Using the AHP to determine the correlation of product issues to profit

Analyzes the correlation between product issues and product profit using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Estimation on the effect of profit on product issues by AHP; failure of the AHP to determine the correlation factors; development of procedure for determining correlation factors

Portability of Prolog programs: theory and case-studies

(Non-)portability of Prolog programs is widely considered as an important factor in the lack of acceptance of the language. Since 1995, the core of the language is covered by the ISO standard 13211-1. Since 2007, YAP and SWI-Prolog have established a basic compatibility framework. This article describes and evaluates this framework. The aim of the framework is running the same code on both systems rather than migrating an application. We show that today, the portability within the family of Edinburgh/Quintus derived Prolog implementations is good enough to allow for maintaining portable real-world applications.Comment: Online proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Implementation of Constraint Logic Programming Systems and Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments (CICLOPS-WLPE 2010), Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K., July 15, 201

Automatic generation of large-scale paraphrases

Research on paraphrase has mostly focussed on lexical or syntactic variation within individual sentences. Our concern is with larger-scale paraphrases, from multiple sentences or paragraphs to entire documents. In this paper we address the problem of generating paraphrases of large chunks of texts. We ground our discussion through a worked example of extending an existing NLG system to accept as input a source text, and to generate a range of fluent semantically-equivalent alternatives, varying not only at the lexical and syntactic levels, but also in document structure and layout

Implementation of national and international REDD mechanism under alternative payments for environemtal services: theory and illustration from Sumatra

This paper develops an analytical model of a REDD+ mechanism with an international payment tier and a national payment tier, and calibrate land users' opportunity cost curves based on data from Sumatra. We compare the avoided deforestation and cost-eciency of government purchases across the two types of contracts fixed price and opportunity cost, and across two government types "benevolent" and "budget maximizing". Our paper shows that a fixed-price scheme is likely to be more efficient than an opportunity-cost compensation scheme at low international carbon prices, when the government is "benevolent" or when variation in opportunity cost within land users is high relative to variation in opportunity cost across land users. Thus, a PES program which pays local communities or land users based on the value of the service provided by avoided deforestation may not only distribute REDD revenue more equitably than an opportunity cost-based payment system, but may be more cost-efficient as well.

Expressing OWL axioms by English sentences: dubious in theory, feasible in practice

With OWL (Web Ontology Language) established as a standard for encoding ontologies on the Semantic Web, interest has begun to focus on the task of verbalising OWL code in controlled English (or other natural language). Current approaches to this task assume that axioms in OWL can be mapped to sentences in English. We examine three potential problems with this approach (concerning logical sophistication, information structure, and size), and show that although these could in theory lead to insuperable difficulties, in practice they seldom arise, because ontology developers use OWL in ways that favour a transparent mapping. This result is evidenced by an analysis of patterns from a corpus of over 600,000 axioms in about 200 ontologies

DecMS : an approach to providing decision support within NEC delivery

Decision-making across the military capability lifecycle phases can vary considerably in terms of the types of decisions made and the manner in which they are made. Although decision-making has received considerable attention within the research community, much work has concentrated on providing decision support for particular styles of decision-making. However, within capability delivery there is a need to develop approaches that can both map styles of decision-making to particular decision problems, and provide decision support at an executable level of detail. This paper presents the Decision Management and Support (DecMS) approach to providing decision support during capability delivery. The approach is based upon refining a fundamental model of decision-making to an executable level of detail. Refinement is controlled using analogical reasoning to ensure that the model is refined in accordance with the needs of the decision problem at hand. Future work will involve testing the effectiveness of the approach

EXPRESS: EXPressing REstful Semantic Web Services

Existing approaches to Semantic Web Services (SWS) require both a domain ontology and a semantic description of the service. We propose EXPRESS a lightweight approach to SWS. Its simplicity stems from the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web such as resource-realization, self?describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from the resource descriptions in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for ontologically describing services. In this poster we describe EXPRESS and show how it represents different service types. It also discusses our ongoing and future work on service discovery and choreograph