Unifying Distributed Processing and Open Hypertext through a Heterogeneous Communication Model

A successful distributed open hypermedia system can be characterised by a scaleable architecture which is inherently distributed. While the architects of distributed hypermedia systems have addressed the issues of providing and retrieving distributed resources, they have often neglected to design systems with the inherent capability to exploit the distributed processing of this information. The research presented in this paper describes the construction and use of an open hypermedia system concerned equally with both of these facets

A Configurable Transport Layer for CAF

The message-driven nature of actors lays a foundation for developing scalable and distributed software. While the actor itself has been thoroughly modeled, the message passing layer lacks a common definition. Properties and guarantees of message exchange often shift with implementations and contexts. This adds complexity to the development process, limits portability, and removes transparency from distributed actor systems. In this work, we examine actor communication, focusing on the implementation and runtime costs of reliable and ordered delivery. Both guarantees are often based on TCP for remote messaging, which mixes network transport with the semantics of messaging. However, the choice of transport may follow different constraints and is often governed by deployment. As a first step towards re-architecting actor-to-actor communication, we decouple the messaging guarantees from the transport protocol. We validate our approach by redesigning the network stack of the C++ Actor Framework (CAF) so that it allows to combine an arbitrary transport protocol with additional functions for remote messaging. An evaluation quantifies the cost of composability and the impact of individual layers on the entire stack

GATE -- an Environment to Support Research and Development in Natural Language Engineering

We describe a software environment to support research and development in natural language (NL) engineering. This environment -- GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering) -- aims to advance research in the area of machine processing of natural languages by providing a software infrastructure on top of which heterogeneous NL component modules may be evaluated and refined individually or may be combined into larger application systems. Thus, GATE aims to support both researchers and developers working on component technologies (e.g. parsing, tagging, morphological analysis) and those working on developing end-user applications (e.g. information extraction, text summarisation, document generation, machine translation, and second language learning). GATE will promote reuse of component technology, permit specialisation and collaboration in large-scale projects, and allow for the comparison and evaluation of alternative technologies. The first release of GATE is now available

Chemical applications of escience to interfacial spectroscopy

This report is a summary of works carried out by the author between October 2003 and September 2004, in the first year of his PhD studie

ADLib: An Arduino Communication Framework for Ambient Displays

As computers become more and more a part of our everyday lives, the need to change the way in which people interact with them is also evolving. Ambient displays provide an effective way to move computers away from our main focus and into the periphery. ADLib is a small communication framework that aims to simplify the construction of ambient displays built using the Arduino prototyping platform. The ADLib framework provides an easy-to-use library for communicating with an Arduino, allowing the user to focus on the construction and development of the display. The framework consists of three main components: A protocol for encoding information to be sent from a host computer to the Arduino An Arduino library for receiving and parsing incoming data A desktop application for sending data to the Arduin