Constructions of aggregation operators that preserve ordering of the data

We address the issue of identifying various classes of aggregation operators from empirical data, which also preserves the ordering of the outputs. It is argued that the ordering of the outputs is more important than the numerical values, however the usual data fitting methods are only concerned with fitting the values. We will formulate preservation of the ordering problem as a standard mathematical programming problem, solved by standard numerical methods.<br /

Development of Use Cases, Part I

For determining requirements and constructs appropriate for a Web query language, or in fact any language, use cases are of essence. The W3C has published two sets of use cases for XML and RDF query languages. In this article, solutions for these use cases are presented using Xcerpt. a novel Web and Semantic Web query language that combines access to standard Web data such as XML documents with access to Semantic Web metadata such as RDF resource descriptions with reasoning abilities and rules familiar from logicprogramming. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first in depth study of how to solve use cases for accessing XML and RDF in a single language: Integrated access to data and metadata has been recognized by industry and academia as one of the key challenges in data processing for the next decade. This article is a contribution towards addressing this challenge by demonstrating along practical and recognized use cases the usefulness of reasoning abilities, rules, and semistructured query languages for accessing both data (XML) and metadata (RDF)

A reusable iterative optimization software library to solve combinatorial problems with approximate reasoning

Real world combinatorial optimization problems such as scheduling are typically too complex to solve with exact methods. Additionally, the problems often have to observe vaguely specified constraints of different importance, the available data may be uncertain, and compromises between antagonistic criteria may be necessary. We present a combination of approximate reasoning based constraints and iterative optimization based heuristics that help to model and solve such problems in a framework of C++ software libraries called StarFLIP++. While initially developed to schedule continuous caster units in steel plants, we present in this paper results from reusing the library components in a shift scheduling system for the workforce of an industrial production plant.Comment: 33 pages, 9 figures; for a project overview see http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/proj/StarFLIP

Stochastic spectral-spatial permutation ordering combination for nonlocal morphological processing

International audienceThe extension of mathematical morphology to mul-tivariate data has been an active research topic in recent years. In this paper we propose an approach that relies on the consensus combination of several stochastic permutation orderings. The latter are obtained by searching for a smooth shortest path on a graph representing an image. The construction of the graph can be based on both spatial and spectral information and naturally enables patch-based nonlocal processing