Dwelling on ontology - semantic reasoning over topographic maps

The thesis builds upon the hypothesis that the spatial arrangement of topographic features, such as buildings, roads and other land cover parcels, indicates how land is used. The aim is to make this kind of high-level semantic information explicit within topographic data. There is an increasing need to share and use data for a wider range of purposes, and to make data more definitive, intelligent and accessible. Unfortunately, we still encounter a gap between low-level data representations and high-level concepts that typify human qualitative spatial reasoning. The thesis adopts an ontological approach to bridge this gap and to derive functional information by using standard reasoning mechanisms offered by logic-based knowledge representation formalisms. It formulates a framework for the processes involved in interpreting land use information from topographic maps. Land use is a high-level abstract concept, but it is also an observable fact intimately tied to geography. By decomposing this relationship, the thesis correlates a one-to-one mapping between high-level conceptualisations established from human knowledge and real world entities represented in the data. Based on a middle-out approach, it develops a conceptual model that incrementally links different levels of detail, and thereby derives coarser, more meaningful descriptions from more detailed ones. The thesis verifies its proposed ideas by implementing an ontology describing the land use ‘residential area’ in the ontology editor Protégé. By asserting knowledge about high-level concepts such as types of dwellings, urban blocks and residential districts as well as individuals that link directly to topographic features stored in the database, the reasoner successfully infers instances of the defined classes. Despite current technological limitations, ontologies are a promising way forward in the manner we handle and integrate geographic data, especially with respect to how humans conceptualise geographic space

Gatherings in biosemiotics

http://www.ester.ee/record=b2860486*es

The poetry of C.T. Msimang : a deconstructive critique

This study attempts to offer a reading of Msimang's poetry from the perspective of deconstruction. In this course it is necessary to introduce and elaborate on certain deconstruction strategies. This is mainly effected in the second chapter, where consideration is given to diachronic and synchronic perspectives on deconstruction. However, not all the ramifications of the various radical insights offered by deconstructive approaches into the various fields are explored, only the significant texts by mainly French theorists and their American disciples are investigated. Secondly, this study seeks to show that the Zulu poems under consideration are highly amenable to a deconstruction reading. This thesis examines the various practices to absorb, transform, and integrate deconstruction and to make the theory applicable as a critical method within the African languages critical environment. In the third chapter, I am chiefly concerned with the claim that a text never has a single meaning, but is a crossroads of multiple ambiguous meanings. Explaining the historical context, the interdisciplinary scope, and the philosophical significance of Derrida' s project are explored in the fourth chapter. Language has no determinate centre nor any retrievable origin or truth. Belief in such is no more than nostalgia, says Derrida. What actually exists is a complex network of differences between signifiers, each in some sense carrying the traces of all others. With psychoanalysis in the fourth chapter, the focus is not on the differences between the deconstructive and psychoanalytic critics, but on their shared assumption that works ofliterature are in some sense indeterminate. These properties lead to the sixth chapter, which deals with intertextuality according to Derrida, Barthes and Bloom. The seventh and last chapter is the general conclusion in which main observations are summarized and important aspects highlighted. Finally, this thesis attempts to illustrate why the deconstructive procedure of analysing texts in such a way as to explicate their partial complicity with the theory, makes this deconstructive reading of Msimang' s poetry possible.African LanguagesD.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages

Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education

International audienceThis volume contains the Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (ERME), which took place 9-13 February 2011, at Rzeszñw in Poland