Semantic Technologies for Manuscript Descriptions — Concepts and Visions

The contribution at hand relates recent developments in the area of the World Wide Web to codicological research. In the last number of years, an informational extension of the internet has been discussed and extensively researched: the Semantic Web. It has already been applied in many areas, including digital information processing of cultural heritage data. The Semantic Web facilitates the organisation and linking of data across websites, according to a given semantic structure. Software can then process this structural and semantic information to extract further knowledge. In the area of codicological research, many institutions are making efforts to improve the online availability of handwritten codices. If these resources could also employ Semantic Web techniques, considerable research potential could be unleashed. However, data acquisition from less structured data sources will be problematic. In particular, data stemming from unstructured sources needs to be made accessible to SemanticWeb tools through information extraction techniques. In the area of museum research, the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) has been widely examined and is being adopted successfully. The CRM translates well to Semantic Web research, and its concentration on contextualization of objects could support approaches in codicological research. Further concepts for the creation and management of bibliographic coherences and structured vocabularies related to the CRM will be considered in this chapter. Finally, a user scenario showing all processing steps in their context will be elaborated on

A closer look at creativity as search

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A derivational rephrasing experiment for question answering

In Knowledge Management, variations in information expressions have proven a real challenge. In particular, classical semantic relations (e.g. synonymy) do not connect words with different parts-of-speech. The method proposed tries to address this issue. It consists in building a derivational resource from a morphological derivation tool together with derivational guidelines from a dictionary in order to store only correct derivatives. This resource, combined with a syntactic parser, a semantic disambiguator and some derivational patterns, helps to reformulate an original sentence while keeping the initial meaning in a convincing manner This approach has been evaluated in three different ways: the precision of the derivatives produced from a lemma; its ability to provide well-formed reformulations from an original sentence, preserving the initial meaning; its impact on the results coping with a real issue, ie a question answering task . The evaluation of this approach through a question answering system shows the pros and cons of this system, while foreshadowing some interesting future developments

A lightweight, pattern-based approach to identification and formalisation of TimeML expressions in clinical narratives

General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) components for identifying clinical events and temporal expressions are developed and evaluated against a corpus of 120 discharge summaries

Perceptual Context in Cognitive Hierarchies

Cognition does not only depend on bottom-up sensor feature abstraction, but also relies on contextual information being passed top-down. Context is higher level information that helps to predict belief states at lower levels. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a formalisation of perceptual context and its integration into a new process model for cognitive hierarchies. Several simple instantiations of a cognitive hierarchy are used to illustrate the role of context. Notably, we demonstrate the use context in a novel approach to visually track the pose of rigid objects with just a 2D camera

Agile elicitation of semantic goals by wiki

Formal goal and service descriptions are the shibboleth of the semantic web services approach, yet the people responsible for creating them are neither machines nor logicians, and rarely even knowledge engineers: the people who need and specify functionality are not those who provide it, and both may be distinct from the semantic annotators. The gap between users' informal conceptualisations of problems and formal descriptions is one which must be effectively bridged for semantic web services to be widely adopted. We show how a simple technique–using a wiki to collect user requirements and mediate a progressive, iterative refinement and formalisation of user goals by domain experts and their knowledge engineer colleagues–can achieve this. Further, we suggest how the process could be extended, so as to itself benefit from semantic technologies

Is an archaeological contribution to the theory of social science possible? Archaeological data and concepts in the dispute between Jean-Claude Gardin and Jean-Claude Passeron

The issue of the definition and position of archaeology as a discipline is examined in relation to the dispute which took place from 1980 to 2009 between the archaeologist Jean-Claude Gardin and the sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron. This case study enables us to explore the actual conceptual relationships between archaeology and the other sciences (as opposed to those wished for or prescribed). The contrasts between the positions declared by the two researchers and the rooting of their arguments in their disciplines are examined: where the sociologist makes use of his philosophical training, the archaeologist relies mainly on his work on semiology and informatics. Archaeology ultimately plays a minor role in the arguments proposed. This dispute therefore cannot be considered as evidence for the movement of concepts between archaeology and the social sciences. A blind spot in the debate, relating to the ontological specificities of archaeological objects, nevertheless presents itself as a possible way of implementing this movement

Set-based design of mechanical systems with design robustness integrated

This paper presents a method for parameter design of mechanical products based on a set-based approach. Set-based concurrent engineering emphasises on designing in a multi-stakeholder environment with concurrent involvement of the stakeholders in the design process. It also encourages flexibility in design through communication in terms of ranges instead of fixed point values and subsequent alternative solutions resulting from intersection of these ranges. These alternative solutions can then be refined and selected according to the designers’ preferences and clients’ needs. This paper presents a model and tools for integrated flexible design that take into account the manufacturing variations as well as the design objectives for finding inherently robust solutions using QCSP transformation through interval analysis. In order to demonstrate the approach, an example of design of rigid flange coupling with a variable number of bolts and a choice of bolts from ISO M standard has been resolved and demonstrated