Traceability requirements for information systems in the agro-food sector

Food safety and quality are keys to companies' business survival and great effort and resources are devoted to them. The food production chain, from the farms and feed mills to the finished products leaving the processing plants, is subject to independent examination and auditing either under the sector's own assurance schemes under official regulatory inspection and testing programmes with published results. For farmers and the agro-food industry, this means new market opportunities – and continual change. Food safety is an on-going challenge, demanding the best control systems and day-to-day vigilance on farms, in processing plants and throughout the distribution system. In order to enable consumers to make the right choice when buying their food and in order to build up markets for quality products, labelling has to provide all relevant information about the production process. Besides complete information about its ingredients, food labels should bear information about its place of origin and the way in which it was produced

Knowledge-based support in Non-Destructive Testing for health monitoring of aircraft structures

Maintenance manuals include general methods and procedures for industrial maintenance and they contain information about principles of maintenance methods. Particularly, Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) methods are important for the detection of aeronautical defects and they can be used for various kinds of material and in different environments. Conventional non-destructive evaluation inspections are done at periodic maintenance checks. Usually, the list of tools used in a maintenance program is simply located in the introduction of manuals, without any precision as regards to their characteristics, except for a short description of the manufacturer and tasks in which they are employed. Improving the identification concepts of the maintenance tools is needed to manage the set of equipments and establish a system of equivalence: it is necessary to have a consistent maintenance conceptualization, flexible enough to fit all current equipment, but also all those likely to be added/used in the future. Our contribution is related to the formal specification of the system of functional equivalences that can facilitate the maintenance activities with means to determine whether a tool can be substituted for another by observing their key parameters in the identified characteristics. Reasoning mechanisms of conceptual graphs constitute the baseline elements to measure the fit or unfit between an equipment model and a maintenance activity model. Graph operations are used for processing answers to a query and this graph-based approach to the search method is in-line with the logical view of information retrieval. The methodology described supports knowledge formalization and capitalization of experienced NDT practitioners. As a result, it enables the selection of a NDT technique and outlines its capabilities with acceptable alternatives

Vision Science and Technology at NASA: Results of a Workshop

A broad review is given of vision science and technology within NASA. The subject is defined and its applications in both NASA and the nation at large are noted. A survey of current NASA efforts is given, noting strengths and weaknesses of the NASA program