4,608 research outputs found
Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design
The Designers' Workbench is a system, developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, to ensure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company's design rule book(s). In the principal application discussed here, the evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Design rules are expressed as constraints over the domain ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench's knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a system, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. Further we hypothesize that in order to appropriately apply, maintain and reuse constraints, it is necessary to understand the underlying assumptions and context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to them as āapplication conditionsā and these form a part of the rationale associated with the constraint. We propose a methodology to capture the application conditions associated with a constraint and demonstrate that an explicit representation (machine interpretable format) of application conditions (rationales) together with the corresponding constraints and the domain ontology can be used by a machine to support maintenance of constraints. Support for the maintenance of constraints includes detecting inconsistencies, subsumption, redundancy, fusion between constraints and suggesting appropriate refinements. The proposed methodology provides immediate benefits to the designers and hence should encourage them to input the application conditions (rationales)
Towards a Principled Representation of Discourse Plans
We argue that discourse plans must capture the intended causal and
decompositional relations between communicative actions. We present a planning
algorithm, DPOCL, that builds plan structures that properly capture these
relations, and show how these structures are used to solve the problems that
plagued previous discourse planners, and allow a system to participate
effectively and flexibly in an ongoing dialogue.Comment: requires cogsci94.sty, psfig.st
Video Interpolation using Optical Flow and Laplacian Smoothness
Non-rigid video interpolation is a common computer vision task. In this paper
we present an optical flow approach which adopts a Laplacian Cotangent Mesh
constraint to enhance the local smoothness. Similar to Li et al., our approach
adopts a mesh to the image with a resolution up to one vertex per pixel and
uses angle constraints to ensure sensible local deformations between image
pairs. The Laplacian Mesh constraints are expressed wholly inside the optical
flow optimization, and can be applied in a straightforward manner to a wide
range of image tracking and registration problems. We evaluate our approach by
testing on several benchmark datasets, including the Middlebury and Garg et al.
datasets. In addition, we show application of our method for constructing 3D
Morphable Facial Models from dynamic 3D data
Exchange-Repairs: Managing Inconsistency in Data Exchange
In a data exchange setting with target constraints, it is often the case that
a given source instance has no solutions. In such cases, the semantics of
target queries trivialize. The aim of this paper is to introduce and explore a
new framework that gives meaningful semantics in such cases by using the notion
of exchange-repairs. Informally, an exchange-repair of a source instance is
another source instance that differs minimally from the first, but has a
solution. Exchange-repairs give rise to a natural notion of exchange-repair
certain answers (XR-certain answers) for target queries. We show that for
schema mappings specified by source-to-target GAV dependencies and target
equality-generating dependencies (egds), the XR-certain answers of a target
conjunctive query can be rewritten as the consistent answers (in the sense of
standard database repairs) of a union of conjunctive queries over the source
schema with respect to a set of egds over the source schema, making it possible
to use a consistent query-answering system to compute XR-certain answers in
data exchange. We then examine the general case of schema mappings specified by
source-to-target GLAV constraints, a weakly acyclic set of target tgds and a
set of target egds. The main result asserts that, for such settings, the
XR-certain answers of conjunctive queries can be rewritten as the certain
answers of a union of conjunctive queries with respect to the stable models of
a disjunctive logic program over a suitable expansion of the source schema.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, submitted to the Journal on Data Semantic
Composition mechanisms for retrenchment
Retrenchment is a flexible model evolution formalism that arose as a reaction to the limitations imposed by refinement, and for which the proof obligations feature additional predicates for accommodating design data. Composition mechanisms for retrenchment are studied. Vertical, horizontal, dataflow, parallel and fusion compositions are described. Of particular note are the means by which the additional predicates compose. It is argued that all of the compositions introduced are associative, and that they are mutually coherent. Composition of retrenchment with refinement, so important for the smooth interworking of the two techniques, is discussed. Decomposition, allowing finer grained retrenchments to be extracted from a single large grained retrenchment, is also investigated
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