Del Pezzo Surfaces and Affine 7-brane Backgrounds

A map between string junctions in the affine 7-brane backgrounds and vector bundles on del Pezzo surfaces is constructed using mirror symmetry. It is shown that the lattice of string junctions with support on an affine 7-brane configuration is isomorphic to the K-theory group of the corresponding del Pezzo surface. This isomorphism allows us to construct a map between the states of the N=2, D=4 theories with E_N global symmetry realized in two different ways in Type IIB and Type IIA string theory. A subgroup of the SL(2,Z) symmetry of the \hat{E}_9 7-brane background appears as the Fourier-Mukai transform acting on the D-brane configurations realizing vector bundles on elliptically fibered B_9.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX, 2 eps figures. v2: minor changes, version to appear in JHE

D-branes in Nonabelian Orbifolds with Discrete Torsion

We study IIB string theory on the orbifold R^8/Gamma with discrete torsion where Gamma is an arbitrary subgroup of U(4). We extend some previously known identities for discrete torsion in abelian groups to nonabelian groups. We construct explicit formulas for a large class of fractional D-brane states and prove that the physical states are classified by projective representations of the orbifold group as predicted originally by Douglas. The boundary states are found to be linear combinations of Ishibashi states with the coefficients being characters of the projective representations.Comment: 21 pages LaTeX, one eps figur

The Requirements for Ontologies in Medical Data Integration: A Case Study

Evidence-based medicine is critically dependent on three sources of information: a medical knowledge base, the patients medical record and knowledge of available resources, including where appropriate, clinical protocols. Patient data is often scattered in a variety of databases and may, in a distributed model, be held across several disparate repositories. Consequently addressing the needs of an evidence-based medicine community presents issues of biomedical data integration, clinical interpretation and knowledge management. This paper outlines how the Health-e-Child project has approached the challenge of requirements specification for (bio-) medical data integration, from the level of cellular data, through disease to that of patient and population. The approach is illuminated through the requirements elicitation and analysis of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA), one of three diseases being studied in the EC-funded Health-e-Child project.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Presented at the 11th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (Ideas2007). Banff, Canada September 200