ET: an Enrolment Tool to Generate Expert Systems for University Courses

Expert Systems are in use today in many fields where there exists a well-defined problem domain (Giarratano & Riley, 2005). In this chapter, XML is used to help define a knowledge domain for academic course rules and used as the starting point for web-base expert systems. Requirements for the satisfactory completion of university and college courses can be quite complex. Courses such as undergraduate bachelor degrees and postgraduate masters degrees are typically composed of units (sometimes called subjects) that must be completed according to the course rules. Such rules may impose constraints on the units that may be taken from specific groups of units, as well as constraints like prerequisite units and corequisite units. Many universities designate a human expert – the Course Coordinator, to guide students through their enrolment process to ensure that students' programs conform to course rules. In addition, many universities provide web-based descriptions of courses and units. However, such web sites are usually purely descriptive and lack a level of interaction with students that would enable answers to complex enrolment questions. It is therefore tempting to consider the automation of the course coordinator's role and its delivery. This chapter will provide a detailed description of the generation of a variety of expert system products intended to provide online advice to students about university bachelor and masters level courses. These products include course rules, unit descriptions, enrolment advice and course planners. They are designed following knowledge acquisition from experienced academic course coordinators about typical student queries in relation to their enrolment choices. An XML Document Type Definition (DTD) will be described for university and college courses. It will be compatible with the European Credit Transfer System (EU, 2004), thus allowing a course to be composed of units with set credit points, term or semester of offering, and other unit constraints. Course rules may be expressed in terms of credit point requirements from groups of units. The XML data definition is sufficient to express the typical course requirement rules of higher education institutions such as universities and colleges

Geração automática de ecrãs dinâmicos

Nos dias de hoje, um sistema informático que faça uso de uma vertente web e se enquandre no setor segurador, tem a necessidade de obter informação através da comunicação com sistemas externos tais como sistemas de definição de produto que são responsáveis por modelar produtos de seguros, obtendo assim metadados que, uma vez interpretados, fazem com que o ecrã que se pretende que se renderize seja diferente em função da interpretação destes metadados. Por vezes, a volatilidade dos metadados interpretados pode ser tão grande fazendo com haja a necessidade de rerenderizar todo o ecrã em função destes. Pretende-se assim dar apoio ao trabalho desenvolvido pela empresa msg life Iberia cujo produto é uma plataforma denominada de msg.Sales utilizada para a comercialização de seguros de diferentes ramos do setor segurador. A plataforma msg.Sales faz uso de um sistema responsável por efetuar a modelação de diversos produtos. Este sistema externo é denominado por Product Definition System (PDS) e o output dado por ele é um modelo canónico que representa produtos de seguros, apresentando assim grande volatilidade. Assim, ao fazer uso normal das soluções web desenvolvidas pela msg life Iberia é feita uma constante interação com o PDS de forma a obter o modelo de um produto de seguros que se pretende renderizar para uma determinada página. Dentro desta mesma página, é possível que o PDS gere vários metamodelos diferentes para a mesma página. Devido a isto, a alteração de um campo no ecrã pode fazer com que sejam adicionados, removidos e alterados campos que são definidos por este metamodelo. Devido a esta volatilidade, por vezes é necessário efetuar-se novas renderizações de todo o ecrã uma vez que é necessário haver a constante interpretação dos metadados fornecidos pelo PDS o que causa um problema na escalabilidade da solução principalmente ao nível de performance. O objetivo desta tese é assim desenvolver um protótipo de um gerador de ecrãs que possa ser incorporado no processo de build de uma solução, fazendo uso de uma Domain Specific Language (DSL) que existe já atualmente no sistema msg.Sales denominada de Flow, evitando assim a interpretação total de ecrãs em runtime. O foco é essencialmente em PDS cujos produtos sejam estáticos, tendo assim menor grau de variabilidade na sua estrutura.These days, an informatics system which has a web component and is focused on the insurance sector, has the necessity of obtaining data relative to the commercialized insurance products by communicating with external systems such as Product Definition Systems (PDS) obtaining this way metadata that is further interpreted resulting on a screen being rendered accordingly to these metadata. Sometimes, the metadata is volatile enough to make a screen being re-rendered in order to for the screen to represent the metadata. This work aims to provide aid to everything developed by the company msg life Iberia whose product is a platform named msg.Sales used for insurance commercialization of diverse sectors. The msg.Sales platform uses an external system responsible for modeling the products to be used. This system is named Product Definition System and its output is the canonical model which represents products showcasing this way a high level of volatility. As stated above, the normal use of the web application has the need of constantly interacting with the PDS to retrieve the metamodel which corresponds to a particular screen. Within this same screen, it is also possible that the PDS generates different metamodels to represent this same screen. As a result of such volatility, within a specific page it is also possible that by changing fields, there could be new fields being added, existing fields being removed, or the domain of possible values for a particular field changing. Due to this level of volatility, sometimes it is required to re-render a screen entirely since it is necessary to process the metadata supplied by the PDS which causes a problem in the msg.Sales scalability mainly at the performance factor. This thesis’s goal is to develop a screen generator prototype which can be incorporated within the build process of the msg.Sales platform, using a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that is incorporate within msg.Sales system, avoiding this way the interpretation of complete screens at runtime. The goal is essentially in PDS’s whose products are static, having this way a smaller level of variability in its products structure

Cross media publishing mittels XML

Die Extensible Markup Language (XML) ist eine Metaauszeichnungssprache, die 1998 vom World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), einer Organisation, die sich mit der Erstel-lung von Web Standards und neuen Technologien für das Internet beschäftigt , als neue Empfehlung für Web-Anwendungen festgesetzt wurde. Seitdem ist viel über XML und die sich durch diese Sprache ergebenden neuen Möglichkeiten des Datenaustausches über das Internet publiziert worden. In XML-Dokumenten werden die hierarchische Struktur und der Inhalt der Dokumente festgelegt, aber keinerlei Angaben zum Layout gemacht. Dieses wird in so genannten Stylesheets definiert. Mit Hilfe mehrerer Stylesheets, die sich alle auf ein XML-Dokument beziehen, ist es möglich, aus einem Daten-bestand verschiedene Ausgabeprodukte, z.B. eine Online-Version und eine druckbare Ausgabe eines Dokuments, zu erzeugen

Informationssysteme auf der Basis aktiver Hypertextdokumente

Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Implementierung von Informationssystemen, die mittels Web-Techniken wie etwa der Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), des Hypertext Transport Protocols (HTTP) oder der Extensible Markup Language (XML) erstellt werden. Web-basierte Informationssysteme werden verstärkt eingesetzt, um vollständige Applikationen für die Abwicklung von Geschäftsprozessen zu implementieren. Die Ausgangslage für die Arbeit ist das Fehlen formeller Modelle, mit der solche Systeme umgesetzt werden können, kombiniert mit dem Aufkommen neuer Anwendungsgebiete wie der Business-to-Business-Kopplung mittels Web-basierter Systeme. Im Verlauf der Arbeit werden bestehende Systeme analysiert um darauf aufbauend die Anforderungen für ein Modell zur Beschreibung und Realisierung Web-basierter Anwendungen festzulegen. Das daraus entwickelte Modell stellt die Information, die in solchen Anwendungen ausgetauscht und verarbeitet wird, in den Vordergrund, und setzt als wichtigstes Beschreibungsmittel Hypertextdokumente ein, welche um aktive Komponenten ergänzt zu aktiven Hypertextdokumenten (AHDs) werden. Das Modell für aktive Hypertextdokumente (AHDM) umfaßt ein Informationsmodell, welches den Aufbau aktiver Hypertextdokumente beschreibt, ein Kommunikationsmodell zur Regelung des Informationsaustausches, ein Objektmodell für die Definition des Zusammenspiels der aktiven Bestandteile eines AHDs und ein Laufzeitmodell für die tatsächliche Ausführung der aktiven Bestandteile. Aktive Hypertextdokumente werden als XML-Dokumente realisiert, die entsprechend dem Informationsmodell neben den ursprünglichen Nutzdaten auch Funktionen und Variablen enthalten. Neben dem Modell wird auch eine Vorgehensweise beschrieben, die den Einsatz aktiver Hypertextdokumente erleichtern soll. Die Praktikabilität des Modells wird anhand von Beispielanwendungen demonstriert, die von einfachen, eigenständigen Anwendungen hin zu kooperativen, vernetzten Anwendungen mit mobilen Dokumenten reichen. Die zur Nutzung aktiver Hypertextdokumente notwendigen Werkzeuge werden ebenfalls beschrieben

Pagina W 1 di 15 An extensible rendering engine for XML and HTML

XML has been proposed in order to bring to the web a markup language free of the shortcomings of HTML, in particular the inextensibility of the set of valid elements (tags). Stylesheet languages have been proposed for XML, in order to provide precise and sophisticated typographical control over the appearance of text-based data. We have developed a rendering engine for HTML and XML documents, providing rudimentary support for typography, but allowing easy extensions (displets) for any kind of data, including non-textual ones, such as math, charts, graphs, etc. Some extensions have already been developed: here we present the one for supporting Z, a notation for formal specifications of software systems