A Basis for Interactive Schema Merging

We present a technique for merging the schemas of heterogeneous databases that generalizes to several different data models, and show how it can be used in an interactive program that merges Entity-Relationship diagrams. Given a collection of schemas to be merged, the user asserts the correspondence between entities and relationships in the various schemas by defining "isa" relations between them. These assertions are then considered to be elementary schemas, and are combined with the elementary schemas in the merge. Since the method defines the merge to be the join in an information ordering on schemas, it is a commutative and associative operation, which means that the merge is defined independent of the order in which schemas are presented. We briefly describe a prototype interactive schema merging tool that has been built on these principles. Keywords: schemas, merging, semantic data models, entity-relationship data models, inheritance 1 Introduction Schema merging is the proble..

Evaluating musical software using conceptual metaphors

An open challenge for interaction designers is to find ways of designing software to enhance the ability of novices to perform tasks that normally require specialized domain expertise. This challenge is particularly demanding in areas such as music analysis, where complex, abstract, domain-specific concepts and notations occur. One promising theoretical foundation for this work involves the identification of conceptual metaphors and image schemas, found by analyzing discourse. This kind of analysis has already been applied, with some success, both to musical concepts and, separately, to user interface design. The present work appears to be the first to combine these hitherto distinct bodies of research, with the aim of devising a general method for improving user interfaces for music. Some areas where this may require extensions to existing method are noted. This paper presents the results of an exploratory evaluation of Harmony Space, a tool for playing, analysing and learning about harmony. The evaluation uses conceptual metaphors and image schemas elicited from the dialogues of experienced musicians discussing the harmonic progressions in a piece of music. Examples of where the user interface supports the conceptual metaphors, and where support could be improved, are discussed. The potential use of audio output to support conceptual metaphors and image schemas is considered

Exploring user experience with image schemas, sentiments, and semantics

Although the concept of user experience includes two key aspects, experience of meaning (usability) and experience of emotion (affect), the empirical work that measures both the usability and affective aspects of user experience is currently limited. This is particularly important considering that affect could significantly influence a user’s perception of usability. This paper uses image schemas to quantitatively and systematically evaluate both these aspects. It proposes a method for evaluating user experience that is based on using image schemas, sentiment analysis, and computational semantics. The aim is to link the sentiments expressed by users during their interactions with a product to the specific image schemas used in the designs. The method involves semantic and sentiment analysis of the verbal responses of the users to identify (i) task-related words linked to the task for which a certain image schema has been used and (ii) affect-related words associated with the image schema employed in the interaction. The main contribution is in linking image schemas with interaction and affect. The originality of the method is twofold. First, it uses a domain-specific ontology of image schemas specifically developed for the needs of this study. Second, it employs a novel ontology-based algorithm that extracts the image schemas employed by the user to complete a specific task and identifies and links the sentiments expressed by the user with the specific image schemas used in the task. The proposed method is evaluated using a case study involving 40 participants who completed a set task with two different products. The results show that the method successfully links the users’ experiences to the specific image schemas employed to complete the task. This method facilitates significant improvements in product design practices and usability studies in particular, as it allows qualitative and quantitative evaluation of designs by identifying specific image schemas and product design features that have been positively or negatively received by the users. This allows user experience to be assessed in a systematic way, which leads to a better understanding of the value associated with particular design features

Coreference detection in XML metadata

Preserving data quality is an important issue in data collection management. One of the crucial issues hereby is the detection of duplicate objects (called coreferent objects) which describe the same entity, but in different ways. In this paper we present a method for detecting coreferent objects in metadata, in particular in XML schemas. Our approach consists in comparing the paths from a root element to a given element in the schema. Each path precisely defines the context and location of a specific element in the schema. Path matching is based on the comparison of the different steps of which paths are composed. The uncertainty about the matching of steps is expressed with possibilistic truth values and aggregated using the Sugeno integral. The discovered coreference of paths can help for determining the coreference of different XML schemas

The Moderating Role of Lifestyle on Maladaptive Schemas and Responsibility among Iranian Male Teachers

Introduction: Responsibility can be affected by personality and life conditions. The present study was conducted to investigate the moderating role of lifestyle on maladaptive schemas and responsibility among Iranian male teachers. Method: The study population consisted of all male teachers at primary schools in the city of Manneh, North Khorasan, Iran (n=250), 250 teachers who were selected using the census sampling method were participated in this study. The data collection tools comprised responsibility, early maladaptive schemas, and lifestyle questionnaires. For data analysis, Pearson correlation coefficient and hierarchical regression were employed. Results: The results showed a significant correlation between responsibility and early maladaptive schemas (r=-0.38, p<0.001) and lifestyle (r=0.42, p<0.001). Also, the results of moderation regression reflected that lifestyle modifies the relationship between early maladaptive schemas and responsibility. Conclusion: Results indicated that high scores in maladaptive schemas were associated with low responsibility scores in case of an unhealthy lifestyle, whereas high maladaptive schemas scores were associated with high responsibility scores in cases with a healthy.Declaration of Interest: None

Drafting Event Schemas using Language Models

Past work has studied event prediction and event language modeling, sometimes mediated through structured representations of knowledge in the form of event schemas. Such schemas can lead to explainable predictions and forecasting of unseen events given incomplete information. In this work, we look at the process of creating such schemas to describe complex events. We use large language models (LLMs) to draft schemas directly in natural language, which can be further refined by human curators as necessary. Our focus is on whether we can achieve sufficient diversity and recall of key events and whether we can produce the schemas in a sufficiently descriptive style. We show that large language models are able to achieve moderate recall against schemas taken from two different datasets, with even better results when multiple prompts and multiple samples are combined. Moreover, we show that textual entailment methods can be used for both matching schemas to instances of events as well as evaluating overlap between gold and predicted schemas. Our method paves the way for easier distillation of event knowledge from large language model into schemas

A Semantic Approach to Integrating XML Schemas Using Domain Ontologies

XML documents might often conform to different schemas even in the same application domain. To support the interoperability among different IT systems, this paper proposes a sophisticated method for integrating XML schemas. The proposed method determines the synonym, hypernym, and holonym relationships among XML elements and attributes by using domain ontologies as well as general dictionaries. Specifically, the proposed method takes the structural information of elements and attributes into account. The conciseness of the schema integrated is also considered. Experimental results with a variety of schemas show that the utilization of a domain ontology and the structural information improved the performance of schema integration

The Blues and the Scientific Method: Codified Cultural Schemas and Understanding Adult Cognition from a Multicultural Perspective

Codified cultural schemas are presented as mental structures reflective of a particular culture or language that have been made public, recorded, and disseminated. The Western scientific method and the Blues are contrasted as two examples of codified cultural schemas. Analysis of such schemas that goes beyond Eurocentric structures--and beyond the modalities of language and mathematics--to include the arts and other forms of human intelligence can help us better understand adult cognition across cultures, as well as aid us in the work of adult education in multicultural societies