195,230 research outputs found
Frameworks: the future of formal software development?
It could be argued that the primary issue to be dealt with in software engineering today is re-use of software. Current software development rarely, if ever, starts from nothing. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the development of specifications. To overcome this problem, various works have attempted to show how specifications can be built using architectural principles. We discuss one such approach in particular, the Architectural Semantics of Open Distributed Processing. We show the limitations of this work with regard to the architecting of specifications and propose a new approach, based on frameworks. To highlight the approach we use the work currently being done in the TOSCA project in its development of a service creation and validation environment for telecommunication services
Isabelle/PIDE as Platform for Educational Tools
The Isabelle/PIDE platform addresses the question whether proof assistants of
the LCF family are suitable as technological basis for educational tools. The
traditionally strong logical foundations of systems like HOL, Coq, or Isabelle
have so far been counter-balanced by somewhat inaccessible interaction via the
TTY (or minor variations like the well-known Proof General / Emacs interface).
Thus the fundamental question of math education tools with fully-formal
background theories has often been answered negatively due to accidental
weaknesses of existing proof engines.
The idea of "PIDE" (which means "Prover IDE") is to integrate existing
provers like Isabelle into a larger environment, that facilitates access by
end-users and other tools. We use Scala to expose the proof engine in ML to the
JVM world, where many user-interfaces, editor frameworks, and educational tools
already exist. This shall ultimately lead to combined mathematical assistants,
where the logical engine is in the background, without obstructing the view on
applications of formal methods, formalized mathematics, and math education in
particular.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453
Encoding models for scholarly literature
We examine the issue of digital formats for document encoding, archiving and
publishing, through the specific example of "born-digital" scholarly journal
articles. We will begin by looking at the traditional workflow of journal
editing and publication, and how these practices have made the transition into
the online domain. We will examine the range of different file formats in which
electronic articles are currently stored and published. We will argue strongly
that, despite the prevalence of binary and proprietary formats such as PDF and
MS Word, XML is a far superior encoding choice for journal articles. Next, we
look at the range of XML document structures (DTDs, Schemas) which are in
common use for encoding journal articles, and consider some of their strengths
and weaknesses. We will suggest that, despite the existence of specialized
schemas intended specifically for journal articles (such as NLM), and more
broadly-used publication-oriented schemas such as DocBook, there are strong
arguments in favour of developing a subset or customization of the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema for the purpose of journal-article encoding;
TEI is already in use in a number of journal publication projects, and the
scale and precision of the TEI tagset makes it particularly appropriate for
encoding scholarly articles. We will outline the document structure of a
TEI-encoded journal article, and look in detail at suggested markup patterns
for specific features of journal articles
Projector - a partially typed language for querying XML
We describe Projector, a language that can be used to perform a mixture of typed and untyped computation against data represented in XML. For some problems, notably when the data is unstructured or semistructured, the most desirable programming model is against the tree structure underlying the document. When this tree structure has been used to model regular data structures, then these regular structures themselves are a more desirable programming model. The language Projector, described here in outline, gives both models within a single partially typed algebra and is well suited for hybrid applications, for example when fragments of a known structure are embedded in a document whose overall structure is unknown. Projector is an extension of ECMA-262 (aka JavaScript), and therefore inherits an untyped DOM interface. To this has been added some static typing and a dynamic projection primitive, which can be used to assert the presence of a regular structure modelled within the XML. If this structure does exist, the data is extracted and presented as a typed value within the programming language
A Generic Storage API
We present a generic API suitable for provision of highly generic storage
facilities that can be tailored to produce various individually customised
storage infrastructures. The paper identifies a candidate set of minimal
storage system building blocks, which are sufficiently simple to avoid
encapsulating policy where it cannot be customised by applications, and
composable to build highly flexible storage architectures. Four main generic
components are defined: the store, the namer, the caster and the interpreter.
It is hypothesised that these are sufficiently general that they could act as
building blocks for any information storage and retrieval system. The essential
characteristics of each are defined by an interface, which may be implemented
by multiple implementing classes.Comment: Submitted to ACSC 200
Collaborative semantic web browsing with Magpie
Web browsing is often a collaborative activity. Users involved in a joint information gathering exercise will wish to share knowledge about the web pages visited and the contents found. Magpie is a suite of tools supporting the interpretation of web pages and semantically enriched web browsing. By automatically associating an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources, Magpie allows relevant services to be invoked as well as remotely triggered within a standard web browser. In this paper we describe how Magpie trigger services can provide semantic support to collaborative browsing activities
Tailored retrieval of health information from the web for facilitating communication and empowerment of elderly people
A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a âhuman-to-machineâ
communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her
empowerment level and the âhuman-to-humanâ communication process that occurs between a patient and a
healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering
its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious
communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health
information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at the syntactic-technical level,
the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly
people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels
and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her
information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the ârightâ amount of Web content in a
language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and
positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals
A web-based teaching/learning environment to support collaborative knowledge construction in design
A web-based application has been developed as part of a recently completed research which proposed a conceptual framework to collect, analyze and compare different design experiences and to construct structured representations of the emerging knowledge in digital architectural design. The paper introduces the theoretical and practical development of this application as a teaching/learning environment which has significantly contributed to the development and testing of the ideas developed throughout the research. Later in the paper, the application of BLIP in two experimental (design) workshops is reported and evaluated according to the extent to which the application facilitates generation, modification and utilization of design knowledge
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