Digital Availability of Product Information for Collaborative Engineering of Spacecraft

In this paper, we introduce a system to collect product information from manufacturers and make it available in tools that are used for concurrent design of spacecraft. The planning of a spacecraft needs experts from different disciplines, like propulsion, power, and thermal. Since these different disciplines rely on each other there is a high need for communication between them, which is often realized by a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) process and corresponding tools. We show by comparison that the product information provided by manufacturers often does not match the information needed by MBSE tools on a syntactic or semantic level. The information from manufacturers is also currently not available in machine-readable formats. Afterwards, we present a prototype of a system that makes product information from manufacturers directly available in MBSE tools, in a machine-readable way.Comment: accepted at CDVE201

Automatic text summarisation of case law using gate with annie and summa plug-ins

Legal reasoning and judicial verdicts in many legal systems are highly dependent on case law. The ever increasing number of case law make the task of comprehending case law in a legal case cumbersome for legal practitioners; and this invariably stifles their efficiency. Legal reasoning and judicial verdicts will therefore be easier and faster, if case law were in abridged form that preserves their original meaning. This paper used the General Information Extraction System Architecture approach and integrated Natural Language Processing, Annotation, and Information Extraction tools to develop a software system that does automatic extractive text summarisation of Nigeria Supreme Court case law. The summarised case law which were about 20% of their original, were evaluated for semantic preservation and has shown to be 83% reliable.Keywords: Case law, text summarisation, text engineering, text annotation, text extractio