A Visual Language for Web Querying and Reasoning

As XML is increasingly being used to represent information on the Web, query and reasoning languages for such data are needed. This article argues that in contrast to the navigational approach taken in particular by XPath and XQuery, a positional approach as used in the language Xcerpt is better suited for a straightforward visual representation. The constructs of the pattern- and rule-based query language Xcerpt are introduced and it is shown how the visual representation visXcerpt renders these constructs to form a visual query language for XML

Recent progress in inverse methods in France

Given the current level of jet engine performance, improvement of the various turbomachinery components requires the use of advanced methods in aerodynamics, heat transfer, and aeromechanics. In particular, successful blade design can only be achieved via numerical design methods which make it possible to reach optimized solutions in a much shorter time than ever before. Two design methods which are currently being used throughout the French turbomachinery industry to obtain optimized blade geometries are presented. Examples are presented for compressor and turbine applications. The status of these methods as far as improvement and extension to new fields of applications is also reported

10041 Abstracts Collection -- Perspectives Workshop: Digital Social Networks

From 24.01.2010 to 29.01.2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10041 ``Perspectives Workshop: Digital Social Networks\u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl ~--~ Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Processing Link Structures and Linkbases on the Web

Hyperlinks are an essential feature of the World Wide Web, highly responsible for its success. XLink improves on HTML's linking capabilities in several ways. In particular, links after XLink can be "out-of-line" (i.e., not defined at a link source) and collected in (possibly several) linkbases, which considerably ease building complex link structures

Organizing Peer Correction in Tertiary STEM Education: An Approach and its Evaluation

This article reports on a novel higher-education course format exploiting choreographed peer reviews and self-corrections using an online learning platform. The novel course format aims to reduce teachers' workload as it was motivated by the necessity to run examinations for all courses during all terms, even though almost all courses can only be offered every second term. As a consequence, and because of a very high students-to-teacher ratio, many students have to prepare for examinations without sufficient assistance. This article describes the novel course format and reports on its evaluation in a case study. The evaluation indicates that most students benefit from the novel course format but that it is less efficient than traditional formats based on a higher teachers' involvement. The major weakness of the novel format is the insufficient participation of some students to their peer-reviewing. The article suggests and discusses possible measures to address that weakness. This article extends previous work by the same authors by providing an extended evaluation of the students' attitudes towards the course format, their behavior on the platform and their peer reviews. The course format and the learning platform are described in greater detail and the integration into related work has been expanded

An Efficient Single-Pass Query Evaluator for XML Data Streams

Data streams might be preferable to data stored in memory in contexts where the data is too large or volatile, or a standard approach to data processing based on data parsing and/or storing is too time or space consuming. Emerging applications such as publish-subscribe systems, data monitoring in sensor networks [6], financial and traffic monitoring, and routing of MPEG-7 [7] call for querying data streams. In many such applications, XML streams are arguably more appropriate than flat data streams, for XML data is recordlike, though not precluding multiple occurrences of fields with the same name. Evaluating selection queries against XML streams is especially challenging because XML data is structured (like records) and might have unbounded size. This paper proposes an efficient single-pass evaluator of XPath queries against XML data streams unbounded (possibly infinite) in size. The evaluator is based on networks of independent deterministic pushdown transducers and it is especially suitable for implementation on devices with lowmemory and simple logic as used, e.g., in mobile computing

Composite Event Queries for Reactivity on the Web

Reactivity on the Web is an emerging issue. The capability to automatically react to events (such as updates to Web resources) is essential for both Web services and Semantic Web systems. Such systems need to have the capability to detect and react to complex, real life situations. This presentation gives flavours of the high-level language XChange, for programming reactive behaviour on the Web

Multi-Calendar Appointment Scheduling: Calendar Modeling and Constraint Reasoning

This article outlines CaTTS, a language for expressing and solving multi-calendar appointment scheduling problems such as planning a phone conference of persons in di#erent time zones and using di#erent calendars. This article complements [1], which is focused on calendar modeling, with a presentation of the approach's constraint reasonin