HILT : High-Level Thesaurus Project. Phase IV and Embedding Project Extension : Final Report

Ensuring that Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) users of the JISC IE can find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse in an environment where most national and institutional service providers - usually for very good local reasons - use different subject schemes to describe their resources is a major challenge facing the JISC domain (and, indeed, other domains beyond JISC). Encouraging the use of standard terminologies in some services (institutional repositories, for example) is a related challenge. Under the auspices of the HILT project, JISC has been investigating mechanisms to assist the community with this problem through a JISC Shared Infrastructure Service that would help optimise the value obtained from expenditure on content and services by facilitating subject-search-based resource sharing to benefit users in the learning and research communities. The project has been through a number of phases, with work from earlier phases reported, both in published work elsewhere, and in project reports (see the project website: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/). HILT Phase IV had two elements - the core project, whose focus was 'to research, investigate and develop pilot solutions for problems pertaining to cross-searching multi-subject scheme information environments, as well as providing a variety of other terminological searching aids', and a short extension to encompass the pilot embedding of routines to interact with HILT M2M services in the user interfaces of various information services serving the JISC community. Both elements contributed to the developments summarised in this report

Integration of document representation, processing and management

This paper describes a way for document representation and proposes an approach towards an integrated document processing and management system. The approach has the intention to capture essentially freely structured documents, like those typically used in the office domain. The document analysis system ANASTASIL is capable to reveal the structure of complex paper documents, as well as logical objects within it, like receiver, footnote, date. Moreover, it facilitates the handling of the containing information. Analyzed documents are stored by the management system KRISYS that is connected to several different subsequent services. The described integrated system can be considered as an ideal extension of the human clerk, making his tasks in information processing easier. The symbolic representation of the analysis results allow an easy transformation in a given international standard, e.g., ODA/ODIF or SGML, and to interchange it via global network

A resolution principle for clauses with constraints

We introduce a general scheme for handling clauses whose variables are constrained by an underlying constraint theory. In general, constraints can be seen as quantifier restrictions as they filter out the values that can be assigned to the variables of a clause (or an arbitrary formulae with restricted universal or existential quantifier) in any of the models of the constraint theory. We present a resolution principle for clauses with constraints, where unification is replaced by testing constraints for satisfiability over the constraint theory. We show that this constrained resolution is sound and complete in that a set of clauses with constraints is unsatisfiable over the constraint theory if we can deduce a constrained empty clause for each model of the constraint theory, such that the empty clauses constraint is satisfiable in that model. We show also that we cannot require a better result in general, but we discuss certain tractable cases, where we need at most finitely many such empty clauses or even better only one of them as it is known in classical resolution, sorted resolution or resolution with theory unification

Integration of distributed terminology resources to facilitate subject cross-browsing for library portal systems

With the increase in the number of distributed library information resources, users may have to interact with different user interfaces, learn to switch their mental models between these interfaces, and familiarise themselves with controlled vocabularies used by different resources. For this reason, library professionals have developed library portals to integrate these distributed information resources, and assist end-users in cross-accessing distributed resources via a single access point in their own library. There are two important subject-based services that a library portal system might be able to provide. The first is a federated search service, which refers to a process where a user can input a query to cross-search a number of information resources. The second is a subject cross-browsing service, which can offer a knowledge navigation tree to link subject schemes used by distributed resources. However, the development of subject cross-searching and browsing services has been impeded by the heterogeneity of different KOS (Knowledge Organisation System) used by different information resources. Due to the lack of mappings between different KOS, it is impossible to offer a subject cross-browsing service for a library portal system. [Continues.

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 2 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division 9 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 12 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 14 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 16 Advertisements IEEE

Neuere Entwicklungen der deklarativen KI-Programmierung : proceedings

The field of declarative AI programming is briefly characterized. Its recent developments in Germany are reflected by a workshop as part of the scientific congress KI-93 at the Berlin Humboldt University. Three tutorials introduce to the state of the art in deductive databases, the programming language Gödel, and the evolution of knowledge bases. Eleven contributed papers treat knowledge revision/program transformation, types, constraints, and type-constraint combinations