Adaptive Layout for Interactive Documents

This thesis presents a novel approach to create automated layouts for rich illustrative material that could adapt according to the screen size and contextual requirements. The adaption not only considers global layout but also deals with the content and layout adaptation of individual illustrations in the layout. An unique solution has been developed that integrates constraint-based and force-directed techniques to create adaptive grid-based and non-grid layouts. A set of annotation layouts are developed which adapt the annotated illustrations to match the contextual requirements over time

Contribution to the elaboration of a decision support system based on modular ontologies for ecological labelling

With the rising concern of sustainability and environmental performance, eco-labeled products and services are becoming more and more popular. In addition to the financial costs, the long and complex process of eco-labeling sometimes demotivates manufacturers and service providers to be certificated. In this research work, we propose a decision support process and implement a decision support platform aiming at further improvement and acceleration of the eco-labeling process in order to democratize a broader application and certification of eco-labels. The decision support platform is based on a comprehensive knowledge base composed of various domain ontologies that are constructed according to official eco-label criteria documentation. Traditional knowledge base in relational data model is low interoperable, lack of inference support and difficult to be reused. In our research, the knowledge base composed of interconnected ontologies modules covers various products and services, and allows reasoning and semantic querying. A domain-centric modularization scheme about EU Eco-label laundry detergent product criteria is introduced as an application case. This modularization scheme separates the entity knowledge and rule knowledge so that the ontology modules can be reused easily in other domains. We explore a reasoning methodology based on inference with SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) rules which allows decision making with explanation. Through standard RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontology query interface, the assets of the decision support platform will stimulate domain knowledge sharing and can be applied into other application. In order to foster the reuse of ontology modules, we also proposed a usercentric approach for federate contextual ontologies (mapping and integration). This approach will create an ontology federation by a contextual configuration that avoid the “OWL:imports” disadvantages. Instead of putting mapping or new semantics in ontology modules, our approach will conserve the extra contextual information separately without impacting original ontologies or without importing all ontologies’ concepts. By introducing this contextualization, it becomes easier to support more expressive semantics in term of ontology integration itself, then it will also facilitate application agents to access and reuse ontologies. To realize this approach, we elaborate a new plug-in for the Protégé ontology editor

Mobile Wound Assessment and 3D Modeling from a Single Image

The prevalence of camera-enabled mobile phones have made mobile wound assessment a viable treatment option for millions of previously difficult to reach patients. We have designed a complete mobile wound assessment platform to ameliorate the many challenges related to chronic wound care. Chronic wounds and infections are the most severe, costly and fatal types of wounds, placing them at the center of mobile wound assessment. Wound physicians assess thousands of single-view wound images from all over the world, and it may be difficult to determine the location of the wound on the body, for example, if the wound is taken at close range. In our solution, end-users capture an image of the wound by taking a picture with their mobile camera. The wound image is segmented and classified using modern convolution neural networks, and is stored securely in the cloud for remote tracking. We use an interactive semi-automated approach to allow users to specify the location of the wound on the body. To accomplish this we have created, to the best our knowledge, the first 3D human surface anatomy labeling system, based off the current NYU and Anatomy Mapper labeling systems. To interactively view wounds in 3D, we have presented an efficient projective texture mapping algorithm for texturing wounds onto a 3D human anatomy model. In so doing, we have demonstrated an approach to 3D wound reconstruction that works even for a single wound image

Implementation of Web Query Languages Reconsidered

Visions of the next generation Web such as the "Semantic Web" or the "Web 2.0" have triggered the emergence of a multitude of data formats. These formats have different characteristics as far as the shape of data is concerned (for example tree- vs. graph-shaped). They are accompanied by a puzzlingly large number of query languages each limited to one data format. Thus, a key feature of the Web, namely to make it possible to access anything published by anyone, is compromised. This thesis is devoted to versatile query languages capable of accessing data in a variety of Web formats. The issue is addressed from three angles: language design, common, yet uniform semantics, and common, yet uniform evaluation. % Thus it is divided in three parts: First, we consider the query language Xcerpt as an example of the advocated class of versatile Web query languages. Using this concrete exemplar allows us to clarify and discuss the vision of versatility in detail. Second, a number of query languages, XPath, XQuery, SPARQL, and Xcerpt, are translated into a common intermediary language, CIQLog. This language has a purely logical semantics, which makes it easily amenable to optimizations. As a side effect, this provides the, to the best of our knowledge, first logical semantics for XQuery and SPARQL. It is a very useful tool for understanding the commonalities and differences of the considered languages. Third, the intermediate logical language is translated into a query algebra, CIQCAG. The core feature of CIQCAG is that it scales from tree- to graph-shaped data and queries without efficiency losses when tree-data and -queries are considered: it is shown that, in these cases, optimal complexities are achieved. CIQCAG is also shown to evaluate each of the aforementioned query languages with a complexity at least as good as the best known evaluation methods so far. For example, navigational XPath is evaluated with space complexity O(q d) and time complexity O(q n) where q is the query size, n the data size, and d the depth of the (tree-shaped) data. CIQCAG is further shown to provide linear time and space evaluation of tree-shaped queries for a larger class of graph-shaped data than any method previously proposed. This larger class of graph-shaped data, called continuous-image graphs, short CIGs, is introduced for the first time in this thesis. A (directed) graph is a CIG if its nodes can be totally ordered in such a manner that, for this order, the children of any node form a continuous interval. CIQCAG achieves these properties by employing a novel data structure, called sequence map, that allows an efficient evaluation of tree-shaped queries, or of tree-shaped cores of graph-shaped queries on any graph-shaped data. While being ideally suited to trees and CIGs, the data structure gracefully degrades to unrestricted graphs. It yields a remarkably efficient evaluation on graph-shaped data that only a few edges prevent from being trees or CIGs

Augmenting applications with hyper media, functionality and meta-information

The Dynamic Hypermedia Engine (DHE) enhances analytical applications by adding relationships, semantics and other metadata to the application\u27s output and user interface. DHE also provides additional hypermedia navigational, structural and annotation functionality. These features allow application developers and users to add guided tours, personal links and sharable annotations, among other features, into applications. DHE runs as a middleware between the application user interface and its business logic and processes, in a n-tier architecture, supporting the extra functionalities without altering the original systems by means of application wrappers. DHE automatically generates links at run-time for each of those elements having relationships and metadata. Such elements are previously identified using a Relation Navigation Analysis. DHE also constructs more sophisticated navigation techniques not often found on the Web on top of these links. The metadata, links, navigation and annotation features supplement the application\u27s primary functionality. This research identifies element types, or classes , in the application displays. A mapping rule encodes each relationship found between two elements of interest at the class level . When the user selects a particular element, DHE instantiates the commands included in the rules with the actual instance selected and sends them to the appropriate destination system, which then dynamically generates the resulting virtual (i.e. not previously stored) page. DHE executes concurrently with these applications, providing automated link generation and other hypermedia functionality. DHE uses the extensible Markup Language (XMQ -and related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets of XML recommendations, like Xlink, XML Schema, and RDF -to encode the semantic information required for the operation of the extra hypermedia features, and for the transmission of messages between the engine modules and applications. DHE is the only approach we know that provides automated linking and metadata services in a generic manner, based on the application semantics, without altering the applications. DHE will also work with non-Web systems. The results of this work could also be extended to other research areas, such as link ranking and filtering, automatic link generation as the result of a search query, metadata collection and support, virtual document management, hypermedia functionality on the Web, adaptive and collaborative hypermedia, web engineering, and the semantic Web

Knowledge visualization: From theory to practice

Visualizations have been known as efficient tools that can help users analyze com- plex data. However, understanding the displayed data and finding underlying knowl- edge is still difficult. In this work, a new approach is proposed based on understanding the definition of knowledge. Although there are many definitions used in different ar- eas, this work focuses on representing knowledge as a part of a visualization and showing the benefit of adopting knowledge representation. Specifically, this work be- gins with understanding interaction and reasoning in visual analytics systems, then a new definition of knowledge visualization and its underlying knowledge conversion processes are proposed. The definition of knowledge is differentiated as either explicit or tacit knowledge. Instead of directly representing data, the value of the explicit knowledge associated with the data is determined based on a cost/benefit analysis. In accordance to its importance, the knowledge is displayed to help the user under- stand the complex data through visual analytical reasoning and discovery