Catalogue of Anti-Patterns for formal Ontology debugging

Debugging of inconsistent OWL ontologies is normally a tedious and time-consuming task where a combination of ontology engineers and domain expert is often required to understand whether the changes to be performed in order to make the OWL ontology consistent are actually changing the intended meaning of the original knowledge model. This task is aided by existing ontology debugging systems, incorporated in existing reasoners and ontology engineering tools, which ameliorate this problem but in complex cases are still far from providing adequate support to ontology engineers, due to lack of efficiency or lack of precision in determining the main causes for inconsistencies. In this paper we describe a set of anti-patterns commonly found in OWL ontologies, which can be useful in the task of ontology debugging in combination with those debugging tools

Training Training-Room Skills

A process-oriented approach to training teachers in ELT teaching methods is nowadays commonplace. To operate such an approach, the teacher trainer needs to be able to handle the skills involved in, inter alia, introducing a teacher training session, conducting awareness-raising, providing input, setting up, monitoring and rounding off small-group activities, feeding back on participants’ ideas and concluding the session. In other words, just as the ELT teacher needs to master a repertoire of classroom skills for handling ELT activities, so the teacher trainer needs to acquire a knowledge of the training-room skills involved in such teacher training procedures Both classroom language teaching and training-room teacher training can be seen as consisting of parallel sets of facilitating skills, of course, and at this level of analysis there is thus an underlying potential for transfer from one to the other, a point which we will return to later. However, training room skills also differ significantly from classroom skills in terms of a) the subject-matter involved (i.e., language teaching vs. language itself) and b) the nature of the audience (i.e., teachers vs. learners). In our experience, thus, there is usually a need for trainers to be oriented to training room skills, just as teachers need to be introduced to classroom teaching skills. What are the skills in question, however, and how might trainers be helped to begin to acquire them? There is no shortage of guidance in the teacher training literature about how to put a process-oriented teacher training approach into practice, in the form of examples of activities and advice about procedures (see, e.g., Doff (1988), Ellis (1990), Wallace (1991), Woodward (1991, 1992), Parrott (1993), Tanner and Green (1998)). Nevertheless, there does not appear to be a readily-accessible taxonomy of the skills involved, of a kind that might guide the selection of content for this aspect of a trainer training programme. Likewise, in the trainer training literature, there do not appear to be any accounts of how to train teacher trainers in such skills. McGrath (1997) contains many important trainer training papers, but none directly concerned with this aspect. Malderez and Bodoczky (1999) also provides valuable guidance about trainer training, but its focus is mainly on the skills involved in school-based teaching practice observation and follow-up counselling, rather than training-room-based skills. This article therefore attempts to throw some light on how teacher trainers can be trained to handle the training-room skills aspect of putting a process-based approach to ELT methodology training into practice, by describing a course which was designed for this purpose, as part of an ELT development project. The training situation is first of all outlined, and then the nature of the content and training methods used in the trainer training course are presented

Guía para el estudio de macroinvertebrados. I.- Métodos de colecta y técnicas de fijación.

El motivador de este trabajo ha sido generar estrategias de enseñanza tendientes a comprender a la diversidad biológica que nos rodea (haciendo hincapié en los macroinvertebrados), desde los distintos niveles de la enseñanza de las ciencias biológicas. Asimismo, sobre la base de nuestra experiencia en investigación en biología y en los distintos niveles de educación, podemos señalar que no son frecuentes de las actividades prácticas de campo y laboratorio en las clases de ciencia. Las mismas, constutyen recursos útiles para la enseñanza y aprendizaje de diferentes técnicas de muestreo específicas para cada grupo de organismos y para cada tipo de ecosistema: también para diseñar la forma de analizar los diferentes tipos de datos obtenidos e identificar las diferentes relaciones entre los grupos de macroinvertebrados con el ambiente en que viven. En esta contribución y a modo de una primera etapa, se plantea la forma de colecta y fijación (conservación) de macroinvertebrados, en relación con el ambiente en que se hallan. Los invertebrados, especialmente los artrópodos se pueden encontrar en cualquier época del año y en casi todos los ambientes. No es necesario ir muy lejos para encontrar la fauna buscada, de forma que con tan sólo un poco de capacidad de observación se pueden descubrir en los jardines, en los solares, en las quintas, en las hierbas de los caminos, en la playa, e incluso en el interior de nuestras viviendas. Por estas razones no debería presentar gran dificultad llevar a cabo un trabajo práctico de campo, incluso en los sitios que presentan marcados problemas de conservación. Los mismos deben realizarse teniendo en cuenta las directrices destinadas hacia la no depredación del ambiente y respetando la fauna de lugares protegidos (e.g. reservas y parques naturales), donde las capturas sin la debida autorización están prohibidas. El propósito de esta contribución es ofrecer la información indispensable para la captura y conservación de la fauna de invertebrados, y al mismo tiempo despertar la curiosidad del lector hacia estos grupos de animales. Sobre esta base, y teniendo en cuenta que hay que aclarar los por qué, para qué y el cómo diseñar estrategias y escenarios de intervención educativa para promover el aprendizaje, los objetivos de esta contribución son: 1) Proponer distintos métodos de captura adecuados para los diversos hábitats y formas de vida de los macroinvertebrados. 2) Describir diferentes técnicas de conservación del material colectado. Posteriormente, el objetivo de estudiar las relaciones existentes entre las distintas especies y con el ambiente donde viven, se realiza una contribución (Darrigran, et al., ms.), en la cual se describen los modelos básicos de muestreos necesarios para lograr esos objetivos. A partir de la adquisición de estos conocimientos, el docente estará en condiciones de elaborar recomendaciones didácticas tendientes a la sistematización y optimización del uso de estas herramientas como recurso didáctico para la enseñanza y aprendizaje de la biodiversidad que lo rodea. (Texto en Español. PDF tiene ochenta y seis paginas

SiGe HMOSFET monolithic inverting current mirror

Accepted versio

A Method to Determine the In-Air Spatial Spread of Clinical Electron Beams

We propose and analyze in detail a method to measure the in-air spatial spread parameter of clinical electron beams. Measurements are performed at the center of the beam and below the adjustable collimators sited in asymmetrical configuration in order to avoid the distortions due to the presence of the applicator. The main advantage of our procedure lies in the fact that the dose profiles are fitted by means of a function which includes, additionally to the Gaussian step usually considered, a background which takes care of the dose produced by different mechanisms that the Gaussian model does not account for. As a result, the spatial spread is obtained directly from the fitting procedure and the accuracy permits a good determination of the angular spread. The way the analysis is done is alternative to that followed by the usual methods based on the evaluation of the penumbra width. Besides, the spatial spread found shows the quadratic-cubic dependence with the distance to the source predicted by the Fermi-Eyges theory. However, the corresponding values obtained for the scattering power are differing from those quoted by ICRU nr. 35 by a factor ~2 or larger, what requires of a more detailed investigation.Comment: 11 pages, 5 Postscript figures, to be published in Medical Physic