate differing approaches to evaluating natural language interfaces. Then, the paper points out some issues that turn out to be red herrings, and suggests a modest proposal that covers much of the broad spectrum of difficult issues involved. Since some of the issues and problems are common to both expert systems and natural language interfaces, comparisons of issues in evaluation of expert systems is also provided.

Funder: University of Cambridge, In this paper we study a class of fast geometric image inpainting methods based on the idea of filling the inpainting domain in successive shells from its boundary inwards. Image pixels are filled by assigning them a color equal to a weighted average of their already filled neighbors. However, there is flexibility in terms of the order in which pixels are filled, the weights used for averaging, and the neighborhood that is averaged over. Varying these degrees of freedom leads to different algorithms, and indeed the literature contains several methods falling into this general class. All of them are very fast, but at the same time all of them leave undesirable artifacts such as “kinking” (bending) or blurring of extrapolated isophotes. Our objective in this paper is to build a theoretical model in order to understand why these artifacts occur and what, if anything, can be done about them. Our model is based on two distinct limits: a continuum limit in which the pixel width h→0 and an asymptotic limit in which h>0 but h≪1. The former will allow us to explain “kinking” artifacts (and what to do about them) while the latter will allow us to understand blur. Both limits are derived based on a connection between the class of algorithms under consideration and stopped random walks. At the same time, we consider a semi-implicit extension in which pixels in a given shell are solved for simultaneously by solving a linear system. We prove (within the continuum limit) that this extension is able to completely eliminate kinking artifacts, which we also prove must always be present in the direct method. Finally, we show that although our results are derived in the context of inpainting, they are in fact abstract results that apply more generally. As an example, we show how our theory can also be applied to a problem in numerical linear algebra.

The paper analyses the problem of class generalisation from the non-traditional point of view—class life cycles. Model of class life cycle represents a process-oriented view on the class which is not usual in the field of conceptual modelling. This paper focuses on the problem of modelling life cycles of generic classes when there is a need to model several life cycles, valid at the same time. The paper shows that this problem is rooted in the natural contradiction of object- and process-oriented approach to modelling following from the fact that these two basic approaches are based on mutually contradicting primary types of hierarchical abstraction. The paper also shows that this problem is closely connected with the “problem of conflicting identities” in generalisation trees discussed on the border of the conceptual modelling and ontology engineering fields.

In the past few years, the world has witnessed severe fires in nightclubs, which have caused many human losses. This paper promotes a methodology which uses evacuation modeling analysis for improving the fire safety strategies (FSS) in nightclubs. The methodology is presented through a study case which represents a nightclub scenario. The results have shown that the use of evacuation modeling analysis can help immensely fire protection engineers to develop their FSS reports, incorporating the human behavior factor; rather than only considering the standard safety factors, such as travel distance. The same methodology can be also applied for fire safety management, which is another key-issue to be properly addressed for fire safety purposes in nightclubs. It is expected that this paper can bring some additional light to the way emergency evacuations are planned and addressed is in nightclubs.

The Semantic Web has been a very important development in how knowledge is disseminated and manipulated on the Web, but it has been of particular importance to the flow of scientific knowledge, and will continue to shape how data is stored and accessed in a broad range of disciplines, including life sciences, earth science, materials science, and the social sciences. Many books and papers have been published on the semantic web (particularly by Springer), but nothing to date has specifically illustrated how applications can be used to acquire, integrate, and deliver knowledge in so many scientific disciplines as this proposed volume. After first presenting papers on the foundations of semantic e-science, including papers on scientific knowledge acquisition, data integration, and workflow, this volume looks at the state of the art in each of the above-mentioned disciplines, presenting research on semantic web applications in the life, earth, materials, and social sciences. Drawing papers from three semantic web workshops, as well as papers from several invited contributors, this volume illustrates how far semantic web applications have come in helping to manage scientific information flow.

This paper addresses the problem of building a grid file system for applications that need to manipulate huge data, distributed and concurrently accessed at a very large scale. In this paper we explore how this goal could be reached through a cooperation between the Gfarm grid file system and BlobSeer, a distributed object management system specifically designed for huge data management under heavy concurrency. The resulting BLOB-based grid file system exhibits scalable file access performance in scenarios where huge files are subject to massive, concurrent, fine-grain accesses. This is demonstrated through preliminary experiments of our prototype, conducted on the Grid’5000 testbed.

In this paper, we discuss the problems of arbitrage detection, which is known as change point detection in statistics. There are some classical methods for change point detection, such as the cumulative sum (CUSUM) procedure. However, when utilizing CUSUM, we must be sure about the model of the data before detecting. We introduce a new method to detect the change points by using Hilbert–Huang transformation (HHT) to devise a new algorithm. This new method (called the HHT test in this paper) has the advantage in that no model assumptions are required. Moreover, in some cases, the HHT test performs better than the CUSUM test, and has better simulation results. In the end, an empirical study of the volatility change based on the S&P 500 is also given for illustration.

This paper presents elements of a data research infrastructure for Arts and Humanities. This paper wants to offer an answer on how Humanities research data sets can be integrated into new hybrid knowledge networks. These type of objects are particularly challenging, as it is often not clear how deep links between them could look like. The paper will suggest to look at a particular set of data grid technologies to establish such deep links between Humanities data sets. As we do not think that such a task can be addressed independently from the knowledge embedded in particular communities, we look at the data integration challenges in one such community, in classics.

Virtual digital mock-up (v-DMU) refers to all of the activities in the design, analysis, and visualization of the product in a 3D virtual environment that lead to a lower cost and a higher quality. In the early days, designers exchanged CAD files directly in collaborations. Recently, DMU systems have been used for relatively effective designs that generally support distributed and collaborative design capability by sharing the design data via the Internet. However, a range of problems can arise in such a case. In the case of large-scale products such as aircrafts or ships, the data size can be on a scale so large that it requires large amount of space on the workstation and requires considerable time for exchanges. Moreover, security problems often occur in the process of data exchanges. For a company and a nation, this can be crucial. The immersive visualization of product design data is becoming more important in collaborative design. As a solution to these issues, this paper proposes a new approach using the technology of the remote visualization of CAD data. This involves the streaming of rendered graphics using COVISE and SAGE. This paper also introduces the implementation of v-DMU based on e-Science by remote visualization.

This paper describes a novel classroom based project that looked at methods for sharing the contributions of students during activities in undergraduate classes. Initially intended for HCI students, the CRaSh product has wide applicability for creative use of class time and for inspiring students in their design work. The method employed was a prototype interface that allowed the sharing of digitally ink based content by uploading this content to a secure website. Encouraging shared learning, the project focuses on the creation, completion and management of worksheets for students. This paper describes the design of the prototype and explores the ethical and legal discussions associated with this sort of product.

The lack of formal semantics in the existing formalisms describing multi-agents models, combined with the complexity of multi-agents systems, are sources of several problems during their development process. The formal methods are known to bring rigorous and precise descriptions. They offer the possibility of checking the correction of specifications. In this framework and in previous papers (Ferber J, Gutknecht O (2002) MadKit user’s guide. Version 3.1) [23], we have proposed a formal and generic framework called DIMA-Maude, allowing formal description and validation of the DIMA model [15] with the Maude language [22]. This language, based on rewriting logic [21], offers a rich notation supporting formal specification, implementation, validation through simulation, and verification through accessibility analysis and model checking of concurrent systems (Koning JL (1999) Algorithms for translating interaction protocols into a formal description. In: IEEE Int Conf Syst Man Cybernet Conf, Tokyo, Japan). In this paper, we propose a rewriting logic-based tool for creating a DIMA model. This tool allows the edition and the simulation of a DIMA system. It allows the user to draw a DIMA system graphically and translates the graphical representation of the drawn DIMA model to a Maude specification. Then the Maude system is used to perform the simulation of the resulting Maude specification. This tool allows preserving the graphic notations offered by the DIMA model for clarity and getting a formal specification in Maude for analysis.

Based on the rapid development of Chinese agricultures, many English users are interesting on the Chinese agricultural information, and many Chinese users are interesting on English agricultural information too. This paper is a schema to design an agricultural cross languages engine, the core technology is the mapping between Chinese and English agricultural thesauri. The paper introduces the all rules of thesauri mapping, and give exact examples for these rules. With the mapping information, authors design a cross languages engine. English users can get Chinese agricultural information from web data by English descriptors; Chinese users can get English agricultural information from web data by Chinese descriptors

According to educational psychologists, the efficiency and effectiveness of the instruction process are influenced by the learning style of the student. This paper introduces an approach which integrates the most relevant characteristics from several learning style models proposed in the literature. The paper’s focus is on the data requirements for the dynamic learner modeling method, i.e., the learner’s observable behavior in an educational hypermedia system; based on the interpretation of these observables, the system can identify various learning preferences.

Data quality improvement has become a critical issue for many companies and organizations because poor data quality degrades organizational performance whereas improved data quality results in cost saving and customer satisfaction. Activities such as identify and removing "duplicate" database records from a single database, and correlating records from different databases that identify the same real world "entity" are used routinely to improve data quality. Due to huge databases having several hundred millions to several billions records, and continuously growing, efficient techniques and algorithms are needed. One way to speed up the processing is to adopt a two-step approach, where potential candidate records are grouped together in step one. After that each group is further processed and analyzed in step two. The so called "transitive closure problem" is a formal formulation of what needs to be done in step one. This paper introduces a record grouping problem called transitive closure, and proposes algorithms to solve the transitive closure problem. The paper also reports on the empirical study of the proposed algorithms and comments on their implementations.

The paper addresses the issue of development of a technology for operational decision support in a pervasive environment. The technology is built around the idea of using Web-services for self-organization of heterogeneous resources of the environment for decision support purposes. The approach focuses on three types of resources to be organized: information, problem-solving, and acting. The final purpose of the resource self-organization is to form an ad-hoc collaborative environment, members of which cooperate with the aim to serve the current needs according to the decision situation. The hybrid technology proposed in the paper integrates technologies of ontology management, context management, constraint satisfaction, Web-services, and intelligent agents. The application of the technology is illustrated by response to a traffic accident.

Computer-based chess machines have been built based on tree searches and parallel computing. Several papers have discussed the computer implementations of different types of chess games such as chess (western), Chinese chess (Xiangqi), Japanese chess (Shogi), and Hex. This paper focuses on the implementation of a triangle chess machine. We first make a brief explanation on the popular chess games and their related studies. We then describe the rules for playing a triangle chess. Basically, the triangle chess machine proposed in this paper considers all possible configurations of chess patterns and then makes moves based on these patterns. We present the software modules of the machine and discuss the computation issues related to this study. Conclusions and the directions for future studies are also given at the end of this paper.

Since the spatial pattern of forest pest occurrence is determined by biological characteristics and habitat conditions, this paper introduced construction of a cellular automaton model combined with Markov model to predicate the forest pest occurrence. Rules of the model includes the cell states rules, neighborhood rules and transition rules which are defined according to the factors from stand conditions, stand structures, climate and the influence of the factors on the state conversion. Coding for the model is also part of the implementations of the model. The participants were designed including attributes and operations of participants expressed with a UML diagram. Finally, the scale issues on forest pest occurrence prediction, of which the core are the prediction of element size and time interval, are partly discussed in this paper.

Access to knowledge about user goals represents a critical component for realizing the vision of intelligent agents acting upon user intent on the web. Yet, the manual acquisition of knowledge about user goals is costly and often infeasible. In a departure from existing approaches, this paper proposes Goal Mining as a novel perspective for knowledge acquisition. The research presented in this chapter makes the following contributions: (a) it presents Goal Mining as an emerging field of research and a corresponding automatic method for the acquisition of user goals from web corpora, in the case of this paper search query logs (b) it provides insights into the nature and some characteristics of these goals and (c) it shows that the goals acquired from query logs exhibit traits of a long tail distribution, thereby providing access to a broad range of user goals. Our results suggest that search query logs represent a viable, yet largely untapped resource for acquiring knowledge about explicit user goals.

The Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) defines a framework within which support of distribution, interoperability and portability can be integrated. However other ODP standards have to be defined. We treat in this paper the need for formal notation for concepts in the computational language. Indeed, the ODP viewpoint languages are abstract in the sense that they define what concepts should be supported not how these concepts should be represented. Using the denotational semantics in the context of UML we define in this paper syntax and semantics for core ODP structural concepts defined in the RM-ODP foundations part and in the computational language namely object action, computational object, and computational interface. These specification concepts are suitable for describing and constraining ODP computational viewpoint specifications.

Alcohol use and abuse contributes to both acute and chronic negative health outcomes and represents a major source of mortality and morbidity in the world as a whole (Ezzati et al., 2002) and in the developed world, such as the United States, where alcohol consumption is one of the primary risk factors for the burden of disease. It ranks as a leading risk factor after tobacco for all disease and premature mortality in the United States (Rehm et al., 2003; Said and Wegman, 2007). In a companion piece to this paper, Wegman and Said (2009) outline a graph-theoretic agent based simulation tool that accommodates the temporal and geospatial dimensions of acute outcomes. In order to complement that modeling paper, this paper focuses on methods to exploit temporal and spatial data with the idea of calibrating the model to include these effects. The model developed inWegman and Said (2009) incorporates a social network component. The overall goal of the model is not just to simulate known data, but to provide a policy tool that would allow decision makers to examine the feasibility of alcohol-related interventions. Such interventions are designed to reduce one or more acute outcomes such as assault, murder, suicide, sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, and DWI-related injuries and deaths. By adjusting conditional probabilities, the effect of interventions can be explored without actually introducing major societal policy actions.

In this paper, we focus on metadata for self-created movies like those found on YouTube and Google Video, the duration of which are increasing in line with falling upload restrictions. While simple tags may have been sufficient for most purposes for traditionally very short video footage that contains a relatively small amount of semantic content, this is not the case for movies of longer duration which embody more intricate semantics. Creating metadata is a time-consuming process that takes a great deal of individual effort; however, this effort can be greatly reduced by harnessing the power of Web 2.0 communities to create, update and maintain it. Consequently, we consider the annotation of movies within Web 2.0 environments, such that users create and share that metadata collaboratively and propose an architecture for collaborative movie annotation. This architecture arises from the results of an empirical experiment where metadata creation tools, YouTube and an MPEG-7 modelling tool, were used by users to create movie metadata. The next section discusses related work in the areas of collaborative retrieval and tagging. Then, we describe the experiments that were undertaken on a sample of 50 users. Next, the results are presented which provide some insight into how users interact with existing tools and systems for annotating movies. Based on these results, the paper then develops an architecture for collaborative movie annotation.

Network convergence across different access technologies holds a promise of enabling ubiquitous service availability but faces several technical challenges. With anticipated proliferation of multimode IP devices, the optimal selection of a service delivery network among multiple IP based wireless access alternatives is one of the important issues that is actively studied and discussed in several standardization forums. Use of multi attribute decision making (MADM) algorithms has been proposed in the past for network selection decisions in a heterogeneous wireless network environment. A direct comparison of these algorithms is difficult as this would require the use of another MADM algorithm. A better approach instead is to ascertain the appropriateness of the algorithm to the problem space. This paper provides the basis for evaluating the appropriateness of MADM algorithms for network selection. It analyzes the use of MADM algorithms such as TOPSIS, ELECTRE and GRA for network selection and argues that GRA provides the best approach in scenarios where the utilities of some of the attributes are non-monotonic. The paper proposes a novel stepwise approach for GRA that uses multiple reference networks and explains its working with network selection scenarios.

With the rapid growth of software size and complexity, how to understand and maintain a software system has become a great challenge in its life-cycle, especially from the global perspective. The paper mainly focuses on the comprehension problem of database-based software systems. A framework for visualizing and analyzing table dependency structure of a DB-based application is proposed, and its corresponding prototype tool named DBViewer is implemented. It mainly includes two main functions, i.e., table dependency visualization in database and structure feature metrics. The key methods of building this tool are proposed and some characters of table dependency relations in database are also found via metrics in this paper. Some experiments are performed on five DB-based software systems, and some preliminary rules have been found: (1) the degree distribution of table dependency graph roughly conforms to power law, (2) the average path length of the max connected subgraph is small, and (3) the clustering effect is not so evident and the coefficients are all less than 0.05 in the max connected sub-graph of all table dependency relations.

The functional programming system SFP under development at the Institute of Informatics Systems in Novosibirsk is aimed at supporting development of parallel computing applications that still offer high performance and portability. The paper describes equivalent transformations of the Sisal 3.2 programming language (based on Sisal 90) structures. These transformations are to decompose the complex language structures into more simple ones that can be directly expressed by the internal representation IR1, which is based on the intermediate form language IF1. Currently some description of similar transformations can be found in few works about Sisal 90 in the form of examples. These transformations are performed by the front-end compiler from Sisal 3.2 into IR1 and help to better understand its translation strategy. The paper also briefly describes IR1 languages.

Bayesian network is a powerful tool to represent and deal with uncertain knowledge. There exists much uncertainty in crop or animal disease. The construction of Bayesian network need much data and knowledge. But when data is scarce, some methods should be adopted to construct an effective Bayesian network. This paper introduces a disease diagnosis model based on Bayesian network, which is two-layered and obeys noisy-or assumption. Based on the two-layered structure, the relationship between nodes is obtained by domain knowledge. Based on the noisy-model, the conditional probability table is elicited by three methods, which are parameter learning, domain expert and the existing certainty factor model. In order to implement this model, a Bayesian network tool is developed. Finally, an example about cow disease diagnosis was implemented, which proved that the model discussed in this paper is an effective tool for some simple disease diagnosis in crop or animal field.

The Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) defines a framework within which support of distribution, interoperability, and portability can be integrated. However, other ODP standards have to be defined. We treat in this paper the need for formal notation for community related structural concepts in the enterprise language. Indeed, the ODP viewpoint languages are abstract in the sense that they define what concepts should be supported, not how these concepts should be represented. One approach to define the formal semantics of a language is denotational elaborating of the instance denoted by a sentence of the language in a particular context. Using the denotational semantics in the context of UML/OCL, we define in this paper semantics for the community related concepts defined in the RM-ODP foundations part and in the enterprise language. These specification concepts are suitable for describing and constraining ODP enterprise viewpoint specifications.

In this paper we address the challenges that arise due to heterogeneities across independently created and autonomously managed Web service requesters and Web service providers. Previous work in this area either involved significant human effort or in cases of the efforts seeking to provide largely automated approaches, overlooked the problem of data heterogeneities, resulting in partial solutions that would not support executable workflow for real-world problems. In this paper, we present a planning-based approach to solve both the process heterogeneity and data heterogeneity problems. We adopt a declarative approach to capture the partner specifications external to the process and demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in adding more dynamism to Web processes. Our system successfully outputs a BPEL file which correctly solves a non-trivial real-world problem in the SWS Challenge.

The last 12 months have seen several advances in the GridPP contribution to the Worldwide Large hadron collider Computing Grid (WLCG) and the provision of over 15 million KSI2K hours of processing. This paper reviews the deployment and operations progress made in both the UK Tier-1 and Tier-2s. For the Tier-1 this includes steps taken to ensure successful implementation of CASTOR and the resolution of major issues faced with several disk procurements. For the Tier-2s the approach to storage management and the ongoing efforts being made to improve availability are described. 2007 is a critical year for WLCG and there is still someway to go in provision of an adequately resourced and stable service. The paper outlines outstanding issues and how GridPP plans to address them. Finally the status of GridPP in relation to the UK National Grid Service (NGS) and the provision of a single national infrastructure are mentioned.

In this paper we present the Experiment Dashboard monitoring system, which is currently in use by four Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [1] experiments. The goal of the Experiment Dashboard is to monitor the activities of the LHC experiments on the distributed infrastructure, providing monitoring data from the virtual organization (VO) and user perspectives. The LHC experiments are using various Grid infrastructures (LCG [2] EGEE [3], OSG [4], NDGF [5]) with correspondingly various middleware flavors and job submission methods. Providing a uniform and complete view of various activities like job processing, data movement and publishing, access to distributed databases regardless of the underlying Grid flavor is the challenging task. In this paper we will describe the Experiment Dashboard concept, its framework and main monitoring applications.

“Forensically sound” is a term used extensively in the digital forensics community to qualify and, in some cases, to justify the use of a particular forensic technology or methodology. Indeed, many practitioners use the term when describing the capabilities of a particular piece of software or when describing a particular forensic analysis approach. Such a wide application of the term can only lead to confusion. This paper examines the various definitions of forensic computing (also called digital forensics) and identifies the common role that admissibility and evidentiary weight play. Using this common theme, the paper explores how the term “forensically sound” has been used and examines the drivers for using such a term. Finally, a definition of “forensically sound” is proposed and four criteria are provided for determining whether or not a digital forensic process may be considered to be “forensically sound.”

This paper presents an approach for mining fuzzy Association Rules (ARs) relating the properties of composite items, i.e. items that each feature a number of values derived from a common schema. We partition the values associated to properties into fuzzy sets in order to apply fuzzy Association Rule Mining (ARM). This paper describes the process of deriving the fuzzy sets from the properties associated to composite items and a unique Composite Fuzzy Association Rule Mining (CFARM) algorithm founded on the certainty factor interestingness measure to extract fuzzy association rules. The paper demonstrates the potential of composite fuzzy property ARs, and that a more succinct set of property ARs can be produced using the proposed approach than that generated using a non-fuzzy method.

Many researchers and organizations are interested in creating a mechanism capable of automatically predicting software defects. In the last years, machine learning techniques have been used in several researches with this goal. Many recent researches use data originated from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) IV&V (Independent Verification & Validation) Facility Metrics Data Program (MDP). We have recently applied a constructive neural network (RBF-DDA) for this task, yet MLP neural networks were not investigated using these data. We have observed that these data sets contain inconsistent patterns, that is, patterns with the same input vector belonging to diAEerent classes. This paper has two main objectives, (i) to propose a modified version of RBF-DDA, named RBF-eDDA (RBF trained with enhanced Dynamic Decay Adjustment algorithm), which tackles inconsistent patterns, and (ii) to compare RBF-eDDA and MLP neural networks in software defects prediction. The simulations reported in this paper show that RBF-eDDA is able to correctly handle inconsistent patterns and that it obtains results comparable to those of MLP in the NASA data sets.

Although many governmental institutions have provided their costumers with access to electronic government documents there is still a lack of accessibility for handicapped citizens. In this paper we present an approach to improve access to governmental forms for handicapped citizens, in particular for people with visual impairments, elderly people, illiterates or immigrants. We describe a system where we combine scanned images of paper-based forms containing textual information and a text-to-speech synthesis to an audio-visual document representation. We exploit standard document formats based on XML and web service technology to ensure independence from software and hardware platforms.

This paper proposes encryption schemes to enforce the order of the procedure in a workflow system. In workflow systems, it is important to perform a procedure according to an order that is given by some regulation. In addition, it is desired that each reviewer checks a necessary part of a document to admit the application because the document sometime contains privacy information, e.g., name, birthday, income and so on. There is a procedure in a workflow system which it is sufficient to pass if one of two reviewers admits the document. More generally, there is a procedure in a workflow system that can be passed if k of n reviewers admit the document, which we call a “threshold procedure”. By applying a cryptographic technique, e.g., a multiple encryption and secret sharing, this paper gives a method to realize various procedures in workflow systems, i.e., controlling the order of reviewers, disclosing a part of document selectively, and a threshold procedure. Conventional workflow systems control their procedure by a server, which we consider a trusted one. This implies that an administrator might tamper a procedure. The proposed schemes help us to enforce a procedure even if he/she is not trustworthy.

In this paper, we describe an innovative concept of three-dimensional interactive educational games that combine the excitement and looks of popular computer games with the educational potential of electronic study materials and its realization by a system called S.M.I.L.E. – Smart Multipurpose Interactive Learning Environment. One of its key features is the consideration of various learners’ abilities. In this paper, we concentrate on the description of features that enable different users (including handicapped) to learn effectively by playing educational games. We follow the idea that everyone needs access to quality education and are convinced that by enabling cooperative education not just among learners, but also between handicapped and able-bodied ones, we bring the humane dimension into education.

The potential of Information and Communications Technology in all forms of education has been well demonstrated. In this paper we examine how ICT can improve the education of students with learning disabilities (LD). We will begin by examining the nature of learning disabilities and discussing the different approaches to schooling for students with LD. Learning models have evolved over recent years in response to many factors including the advent of technology in education. This is particularly important in this arena where technology can make a significant difference to educating these students, but only if it is used appropriately. The paper then looks at a case study of use of ICT in a school catering for students with LD.

This paper discusses a number of existing problems with the airport transportation security system in the United States. The paper discusses two separate, yet equally important issues: the ease with which a passenger can fly without any identification documents at all and the ease with which print-at-home boarding passes can be modified, tampered with, and faked. The significance of these vulnerabilities becomes clear when viewed in light of the United States (US) government's insistence on maintaining passenger watch lists, whose contents are secret and effectiveness depend upon the government being able to verify the identity of each flying passenger. The paper then introduces a method of determining if any particular name is on the no fly list, without ever having to step foot into an airport. The paper introduces a physical denial of service attack against the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints at airports, distributed via an Internet virus. Finally, the paper proposes technical solutions to the user modifiable boarding pass problem, which also neutralize the physical denial of service attack. The solutions have the added benefit of meshing with TSA's publicly stated wish to assume responsibility for verifying passengers names against the watch lists, as well as enabling them to collect and store real time data on passengers as they pass through checkpoints, something they are not able to do under the existing system.

This paper presents a particular approach how to support the knowledge creation processes that are based on innovative idea of trialogical learning.The key task in trialogical learning is to understand how the “weaker” forms of knowledge are used and made explicit in a meaningful way in collaborative processes. Trialogical learning provides mechanism by which tacit knowledge is conceptualized in collaborative systems. Within the "Knowledge-Practices Laboratory” (KP-Lab) project suitable tools and practices for support of trialogical learning are being designed, implemented and evaluated. The KP-LAB platform offers, except of others, also facilities for discovering, managing and visualization of some tacit knowledge. We present in this paper one particular approach how to this is supported with proposed awareness features

Engine crankshafts are required to be balanced. The balance of a crankshaft is one of several parameters to be analyzed during the design of an engine, but certainly a poor balance leads to a low life time of the whole system. It is possible to optimize the balance of a crankshaft using CAD and CAE software, thanks to the new optimization tools based on Genetic Algorithms (GA) and tools for the integration of the CAD-CAE software. GAs have been used in various applications, one of which is the optimization of geometric shapes, a relatively recent area with high research potential. This paper describes a general strategy to optimize the balance of a crankshaft. A comparison is made among different tools used for the sustaining of this strategy. This paper is an extension of a previous paper by the authors [1] but now different tools are being included to improve the performance of the strategy. The analyzed crankshaft is modeled in commercial 3D parametric software. A Java interface included in the CAD software is used for evaluating the fitness function (the balance). Two GAs from different sources and platforms are used and then they are compared and discussed.

It is fundamental for the kinematics simulation and mechanism design to apply the visualization in scientific computing on the simulation research of 3D mechanism. It is also the basis of independent development for 3D CAE software without any copyright limit. This paper offered a parameterized kinematics simulation template for 3D mechanism based on the visualization in scientific computing, in which the open graphics library is applied by MFC compiler. This paper illuminates the fundamental principle of the simulation development applying the OpenGL technology. The principle of OpenGL, the procedure structure, the working flow of OpenGL, the concept of program designing and the code implementation based on VC++ is demonstrated and an application approach for mechanism simulation is developed under the MFC environment.

A web-based multi-models expert system called DCDDS is presented in this paper, which developed for diagnosis of dairy cow diseases through the symptoms submitted by users on web. As it is accepted that the inference engine and the relevant knowledge representation are the crucial part of diagnosis expert system, which limits its application and popularization in animal disease diagnosis. To break the limit and raise accuracy, this paper compares and appraises the existed systems and presents a solution that contains three models—Case-based reasoning (CBR), Subjective Bayesian theory and D-S evidential theory. Accordingly a knowledge representation method which can support the three different models is also designed. Up to the complicacy of the group of symptoms users acquired, they can choose which of the three models should be adopted to meet the best resolve. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated by an application to the field of dairy cow disease diagnosis using a real example of dairy cow diseases. The result indicates that the new methods have improved the inference procedures of the expert systems, and have showed that the new architecture has some advantage over the conventional architectures of expert systems on both efficiency and accuracy.