A YII-POWERED WEB APPLICATION TO ASSIST DECISION-MAKERS IN MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT

This paper adopts the concepts of observatory and competitive intelligence (CI) to model a system that will generate better insights for decision-makers in the solid waste industry. The first part of this work is to design and develop a data warehouse (DWH) of solid waste statistics using data assembled from disparate sources. Our methodology of design is the entity relationship diagram (ERD) and our implementation tool is MySQL running on phpMyAdmin. The second part of our work will be to turn our developed DWH into a Web application using the Yii PHP component framework. Our findings indicated that the application of both concepts of observatory and CI lead to better insights for decision-makers and hence better organizational performance

The intelligent waste container

This work involved the design of an intelligent waste container that is capable of notifying the waste disposal company immediately they are filled to capacity so that they may be emptied. The central container collection system of waste disposal which is the main form of waste collection and disposal in most developing countries has rather led to filthy surroundings. This is because the waste containers provided in the communities are never emptied immediately, they get filled to capacity. To counter this problem, this system was designed to use short messaging service (SMS) technique to alert the waste disposal company of a container that is full. The system makes use of a sensor, microcontroller and a global system for mobile (GSM) module in order to function. An application that uses a SMS server is deployed at the offices of the waste management company to complete the system. The sensor detects whether the skip is full or not. The microcontroller controls when the text message is sent the moment the skip is full. The message that is sent is received on a console at the offices of the waste management company through the SMS server. The driver assigned to that skip is then dispatched to empty the skip

Trends in conceptual modeling: Citation analysis of the ER conference papers (1979-2005)

Paper presented at The 11th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI 2007). Madrid, Spain.We analyze thematic trends and challenging issues in conceptual modeling based on the metadata of 943 research papers published in a series of conferences on conceptual modeling (known as the ER conferences) between 1979 and 2005. We specifically address 1) all-time prominent challenges in conceptual modeling, 2) current challenges and emerging trends, and 3) the structure and dynamics of the conceptual modeling community. We utilize CiteSpace, a progressive domain visualization tool, to identify and visualize the movement of research fronts and intellectual bases, persistent clusters of papers, critical paths connecting these clusters, and the evolution of co-authorship networks as well as citation networks. The work contributes an indepth analysis of a major forum of conceptual modeling and a practical method that one can use as frequently as needed to keep abreast of the state of the art of conceptual modeling

Entwurf eines geographisch-historischen Informationssystems: GEOHIST

Semantische Datenmodelle sind das Verbindungsglied zwischen der Sicht und den Erwartungen des Nutzers an die Daten und der physischen Realisation und Implementation der Datenbasis. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt das 'Entity Relationship Model' als das zur Zeit bekannteste semantische Modell vor. Dieses Modell operiert mit den fünf Kategorien Gegenstand, Wert, Assoziation, Attribut und Bindung. Alle für einen gegebenen Nutzer interessierenden Erscheinungen eines Ausschnitts der realen Welt müssen auf diese Kategorien abgebildet werden. Die Vorgehensweise beim Design eines solchen Systems wird am Aufbau des geographisch-historischen Informationssystems GEOHIST demonstriert. (pmb

Computer aided drug design: Drug target directed in silico approaches

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Evaluation of Functional Data Models for Database Design and Use

The problems of design, operation, and maintenance of databases using the three most popular database management systems (Hierarchical, CQDASYL/DBTG, and Relational) are well known. Users wishing to use these systems have to make conscious and often complex mappings between the real-world structures and the data structuring options (data models) provided by these systems. In addition, much of the semantics associated with the data either does not get expressed at all or gets embedded procedurally in application programs in an ad-hoc way. In recent years, a large number of data models (called semantic data models) have been proposed with the aim of simplifying database design and use. However, the lack of usable implementations of these proposals has so far inhibited the widespread use of these concepts. The present work reports on an effort to evaluate and extend one such semantic model by means of an implementation. It is based on the functional data model proposed earlier by Shipman[SHIP81). We call this 'Extended Functional Data Model' (EFDM). EFDM, like Shipman's proposals, is a marriage of three of the advanced modelling concepts found in both database and artificial intelligence research: the concept of entity to represent an object in the real world, the concept of type hierarchy among entity types, and the concept of derived data for modelling procedural knowledge. The functional notation of the model lends itself to high level data manipulation languages. The data selection in these languages is expressed simply as function application. Further, the functional approach makes it possible to incorporate general purpose computation facilities in the data languages without having to embed them in procedural languages. In addition to providing the usual database facilities, the implementation also provides a mechanism to specify multiple user views of the database