COSMOS-7: Video-oriented MPEG-7 scheme for modelling and filtering of semantic content

MPEG-7 prescribes a format for semantic content models for multimedia to ensure interoperability across a multitude of platforms and application domains. However, the standard leaves it open as to how the models should be used and how their content should be filtered. Filtering is a technique used to retrieve only content relevant to user requirements, thereby reducing the necessary content-sifting effort of the user. This paper proposes an MPEG-7 scheme that can be deployed for semantic content modelling and filtering of digital video. The proposed scheme, COSMOS-7, produces rich and multi-faceted semantic content models and supports a content-based filtering approach that only analyses content relating directly to the preferred content requirements of the user

The structured-element object model for XML.

Ma Chak Kei.Thesis submitted in: July 2002.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-101).Abstracts in English and Chinese.ABSTRACT --- p.IIACKNOWLEDGEMENTS --- p.VITABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.VIILIST OF TABLES --- p.XILIST OF FIGURES --- p.XIIIChapter CHAPTER 1. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Addressing and Manipulating XML Data --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- The Structured-Element Object Model (SEOM) --- p.3Chapter 1.3 --- Relate Research --- p.4Chapter 1.4 --- Contribution --- p.5Chapter 1.5 --- Thesis Overview --- p.6Chapter CHAPTER 2. --- BACKGROUND TECHNOLOGIES --- p.7Chapter 2.1 --- Overview of XML --- p.7Chapter 2.1.1. --- XML Basic Syntax --- p.8Chapter 2.1.2. --- Namespaces in XML --- p.8Chapter 2.2 --- Overview of XML Schema --- p.9Chapter 2.2.1. --- W3C XML Schema --- p.10Chapter 2.2.2 --- ", Schema Alternatives" --- p.13Chapter 2.3 --- Overview of XPath --- p.13Chapter 2.4 --- Overview of DOM --- p.15Chapter CHAPTER 3. --- OVERVIEW OF STRUCTURED-ELEMENT OBJECT MODEL (SEOM) --- p.18Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.18Chapter 3.2 --- Objectives --- p.20Chapter 3.3 --- General Concepts in SEOM --- p.21Chapter 3.3.1. --- Data Representation --- p.21Chapter 3.3.2. --- Data Binding --- p.24Chapter 3.3.3. --- Data Access --- p.25Chapter CHAPTER 4. --- SEOM DOCUMENT MODELING --- p.27Chapter 4.1 --- Data Modeling --- p.27Chapter 4.1.1. --- Simple XML Data Model --- p.28Chapter 4.1.2. --- SEOM Data Model --- p.32Chapter 4.2 --- Schema Modeling --- p.41Chapter 4.2.1. --- SEOM Schema --- p.42Chapter 4.2.2. --- Creating a Schema --- p.46Chapter CHAPTER 5. --- SEOM DOCUMENT PROCESSING --- p.51Chapter 5.1 --- SEOM Document Processing --- p.51Chapter 5.2 --- The Classes --- p.51Chapter 5.2.1. --- SEOM Document Class --- p.52Chapter 5.2.2. --- A bstract SElement Class --- p.55Chapter 5.2.3. --- Generic SElement Class --- p.56Chapter 5.2.4. --- Implementation SElement Classes --- p.57Chapter 5.3 --- XML Parsing and Data Binding --- p.59Chapter 5.3.1. --- Parsing Process --- p.60Chapter 5.4 --- Querying --- p.62Chapter 5.4.1. --- Query Wrapper and Result Wrapper --- p.62Chapter 5.4.2. --- Embedding in XPath --- p.68Chapter CHAPTER 6. --- AN WEB-BASED SEOM DOCUMENT QUERY SYSTEM --- p.71Chapter 6.1 --- Web-based SEOM Document Query System --- p.71Chapter 6.2 --- Client-Server Architecture --- p.71Chapter 6.3 --- The Server --- p.74Chapter 6.3.1. --- Data Loading --- p.74Chapter 6.3.2. --- Implemented SElement - R-Tree --- p.74Chapter 6.3.3. --- Network Interface --- p.80Chapter 6.4 --- Client Side --- p.82Chapter 6.4.1. --- The Interface --- p.82Chapter 6.4.2. --- Programmatic Controls --- p.85Chapter CHAPTER 7. --- EVALUATION --- p.88Chapter 7.1 --- Experiment with Synthetic Data --- p.88Chapter 7.2 --- Qualitative Comparison --- p.90Chapter 7.3 --- Advantages --- p.91Chapter 7.4 --- Disadvantages --- p.92Chapter 7.5 --- Means of Enhancement --- p.93Chapter CHAPTER 8. --- CONCLUSION --- p.94BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.9

Sustainable Construction Engineering and Management

This Book is a Printed Edition of the Special Issue which covers sustainability as an emerging requirement in the fields of construction management, project management and engineering. We invited authors to submit their theoretical or experimental research articles that address the challenges and opportunities for sustainable construction in all its facets, including technical topics and specific operational or procedural solutions, as well as strategic approaches aimed at the project, company or industry level. Central to developments are smart technologies and sophisticated decision-making mechanisms that augment sustainable outcomes. The Special Issue was received with great interest by the research community and attracted a high number of submissions. The selection process sought to balance the inclusion of a broad representative spread of topics against research quality, with editors and reviewers settling on thirty-three articles for publication. The Editors invite all participating researchers and those interested in sustainable construction engineering and management to read the summary of the Special Issue and of course to access the full-text articles provided in the Book for deeper analyses

Symmetric and Asymmetric Data in Solution Models

This book is a Printed Edition of the Special Issue that covers research on symmetric and asymmetric data that occur in real-life problems. We invited authors to submit their theoretical or experimental research to present engineering and economic problem solution models that deal with symmetry or asymmetry of different data types. The Special Issue gained interest in the research community and received many submissions. After rigorous scientific evaluation by editors and reviewers, seventeen papers were accepted and published. The authors proposed different solution models, mainly covering uncertain data in multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problems as complex tools to balance the symmetry between goals, risks, and constraints to cope with the complicated problems in engineering or management. Therefore, we invite researchers interested in the topics to read the papers provided in the book

Dynamic Integration of Evolving Distributed Databases using Services

This thesis investigates the integration of many separate existing heterogeneous and distributed databases which, due to organizational changes, must be merged and appear as one database. A solution to some database evolution problems is presented. It presents an Evolution Adaptive Service-Oriented Data Integration Architecture (EA-SODIA) to dynamically integrate heterogeneous and distributed source databases, aiming to minimize the cost of the maintenance caused by database evolution. An algorithm, named Relational Schema Mapping by Views (RSMV), is designed to integrate source databases that are exposed as services into a pre-designed global schema that is in a data integrator service. Instead of producing hard-coded programs, views are built using relational algebra operations to eliminate the heterogeneities among the source databases. More importantly, the definitions of those views are represented and stored in the meta-database with some constraints to test their validity. Consequently, the method, called Evolution Detection, is then able to identify in the meta-database the views affected by evolutions and then modify them automatically. An evaluation is presented using case study. Firstly, it is shown that most types of heterogeneity defined in this thesis can be eliminated by RSMV, except semantic conflict. Secondly, it presents that few manual modification on the system is required as long as the evolutions follow the rules. For only three types of database evolutions, human intervention is required and some existing views are discarded. Thirdly, the computational cost of the automatic modification shows a slow linear growth in the number of source database. Other characteristics addressed include EA-SODIA’ scalability, domain independence, autonomy of source databases, and potential of involving other data sources (e.g.XML). Finally, the descriptive comparison with other data integration approaches is presented. It shows that although other approaches may provide better performance of query processing in some circumstances, the service-oriented architecture provide better autonomy, flexibility and capability of evolution

Optimization for Decision Making II

In the current context of the electronic governance of society, both administrations and citizens are demanding the greater participation of all the actors involved in the decision-making process relative to the governance of society. This book presents collective works published in the recent Special Issue (SI) entitled “Optimization for Decision Making II”. These works give an appropriate response to the new challenges raised, the decision-making process can be done by applying different methods and tools, as well as using different objectives. In real-life problems, the formulation of decision-making problems and the application of optimization techniques to support decisions are particularly complex and a wide range of optimization techniques and methodologies are used to minimize risks, improve quality in making decisions or, in general, to solve problems. In addition, a sensitivity or robustness analysis should be done to validate/analyze the influence of uncertainty regarding decision-making. This book brings together a collection of inter-/multi-disciplinary works applied to the optimization of decision making in a coherent manner

A Generic Approach to Supporting the Management of Computerised Clinical Guidelines and Protocols

Clinical guidelines or protocols (CGPs) are statements that are systematically developed for the purpose of guiding the clinician and the patient in making decisions about appropriate healthcare for specific clinical problems. Using CGPs is one of the most effective and proven ways to attaining improved quality, optimised resource utilisation, cost containment and reduced variation in healthcare practice. CGPs exist mainly as paper-based natural language statements, but are increasingly being computerised. Supporting computerised CGPs in a healthcare environment so that they are incorporated into the routine used daily by clinicians is complex and presents major information management challenges. This thesis contends that the management of computerised CGPs should incorporate their manipulation (operations and queries), in addition to their specification and execution, as part of a single unified management framework. The thesis applies modern advanced database technology to the task of managing computerised CGPs. The event-condition-action (ECA) rule paradigm is recognised to have a huge potential in supporting computerised CGPs. In this thesis, a unified generic framework, called SpEM and an approach, called MonCooS, were developed for enabling computerised CGPs, to be specified by using a specification language, called PLAN, which follows the ECA rule paradigm; executed by using a software mechanism based on the ECA mechanism within a modern database system, and manipulated by using a manipulation language, called TOPSQL. The MonCooS approach focuses on providing clinicians with assistance in monitoring and coordinating clinical interventions while leaving the reasoning task to domain experts. A proof-of-concepts system, TOPS, was developed to show that CGP management can be easily attained, within the SpEM framework, by using the MonCooS approach. TOPS is used to evaluate the framework and approach in a case study to manage a microalbuminuria protocol for diabetic patients. SpEM and MonCooS were found to be promising in supporting the full-scale management of information and knowledge for the computerised clinical protocol. Active capability within modern DBMS is still experiencing significant limitations in supporting some requirements of this application domain. These limitations lead to pointers for further improvements in database management system (DBMS) functionality for ECA rule support. The main contributions of this thesis are: a generic and unified framework for the management of CGPs; a general platform and an advanced software mechanism for the manipulation of information and knowledge in computerised CGPs; a requirement for further development of the active functionality within modern DBMS; and a case study for the computer-based management of microalbuminuria in diabetes patients

Labelling Dynamic XML Documents: A GroupBased Approach

Documents that comply with the XML standard are characterised by inherent ordering and their modelling usually takes the form of a tree. Nowadays, applications generate massive amounts of XML data, which requires accurate and efficient query-able XML database systems. XML querying depends on XML labelling in much the same way as relational databases rely on indexes. Document order and structural information are encoded by labelling schemes, thus facilitating their use by queries without having to access the original XML document. Dynamic XML data, data which changes, complicates the labelling scheme. As demonstrated by much research efforts, it is difficult to allocate unique labels to nodes in a dynamic XML tree so that all structural relationships between the nodes are encoded by the labels. Static XML documents are generally managed with labelling schemes that use simple labels. By contrast, dynamic labelling schemes have extra labelling costs and lower query performance to allow random updates irrespective of the document update frequency. Given that static and dynamic XML documents are often not clearly distinguished, a labelling scheme whose efficiency does not depend on updating frequency would be useful. The GroupBased labelling scheme proposed in this thesis is compatible with static as well as dynamic XML documents. In particular, this scheme has a high performance in processing dynamic XML data updates. What differentiates it from other dynamic labelling schemes is its uniform behaviour irrespective of whether the document is static or dynamic, ability to determine all structural relationships between nodes, and the improved query performance in both types of document. The advantages of the GroupBased scheme in comparison to earlier schemes are highlighted by the experiment results