109,220 research outputs found
2007 Annual Report to Congress
[Excerpt] The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA) was passed by Congress in 2000, and amended in 2004, to compensate American workers who put their health on the line to help fight the Cold War. In the course of doing their jobs, many of these workers were exposed to radiation and other toxic substances and, as a result, developed cancer and other serious diseases. The purpose of this program is to acknowledge the sacrifice of these workers and to compensate them in some small way for their suffering and loss.
As originally enacted in 2000, EEOICPA included Part B (administered by the Department of Labor (DOL)) and Part D (administered by the Department of Energy (DOE)). In October 2004, Congress repealed Part D and enacted Part E of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, effectively transferring responsibility for administration of contractor employee compensation from the DOE to the DOL. The 2004 amendments also created the Office of the Ombudsman for Part E and directed that it be an independent office, located within the Department of Labor, charged with a three-fold mission: To conduct outreach to claimants and potential claimants to provide information on the benefits available under this part and on the requirements and procedures applicable to the provision of such benefits; To make recommendations to the Secretary of Labor about where to locate resource centers for the acceptance and development of claims; To submit an Annual Report to Congress by February 15, setting forth the number and types of complaints, grievances and requests for assistance received by the Ombudsman, and an assessment of the most common difficulties encountered by claimants and potential claimants under Part E during the previous year
Instances and connectors : issues for a second generation process language
This work is supported by UK EPSRC grants GR/L34433 and GR/L32699Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been defined, used and evaluated. It is now possible to consider second generation languages based on this experience. Rather than develop a second generation wish list this position paper explores two issues: instances and connectors. Instances relate to the relationship between a process model as a description and the, possibly multiple, enacting instances which are created from it. Connectors refers to the issue of concurrency control and achieving a higher level of abstraction in how parts of a model interact. We believe that these issues are key to developing systems which can effectively support business processes, and that they have not received sufficient attention within the process modelling community. Through exploring these issues we also illustrate our approach to designing a second generation process language.Postprin
Pattern Reification as the Basis for Description-Driven Systems
One of the main factors driving object-oriented software development for
information systems is the requirement for systems to be tolerant to change. To
address this issue in designing systems, this paper proposes a pattern-based,
object-oriented, description-driven system (DDS) architecture as an extension
to the standard UML four-layer meta-model. A DDS architecture is proposed in
which aspects of both static and dynamic systems behavior can be captured via
descriptive models and meta-models. The proposed architecture embodies four
main elements - firstly, the adoption of a multi-layered meta-modeling
architecture and reflective meta-level architecture, secondly the
identification of four data modeling relationships that can be made explicit
such that they can be modified dynamically, thirdly the identification of five
design patterns which have emerged from practice and have proved essential in
providing reusable building blocks for data management, and fourthly the
encoding of the structural properties of the five design patterns by means of
one fundamental pattern, the Graph pattern. A practical example of this
philosophy, the CRISTAL project, is used to demonstrate the use of
description-driven data objects to handle system evolution.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figure
The essence of component-based design and coordination
Is there a characteristic of coordination languages that makes them
qualitatively different from general programming languages and deserves special
academic attention? This report proposes a nuanced answer in three parts. The
first part highlights that coordination languages are the means by which
composite software applications can be specified using components that are only
available separately, or later in time, via standard interfacing mechanisms.
The second part highlights that most currently used languages provide
mechanisms to use externally provided components, and thus exhibit some
elements of coordination. However not all do, and the availability of an
external interface thus forms an objective and qualitative criterion that
distinguishes coordination. The third part argues that despite the qualitative
difference, the segregation of academic attention away from general language
design and implementation has non-obvious cost trade-offs.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 3 table
empathi: An ontology for Emergency Managing and Planning about Hazard Crisis
In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient
situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and
integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors
and social media content generated by local people. A bold obstacle to
capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse
information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this
domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce
empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts concerning with the
domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises. Although empathi
has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary concepts and relations
being essential in this domain. This ontology is available at
https://w3id.org/empathi/
Instances and connectors : issues for a second generation process language
This work is supported by UK EPSRC grants GR/L34433 and GR/L32699Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been defined, used and evaluated. It is now possible to consider second generation languages based on this experience. Rather than develop a second generation wish list this position paper explores two issues: instances and connectors. Instances relate to the relationship between a process model as a description and the, possibly multiple, enacting instances which are created from it. Connectors refers to the issue of concurrency control and achieving a higher level of abstraction in how parts of a model interact. We believe that these issues are key to developing systems which can effectively support business processes, and that they have not received sufficient attention within the process modelling community. Through exploring these issues we also illustrate our approach to designing a second generation process language.Postprin
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