Authoring XML Documents with XHTML and MATHML Support

Since the late 1970s, a large number of scientific documents have been authored in TeX or its derivations such as LaTeX. These typesetting systems allow anybody to write highquality books and articles. But the TeX syntax is not compatible with HTML or XML. So the WWW consortium\u27s answer is MathML. The primary goal of MathML is to enable mathematical documents to be communicated, exchanged, and processed on the Web. Therefore, MathML documents are usually embedded with XHTML documents. Currently, there are several XHTML+MathML editors. The most popular editors use two common approaches. The first approach offers a WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet (WYSIWYG) interface. But experts often find it is difficult to have precise control. For example, font attribute is determined by the direction of the mouse movement during the event of insertion. The second approach uses a textbased form. The entire document is presented as a treelike structure. The treelike structure is unintuitive and extremely inefficient to comprehend, particularly for twodimensional structures such as tables or equations. Here, I present a WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouNeed (WYSIWYN) editing interface that satisfies the needs of experts who have knowledge of XHML+MathML. The WYSIWYN interface is presented in a form that simultaneously makes editing operations unambiguous and that looks recognizable. It avoids unexpected errors by showing enough structure, but still maintain enough visual presentation to avoid confusion. This report presents a test bench, an XHTML+MathML editor with a new navigation model that demonstrates the WYSIWYN user interface. Similar to a WYSIWYG editor, XHTML+MathML documents can be visualized during editing, and users can check the current XPath position by viewing the status bar. In contrast to the WYSIWYG editor, the new approach offers users the ability to view local structure of the current element with a selected style. In this way, users can magnify any ambiguous positions and still be able to visualize mathematical documents. In addition, the test bench offers multiple WYSIWYN modes with different levels of magnification

Promoción del uso del web docente en la Universidad de Navarra: estrategia seguida y evaluación

This paper presents the strategy adopted by the University of Navarre in school year 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 to promote the use of websites for academic purposes. Data on the outcome of the project implementation are also provided. The project implementation had several components. First, we developed an e-content creation tool called Anai that is user-friendly. This allows people with very few computer skills to develop high-quality websites that have versatile features like weblogs, assessment systems, discussion tools, etc. Second, we organized several training sessions on the use of these tools. Today, the number of professors using websites for academic purposes has increased significantly. At least 60% of the courses offered in the University of Navarre have a website. Nevertheless, among the professors, the level and extent of the use of the web vary considerably. 1) The content of most websites is limited to providing basic information about a course, such as course description, objectives, syllabus, criteria of evaluation, etc. 2) Some websites contain teaching notes, handouts and ideas to support students. The content is presented using a variety of formats such as Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF and Microsoft PowerPoint. 3) Very few courses use tools like forums, weblogs, assessment systems or digital video. The key elements to ensure the effective implementation of the project include the following: user-friendly tools, institutional support and sustained efforts to train the users

Algebraic specification of documents

According to recent research, nearly 95 percent of a corporate information is stored in documents. Further studies indicate that companies spent between 6 and 10 percent of their gross revenues printing and distributing documents in several ways: web and cdrom publishing, database storage and retrieval and printing. In this context documents exist in some different formats, from pure ascii files to internal database or text processor formats. It is clear that document reusability and low-cost maintenance are two important issues in the near future. The majority of available document processors is purpose-oriented, reducing the necessary flexibility and reusability of documents. Some waste of time arises from adapting the same text to different purposes. For example you may want to have the same document as an article as a set of slides or as a poster; or you can have a dictionnary document producing a book and a list of words for a spell-checker. This conversion could be done automatically from the first version of the document if it complies some standard requirements. The key idea will be to keep a complete separation between syntax and semantics. In this way we produce an abstract description separating conceptual issues from those concerned with the use. This note proposes a few guidelines to build a system to solve the above problem. Such a system should be an algebraic based environment and provide facilities for: - Document type definitions; - Definition of functions over document types; - Document definitions as algebraic terms. This approach (rooted in the tradition of constructive algebraic specification), will allow for homogeneous environment to deal with operations such as merging documents, converting formats, translating documents, extracting different kinds of information (to set up information repositories, data bases, or semantic networks) or portions of documents (as it happens, for instance, in literate programming), and some other actions, not so traditional, like mail reply, or memo production. We intend to use CAMILA (a specification language and prototyping environment developed at Universidade do Minho, by the Computer Science group) to develop the above mentioned system

The BIFLOW-Toscana Bilingue Catalogue: A Digital Representation of the Socio-cultural History of Translation in the Tuscan Middle Ages (1260–1430)

This article aims at presenting the Biflow-Toscana Bilingue catalogue, the final out-come of the Biflow(Bilingualism in Florentine and Tuscan Works)ERC project, which investigates the forms and modes of the transmission of texts circulating in several languages in medieval Tuscany between the end of the thirteenth and the middle of the fifteenth century (translations of non-classical texts produced or realized in Tuscany between 1260 and 1430). The construction of a digital catalogue comprehends the theoretical framework and method-ological backgrounds of the many fields involved in the project; more crucially, this research focused on the tradition and translations of texts transmitted in manuscripts seeks to reshape humanistic methods and methodologies in order to find the best solutions for representing it with computational models

Multi-touch interaction for interface prototyping

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Talking/Speaking/Stalking/Streaming: Artist’s Browsers and Tactical Engagements with the Early Web

The thesis discusses three artist-made browsers from the late 1990s. As the Web transitioned from a niche information system to global telecommunications infrastructure, these artists created functional software that explored the socioeconomic, political, and cultural ramifications of these rapidly changing networked technologies. The thesis argues that these artworks seized upon the browser—an interface between users and information—as a tactical point of intervention. These artist’s browsers presented alternative interfaces to the Web, visualizing how commercial browsers shape access to networked information while also making available new modalities of interaction. These artworks encouraged users to develop a critical awareness of how the Web functioned, and built on that awareness by offering tactics for interaction. Framing browsing as a union of reading and writing practices, these artists envisioned how the Web might be reshaped if users could fully leverage the browser as a means of both information production and consumption.Master of Art

Helping scientists integrate and interact with biomedical data

Tese de mestrado, Bioinformática e Biologia Computacional , 2021, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasFor the past decades, the amount and complexity of biomedical data available have increased and far exceeded the human capacity to process it. To support this, knowledge graphs and ontologies have been increasingly used, allowing semantic integration of heterogeneous data within and across domains. However, the independent development of biomedical ontologies has created heterogeneity problems, with the design of ontologies with overlapping domains or significant differences. Automated ontology alignment techniques have been developed to tackle the semantic heterogeneity problem, by establishing meaningful correspondences between entities of two ontologies. However, their performance is limited, and the alignments they produce can contain erroneous, incoherent, or missing mappings. Therefore, manual validation of automated ontology alignments remains essential to ensure their quality. Given the complexity of the ontology matching process, is important to provide visualization and a user interface with the necessary features to support the exploration, validation, and edition of alignments. However, these aspects are often overlooked, as few alignment systems feature user interfaces enabling alignment visualization, fewer allow editing alignments, and fewer provide the functionalities needed to make the task seamless for users. This dissertation developed VOWLMap — an extension for the standalone web application, WebVOWL — for visualizing, editing, and validating biomedical ontology alignments. This work extended the Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (VOWL), which defines a visual representation for most language constructs of OWL, to support graphical representations of alignments and restructured WebVOWL to load and visualize alignments. VOWLMap employs modularization techniques to facilitate the visualization of large alignments, while maintaining the context of each mapping, and offers a dynamic visualization that supports interaction mechanisms, including direct interaction with and editing of graph representations. A user study was conducted to evaluate the usability and performance of VOWLMap, having obtained positive feedback with an excellent score in a standard usability questionnaire

ISAR: Ein Autorensystem für Interaktive Tische

Developing augmented reality systems involves several challenges, that prevent end users and experts from non-technical domains, such as education, to experiment with this technology. In this research we introduce ISAR, an authoring system for augmented reality tabletops targeting users from non-technical domains. ISAR allows non-technical users to create their own interactive tabletop applications and experiment with the use of this technology in domains such as educations, industrial training, and medical rehabilitation.Die Entwicklung von Augmented-Reality-Systemen ist mit mehreren Herausforderungen verbunden, die Endbenutzer und Experten aus nicht-technischen Bereichen, wie z.B. dem Bildungswesen, daran hindern, mit dieser Technologie zu experimentieren. In dieser Forschung stellen wir ISAR vor, ein Autorensystem für Augmented-Reality-Tabletops, das sich an Benutzer aus nicht-technischen Bereichen richtet. ISAR ermöglicht es nicht-technischen Anwendern, ihre eigenen interaktiven Tabletop-Anwendungen zu erstellen und mit dem Einsatz dieser Technologie in Bereichen wie Bildung, industrieller Ausbildung und medizinischer Rehabilitation zu experimentieren

Knowledge Based Systems: A Critical Survey of Major Concepts, Issues, and Techniques

This Working Paper Series entry presents a detailed survey of knowledge based systems. After being in a relatively dormant state for many years, only recently is Artificial Intelligence (AI) - that branch of computer science that attempts to have machines emulate intelligent behavior - accomplishing practical results. Most of these results can be attributed to the design and use of Knowledge-Based Systems, KBSs (or ecpert systems) - problem solving computer programs that can reach a level of performance comparable to that of a human expert in some specialized problem domain. These systems can act as a consultant for various requirements like medical diagnosis, military threat analysis, project risk assessment, etc. These systems possess knowledge to enable them to make intelligent desisions. They are, however, not meant to replace the human specialists in any particular domain. A critical survey of recent work in interactive KBSs is reported. A case study (MYCIN) of a KBS, a list of existing KBSs, and an introduction to the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Project are provided as appendices. Finally, an extensive set of KBS-related references is provided at the end of the report

Grifon: a graphical interface to an object oriented database

The aim of the research outlined in this thesis is to establish what type of interface would be most suitable for object oriented databases. In particular it examines how graphical interface technologies might be used to present the database in a clearer form. In support of the research, a prototype interface system has also been developed to a commercial database to illustrate the practicality of the development of such an interface, and the increased effectiveness of the resultant system. The thesis outlines the features provided by the interface, the benefits accrued from such a system, and the problems associated with its development. Finally, it examines how such a system fits into the current work being carried out in the area of user interaction with databases