Endurant Types in Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling: Towards OntoUML 2.0

For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. This ontology has led to the development of an Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed in a number of academic, industrial and governmental settings to create conceptual models in a variety of different domains. These experiences have pointed out to opportunities of improvement not only to the language itself but also to its underlying theory. In this paper, we take the first step in that direction by revising the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of the meta-types present in OntoUML (differentiating Kinds, Roles, Phases, Mixins, etc.) should be considered not as restricted to Substantial types but instead should be applied to model Endurant Types in general, including Relator types, Quality types and Mode types. We also contribute a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a metamodel for OntoUML 2.0. Finally, we propose a computational support tool implementing this updated metamodel

Parabolic Problems with Nonlinear Boundary Conditions in Cell Tissues

In this paper we consider reaction diffusion problems with nonlinear boundary conditions in two dimensional domains for which the diffusion is large except in a neighborhood of a one dimensional set where it becomes small. We regard the domain as a cell tissue

Education, development and new learning in Europe: the portuguese case

Actualmente, Portugal enfrenta numerosos desafios e está a apostar, segundo as directrizes europeias, na formação dos recursos humanos, novas tecnologias e inovação como ingredientes essenciais para enfrentar e integrar a economia global. Isto implica, invariavelmente, alterações significativas na educação, formação e ensino, e uma remodelação das aprendizagens rumo à ambicionada sociedade do conhecimento.Actually Portugal has been confronting many challenges according to European Board rules tied to the formation of the human resource, the new technolo-gies and the innovations, as essentials tools to face and to integrate a global economy. This has been involving significant reformulations in education, teacher formation and teaching as well as a reformulation in the learning in the direction to an ambitious society of Knowledge

Information and knowledge society in the European Union: priorities of the Lisbon Strategy

Actualmente, vivemos na era da "Revolução Digital". Na verdade, os últimos dez anos têm assistido a uma difusão, sem precedentes, das Tecnologias da Informação e da Comunicação (TIC). Perante a globalização e a celeridade das mudanças tecnológicas, a União Europeia lançou a Estratégia de Lisboa, em 2000, com um objectivo estratégico: «transformar a Europa na economia baseada no conhecimento mais dinâmica e competitiva do mundo». Neste contexto, a Estratégia de Lisboa reconhece a importância das TIC no estímulo à competitividade, à inovação, na sociedade da informação e do conhecimento, e na economia baseada no conhecimento.Nowadays we live in 'Digital Revolution' era. In fact, the last ten years has witnessed an unprecedented diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Facing globalisation and faster technological change, European Union has launched the Lisbon Strategy, in 2000, who aim a strategic goal: «to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world». In this context, the Lisbon Strategy rightly recognises and values the importance of ICT in stimulating competitiveness and innovation and in the information and knowledge-based economy and society

Correlations around an interface

We compute one-loop correlation functions for the fluctuations of an interface using a field theory model. We obtain them from Feynman diagrams drawn with a propagator which is the inverse of the Hamiltonian of a Poschl-Teller problem. We derive an expression for the propagator in terms of elementary functions, show that it corresponds to the usual spectral sum, and use it to calculate quantities such as the surface tension and interface profile in two and three spatial dimensions. The three-dimensional quantities are rederived in a simple, unified manner, whereas those in two dimensions extend the existing literature, and are applicable to thin films. In addition, we compute the one-loop self-energy, which may be extracted from experiment, or from Monte Carlo simulations. Our results may be applied in various scenarios, which include fluctuations around topological defects in cosmology, supersymmetric domain walls, Z(N) bubbles in QCD, domain walls in magnetic systems, interfaces separating Bose-Einstein condensates, and interfaces in binary liquid mixtures.Comment: RevTeX, 13 pages, 6 figure

Toward a test of angular momentum coherence in a twin-atom interferometer

We present a scheme well-suited to investigate quantitatively the angular momentum coherence of molecular fragments. Assuming that the dissociated molecule has a null total angular momentum, we investigate the propagation of the corresponding atomic fragments in the apparatus. We show that the envisioned interferometer enables one to distinguish unambiguously a spin-coherent from a spin-incoherent dissociation, as well as to estimate the purity of the angular momentum density matrix associated with the fragments. This setup, which may be seen as an atomic analogue of a twin-photon interferometer, can be used to investigate the suitability of molecule dissociation processes -- such as the metastable hydrogen atoms H($2^2 S$)-H($2^2 S$) dissociation - for coherent twin-atom optics.Comment: 6 pages, 3 Figures. Final version accepted for publication in Europhysics Letter