440,394 research outputs found
Managing the consistency of distributed documents
Many businesses produce documents as part of their daily activities: software engineers
produce requirements specifications, design models, source code, build scripts and more;
business analysts produce glossaries, use cases, organisation charts, and domain ontology
models; service providers and retailers produce catalogues, customer data, purchase orders,
invoices and web pages.
What these examples have in common is that the content of documents is often semantically
related: source code should be consistent with the design model, a domain ontology
may refer to employees in an organisation chart, and invoices to customers should be consistent
with stored customer data and purchase orders. As businesses grow and documents
are added, it becomes difficult to manually track and check the increasingly complex relationships
between documents. The problem is compounded by current trends towards
distributed working, either over the Internet or over a global corporate network in large
organisations. This adds complexity as related information is not only scattered over
a number of documents, but the documents themselves are distributed across multiple
physical locations.
This thesis addresses the problem of managing the consistency of distributed and possibly
heterogeneous documents. āDocumentsā is used here as an abstract term, and does not
necessarily refer to a human readable textual representation. We use the word to stand
for a file or data source holding structured information, like a database table, or some
source of semi-structured information, like a file of comma-separated values or a document
represented in a hypertext markup language like XML [Bray et al., 2000]. Document
heterogeneity comes into play when data with similar semantics is represented in different
ways: for example, a design model may store a class as a rectangle in a diagram whereas
a source code file will embed it as a textual string; and an invoice may contain an invoice
identifier that is composed of a customer name and date, both of which may be recorded
and managed separately.
Consistency management in this setting encompasses a number of steps. Firstly, checks
must be executed in order to determine the consistency status of documents. Documents
are inconsistent if their internal elements hold values that do not meet the properties
expected in the application domain or if there are conflicts between the values of elements
in multiple documents. The results of a consistency check have to be accumulated and
reported back to the user. And finally, the user may choose to change the documents to
bring them into a consistent state.
The current generation of tools and techniques is not always sufficiently equipped to deal
with this problem. Consistency checking is mostly tightly integrated or hardcoded into tools, leading to problems with extensibility with respect to new types of documents.
Many tools do not support checks of distributed data, insisting instead on accumulating
everything in a centralized repository. This may not always be possible, due to organisational
or time constraints, and can represent excessive overhead if the only purpose of
integration is to improve data consistency rather than deriving any additional benefit.
This thesis investigates the theoretical background and practical support necessary to
support consistency management of distributed documents. It makes a number of contributions
to the state of the art, and the overall approach is validated in significant case
studies that provide evidence of its practicality and usefulness
Transport Impacts on Land Use: Towards A Practical Understanding for Urban Policy Making ā Introduction and Research Plan.
INTRODUCTION
This working paper forms a general introduction to an EPSRC CASE research project,
presenting the objectives of the research, the rationale behind the study, a summary of some of
the results obtained so far, and a plan for the remainder of the research work. The project is due
for completion in November 1996.
In other words, the project is examining:
1. The current understanding of the nature of the influence that transport has upon activity
patterns and land use. Specifically, this is making use of empirical studies of transport
impacts on land use, plus behavioural studies of the factors in location choice.
2. Whether this relationship can be adequately represented in a predictive context. This
consists of two elements. How the relationship of transport on land use can be studied and
'formalised', and secondly, the ability to use this relationship for estimation of land use
response to transport impacts. Use will be made of published modelling studies, plus some
original modelling work, using a model constructed for this research.
3. The benefits of predicting transport impacts upon land use to planners involved in strategic
land use and transport planning. This is the main objective of the research, and addresses
why transport impacts on land use appear to have a minor role in structure planning, why
model representations are seldom used, and given a model's predictions, what use will be
made of the model results. Initial results from the first round of interviews are given in this
paper.
There are several themes that underpin this research:
The nature of the 'transport on land use' relationship.
How far it can he formalised, what
we know about it, and how it is best to study it.
Strategic planning processes in the UK, how the planning system handles the transport on
land use relationship, under what circumstances the relationship is important, and the role
of model predictions in the planning process.
Whether the remit of 'planning' should examine transport impacts on land use, plus
anticipation of the impacts of local government reorganisation.
The issue of whether predictive modellmg in this context is an appropriate tool beyond the
scope of academic research
Applying Science Models for Search
The paper proposes three different kinds of science models as value-added
services that are integrated in the retrieval process to enhance retrieval
quality. The paper discusses the approaches Search Term Recommendation,
Bradfordizing and Author Centrality on a general level and addresses
implementation issues of the models within a real-life retrieval environment.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, ISI 201
Improving identification and audit of disability within Child Health Services
This project was commissioned by the Department of Health to survey existing data collections regarding childhood disability across the domains of education, health and social care and to collect definitions of disability from across three domains. A systematic review was conducted which addressed the two aims. The findings were discussed in consultation of findings with key professionals from across the UK and with some contacts in Europe, both electronically and in a professional working focus group.
The review of published academic and grey literature identified vast disparities between the way that data is collected, coded and used across the three domains. The disparities between the definitions of disability used across the domains further prevent the data being drawn together in a cohesive manner that may then be used to facilitate effective planning of services both locally and nationally.
The project did, however, identify one coding system that may potentially offer a solution to these difficulties, the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health ā Children and Youth Version (ICF-CY, World Health Organisation, 2007). This coding system has demonstrated a capacity to resolve issues with data collections in Europe and has been the subject of policy recommendations presented to the European Parliament on the 16th September 2008. It is proposed that while immediate change is not possible, a staged approach, beginning with a pilot study of the utility of the ICF-CY, should be conducted to test its efficiency in providing effective harmonisation of data collections across the three domains and its applicability in the identification of childhood disability. Alongside this, it is important for the ICF-CY considered by the project group overseeing the implementation of the Child Health, Maternity and CAMHS Care Records
Integrated content presentation for multilingual and multimedia information access
For multilingual and multimedia information retrieval from
multiple potentially distributed collections generating the
output in the form of standard ranked lists may often mean
that a user has to explore the contents of many lists before
finding sufficient relevant or linguistically accessible material to satisfy their information need. In some situations delivering an integrated multilingual multimedia presentation could enable the user to explore a topic allowing them to select from among a range of available content based on suitably chosen displayed metadata. A presentation of this type has similarities with the outputs of existing adaptive hypermedia systems. However, such systems are generated based on āclosedā content with sophisticated user and domain models. Extending them to āopenā domain information retrieval applications would raise many issues. We present an outline exploration of what will form a challenging new direction for research in multilingual information access
PLuTO: MT for online patent translation
PLuTO ā Patent Language Translation Online ā is a partially EU-funded commercialization project which specializes in the automatic retrieval and translation of patent documents. At the core of the PLuTO framework is a machine translation (MT) engine through which web-based translation services are offered. The fully integrated PLuTO architecture includes a translation engine coupling MT with translation memories (TM), and a patent search and retrieval engine. In this paper, we first describe the motivating factors behind the provision of such a service. Following this, we give an overview of the PLuTO framework as a whole, with particular emphasis on the MT components, and provide a real world use case scenario in which PLuTO MT services are exploited
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Integration with Ontologies
One of todayās hottest IT topics is integration, as bringing together information from different sources and structures is not completely solved. The approach outlined here wants to illustrate how ontologies [Gr93] could help to support the integration process
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