Decidability Results for the Boundedness Problem

We prove decidability of the boundedness problem for monadic least fixed-point recursion based on positive monadic second-order (MSO) formulae over trees. Given an MSO-formula phi(X,x) that is positive in X, it is decidable whether the fixed-point recursion based on phi is spurious over the class of all trees in the sense that there is some uniform finite bound for the number of iterations phi takes to reach its least fixed point, uniformly across all trees. We also identify the exact complexity of this problem. The proof uses automata-theoretic techniques. This key result extends, by means of model-theoretic interpretations, to show decidability of the boundedness problem for MSO and guarded second-order logic (GSO) over the classes of structures of fixed finite tree-width. Further model-theoretic transfer arguments allow us to derive major known decidability results for boundedness for fragments of first-order logic as well as new ones

Membership for limited ET0L languages is not decidable

In this paper, we show how to encode arbitrary enumerable set of numbers given by register machines within limited EPT0L systems and programmed grammars with unconditional transfer.This result has various consequences, e.g.the existence of nonrecursive sets generable by 1lET0L systems or by programmed grammars with unconditional transfer. Moreover, ordered grammars are strictly less powerful than 1lET0L systems

Reachability problems for systems with linear dynamics

This thesis deals with reachability and freeness problems for systems with linear dynamics, including hybrid systems and matrix semigroups. Hybrid systems are a type of dynamical system that exhibit both continuous and discrete dynamic behaviour. Thus they are particularly useful in modelling practical real world systems which can both flow (continuous behaviour) and jump (discrete behaviour). Decision questions for matrix semigroups have attracted a great deal of attention in both the Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science communities. They can also be used to model applications with only discrete components. For a computational model, the reachability problem asks whether we can reach a target point starting from an initial point, which is a natural question both in theoretical study and for real-world applications. By studying this problem and its variations, we shall prove in a formal mathematical sense that many problems are intractable or even unsolvable. Thus we know when such a problem appears in other areas like Biology, Physics or Chemistry, either the problem itself needs to be simplified, or it should by studied by approximation. In this thesis we concentrate on a specific hybrid system model, called an HPCD, and its variations. The objective of studying this model is twofold: to obtain the most expressive system for which reachability is algorithmically solvable and to explore the simplest system for which it is impossible to solve. For the solvable sub-cases, we shall also study whether reachability is in some sense easy or hard by determining which complexity classes the problem belongs to, such as P, NP(-hard) and PSPACE(-hard). Some undecidable results for matrix semigroups are also shown, which both strengthen our knowledge of the structure of matrix semigroups, and lead to some undecidability results for other models

Web interaction environments : characterising Web accessibility at the large

Tese de doutoramento, Informática (Engenharia Informática), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2012Accessibility quality on the Web is essential for providing a good Web experience to people with disabilities. The existence of virtual ramps aid these users grasping and interacting withWeb content, just like the experience of those who are unimpaired. However, more often than not, Web pages impose accessibility barriers, usually centred on the unavailability of tailored content to specific perceptual abilities (e.g., textual description of images, enabling grasping information with assistive technologies), as well as on proper HTML structural elements that adequate the semantics of a Web page. When evaluating the accessibility quality of Web pages, the resulting analysis is often focused on a small sample set (e.g., a single Web page or a selection of pages from a Web site). While this kind of analysis gets the gist of accessibility quality, it misses the big picture on the overall accessibility quality of the Web. This thesis addresses the challenge of observing accessibility phenomena on the Web, through the experimental evaluation of large collections of Web pages. This resulted on new findings about the accessibility quality of the Web, such as its correlation with HTML element count, and the erroneous perception of accessibility quality by developers. Small-scale experiments have been verified also at large scale, such as the correlation between the usage of HTML templates and accessibility quality. Based on the challenges raised by the experimental evaluation, this thesis proposes a novel approach for large scale Web accessibility evaluation based on Linked Data, as well as the establishment of metrics to assess the truthfulness and coverage of automated evaluation methods.A qualidade da acessibilidade é um factor crucial para as pessoas com deficiências terem uma boa experiência de interacção com a Web.A qualidade da acessibilidade é um factor crucial para as pessoas com deficiências terem uma boa experiência de interacção com a Web. A existência de rampas virtuais ajuda estas pessoas a compreender e interagir com conteúdos Web, a par do que o utilizador comum já experiencia. Porém, a maioria das páginas Web ainda contêm barreiras à acessibilidade. Estas barreiras centram-se normalmente na indisponibilidade de conteúdos perceptíveis por diferentes tipos de capacidades (e.g., descrições textuais de imagens), bem como no uso incorrecto de elementos HTML de acordo com a semântica de uma página Web. Nos dias de hoje, a avaliação da qualidade de acessibilidade de páginas Web é ainda efectuada em pequena escala (e.g., uma página Web ou, no melhor caso, um conjunto de páginas representativas de um sítio Web). Apesar deste tipo de avaliações resultarem na compreensão de alguns fenómenos do estado da acessibilidade na Web, ainda não se sabe qual o seu impacto em larga escala. Esta tese discute os principais desafios na observação da acessibilidade da Web, tendo por base um conjunto de avaliações experimentais de colecções de grande dimensão de páginas Web. Destes estudos destacam-se as seguintes contribuições e resultados:a diferença drástica na interpretação dos avisos resultantes de avaliações de acessibilidade Web: um dos resultados principais da avaliação experimental em larga escala destaca a diferença na interpretação dos avisos (warnings) da aplicação de técnicas da norma WCAG, onde a interpretação optimista (i.e., a visão da maioria dos criadores de páginas Web) se distancia amplamente da interpretação conservadora (onde os avisos são interpretados como erros); a correlação entre a qualidade da acessibilidade de uma página Web e a sua complexidade: este mesmo estudo de larga escala revelou uma correlação entre a complexidade de uma página Web (no que diz respeito ao número de elementos HTML que contém) e a qualidade da acessibilidade. Quanto menor a complexidade de uma página Web, mais certa se torna a alta qualidade da acessibilidade dessa página; o benefício do uso de templates e sistemas de gestão de conteúdos na melhoria da acessibilidade de páginas Web: em ambos os estudos experimentais de acessibilidade foi detectada uma correlação entre a qualidade de acessibilidade das páginas Web e o uso de templates e sistemas de gestão de conteúdo. Esta propriedade foi verificada quer em pequena escala (sobre uma colecção de páginas Web da Wikipedia), quer em larga escala; o incumprimento das regras mais elementares e mais conhecidas da acessibilidade: estes estudos experimentais permitiram também verificar que, apesar de toda a envagelização e educação sobre as questões de acessibilidade na Web, a maioria das regras de acessibilidade são incessantemente quebradas pela maioria das páginas Web.Esta problemática verifica-se, em particular, nas regras de cumprimento de acessibilidade mais conhecidas, tal como por exemplo a disponibilidade de textos alternativos a conteúdos multimédia. Com base nestas experiências e resultados, esta tese apresenta um novo modelo de estudo da acessibilidade na Web, tendo por base o ciclo de estudos da Web em larga escala. Deste modelo resultaram as seguintes contribuições: um modelo para a avaliação distribuída de acessibilidade Web, baseado em propriedades tecnológicas e topológicas: foi concebido um modelo de avaliação de acessibilidade Web que permite a concepção de sistemas de avaliação com base em propriedades tecnológicas e topológicas. Este modelo possibilita, entre outras características, o estudo da cobertura de plataformas e avaliadores de acessibilidade, bem como da sua aplicação em larga escala; uma extensão às linguagens e modelos EARL e Linked Data, bem como um conjunto de definições para extrair informação destes: este modelo de avaliação de acessibilidade Web foi sustentado também pela sua concretização em linguagens e modelos já existentes para o estudo de acessibilidade (EARL) e da Web em larga escala (Linked Data), permitindo assim a sua validação; definição dos limites da avaliação de acessibilidade Web: por fim, este modelo de avaliação de acessibilidade permitiu também delinear uma metodologia de meta-avaliação da acessibilidade, na qual se poderão enquadrar as propriedades dos avaliadores de acessibilidade existentes. Todas estas contribuições resultaram também num conjunto de publicações científicas, das quais se destacam: Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, A Web Science Perspective of Web Accessibility, in submission for the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), ACM, 2011; Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, Macroscopic Characterisations of Web Accessibility, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia – Special Issue on Web Accessibility. Taylor & Francis, 2010; Rui Lopes, Karel Van Isacker and Luís Carriço, Redefining Assumptions: Accessibility and Its Stakeholders, The 12th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP), Vienna, Austria, 14-16 July 2010; Rui Lopes, Daniel Gomes and Luís Carriço, Web Not For All: A Large Scale Study of Web Accessibility, W4A: 7th ACM International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 26-27 April 2010; Rui Lopes, Konstantinos Votis, Luís Carriço, Dimitrios Tzovaras, and Spiridon Likothanassis, The Semantics of Personalised Web Accessibility Assessment, 25th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), Sierre, Switzerland, 22-26 March, 2010 Konstantinos Votis, Rui Lopes, Dimitrios Tzovaras, Luís Carriço and Spiridon Likothanassis, A Semantic Accessibility Assessment Environment for Design and Development for the Web, HCI International 2009 (HCII 2009), San Diego, California, USA, 19-24 July 2009 Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, On the Gap Between Automated and In-Vivo Evaluations of Web Accessibility, HCI International 2009 (HCII 2009), San Diego, California, USA, 19-24 July 2009; Rui Lopes, Konstantinos Votis, Luís Carriço, Spiridon Likothanassis and Dimitrios Tzovaras, Towards the Universal Semantic Assessment of Accessibility, 24th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC),Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 8-12 March 2009; Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, Querying Web Accessibility Knowledge from Web Graphs, Handbook of Research on Social Dimensions of Semantic Technologies, IGI Global, 2009; Rui Lopes, Konstantinos Votis, Luís Carriço, Spiridon Likothanassis and Dimitrios Tzovaras, A Service Oriented Ontological Framework for the Semantic Validation of Web Accessibility, Handbook of Research on Social Dimensions of Semantic Technologies, IGI Global, 2009; Rui Lopes and Luís Carriço, On the Credibility of Wikipedia: an Accessibility Perspective, Second Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web (WICOW 2008), Napa Valley, California, USA, 2008; Rui Lopes, Luís Carriço, A Model for Universal Usability on the Web, WSW 2008: Web Science Workshop, Beijing, China, 22 April 2008; Rui Lopes, Luís Carriço, The Impact of Accessibility Assessment in Macro Scale Universal Usability Studies of the Web, W4A: 5th ACM International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, Beijing, China, 21-22 April 2008. Best paper award; Rui Lopes, Luís Carriço, Modelling Web Accessibility for Rich Document Production, Journal on Access Services 6 (1-2), Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009; Rui Lopes, Luís Carriço, Leveraging Rich Accessible Documents on the Web, W4A: 4th ACM International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, Banff, Canada, 7-8 May 2007.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, SFRH/BD/29150/2006

Accepting grammars and systems

We investigate several kinds of regulated rewriting (programmed, matrix, with regular control, ordered, and variants thereof) and of parallel rewriting mechanisms (Lindenmayer systems, uniformly limited Lindenmayer systems, limited Lindenmayer systems and scattered context grammars) as accepting devices, in contrast with the usual generating mode. In some cases, accepting mode turns out to be just as powerful as generating mode, e.g. within the grammars of the Chomsky hierarchy, within random context, regular control, L systems, uniformly limited L systems, scattered context. Most of these equivalences can be proved using a metatheorem on so-called context condition grammars. In case of matrix grammars and programmed grammars without appearance checking, a straightforward construction leads to the desired equivalence result. Interestingly, accepting devices are (strictly) more powerful than their generating counterparts in case of ordered grammars, programmed and matrix grammars with appearance checking (even programmed grammarsm with unconditional transfer), and 1lET0L systems. More precisely, if we admit erasing productions, we arrive at new characterizations of the recursivley enumerable languages, and if we do not admit them, we get new characterizations of the context-sensitive languages. Moreover, we supplement the published literature showing: - The emptiness and membership problems are recursivley solvable for generating ordered grammars, even if we admit erasing productions. - Uniformly limited propagating systems can be simulated by programmed grammars without erasing and without appearance checking, hence the emptiness and membership problems are recursively solvable for such systems. - We briefly discuss the degree of nondeterminism and the degree of synchronization for devices with limited parallelism

Mehrfach-limitierte Lindenmayer-Systeme

The theory of L systems originated with the biologist and mathematician Aristide Lindenmayer. His original goal was to provide mathematical models for the simultaneous development of cells in filamentous organisms. Since L systems may be viewed as rewriting systems, their generated languages, i.e., sets of organisms encoded by strings, are also subject to formal language theory, which aims to classify formal languages as well as their generating mechanisms according to various properties, such as generative power, decidability, etc. D. Wätjen introduced and studied k-limited L systems in order to combine the purely sequential mode of rewriting and the purely parallel mode of rewriting in context-free grammars, respectively, L systems. In biology, these systems may be interpreted as organisms, for which the simultaneous growth of cells is restricted by the supply of some resources of food being limited by some finite value k. In this thesis the constraint of a common limit k is relaxed in favor of individual resource limits k(a) for every cell-type a, which yields the new notion of multi-limited L system. The language families generated by such systems are then classified according to their sets of limits k(a). At first, an intuitive approach to the different mechanisms of the L system variants is provided by presenting a method for the graphical interpretation of L systems, the so-called turtle interpretation. Suitable computer programs implementing a turtle interpreter as well as free-programmable simulators for multi-limited, k-limited, and uniformly k-limited L systems, are developed and their source-code is appended. Subsequently, language families generated by multi-limited L systems are compared to each other, to Wätjen's k-limited as well as to non-limited language families, and to the families of the Chomsky Hierarchy. Besides asymptotically comparing the generative power of multi-limited L systems to that of the underlying non-limited L systems, also their closure properties are investigated.Der Biologe und Mathematiker Aristide Lindenmayer begründete die Theorie der L-Systeme. Das ursprüngliche Ziel dieser Theorie ist die Bereitstellung mathematischer Modelle zur Untersuchung des simultanen Zellwachstums fadenartiger Organismen. Da L-Systeme als eine Art von Ersetzungssystemen definiert sind, sind ihre erzeugten Sprachen, d.h. die Mengen der durch Zeichenketten beschriebenen Organismen, ebenfalls Gegenstand der Theorie der formalen Sprachen. Diese Theorie klassifiziert formale Sprachen sowie ihre Erzeugungsmechanismen gemäß ihrer Eigenschaften, wie z.B. Erzeugungsmächtigkeit oder Entscheidbarkeit. Als ein Sprachen-erzeugender Mechanismus, der zwischen der rein sequentiellen Ersetzung kontextfreier Grammatiken und der rein parallelen Ersetzung von L-Systemen liegt, sind k-limitierte L-Systeme von D. Wätjen eingeführt und untersucht worden. In der Biologie können diese Systeme als Organismen interpretiert werden, deren simultanes Zellwachstum beschränkt ist durch individuelle Nahrungsvorräte mit einer einheitlichen endlichen Kapazität k. Die in dieser Arbeit betrachteten mehrfach-limitierten L-Systeme bilden eine Verallgemeinerung der k-limitierten L-Systeme, indem sie für jeden Zelltyp a einen individuellen Nahrungsvorrat mit einer spezifischen Kapazität k(a) anstelle der einheitlichen Kapazität k vorsehen. Diese Arbeit führt mehrfach-limitierte L-Systeme ein und definiert eine geeignete Kategorisierung der von ihnen erzeugten Sprachfamilien anhand der erlaubten Mengen von Limits k(a). Zunächst wird ein intuitiver Zugang zu den verschiedenen Mechanismen der L-System-Varianten ermöglicht, indem eine Methode zur grafischen Interpretation von L-Systemen, die sogenannte Turtle-Interpretation, vorgestellt wird. Hierzu werden geeignete Computer-Programme für einen Turtle-Interpreter sowie für frei programmierbare Simulatoren von mehrfach-limitierten, k-limitierten sowie uniform k-limitierten L-Systemen erstellt und ihr Quell-Code zur Verfügung gestellt. Die von mehrfach-limitierten L-Systemen erzeugten Sprachfamilien werden bzgl. ihrer Inklusionseigenschaften untereinander, mit Wätjens k-limitierten Sprachfamilien, mit den nicht-limitierten Sprachfamilien sowie mit der Chomsky Hierarchie verglichen. Die Erzeugungsmächtigkeit von mehrfach-limitierten L-Systemen wird asymptotisch verglichen mit den jeweils unterliegenden nicht-limitierten L-Systemen. Des weiteren werden die Abschlusseigenschaften der mehrfach-limitierten L-Systeme untersucht

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT