Journal Staff

With the proliferation of ontologies and their use in semantically-enabled applications, the issue of finding and repairing defects in ontologies has become increasingly important. Current work mostly targets debugging semantic defects in ontologies. In our work, we focus on another kind of severe defects, modeling defects, which require domain knowledge to detect and resolve. In particular, we debug the missing structural relations (is-a hierarchy) in a fundamental kind of ontologies, i.e. taxonomies. The context of our study is an ontology network consisting of several taxonomies networked by partial reference alignments. We use the ontology network as domain knowledge to detect the missing is-a relations in these ontologies. We also propose algorithms to generate possible repairing actions, rank missing is-a relations, recommend and execute repairing actions. Further, we discuss an implemented system RepOSE and experiments on ontologies of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative and the Finnish Ontology Library Service

Autocatalytic Pyrolysis of Wastewater Biosolids for Product Upgrading

The main goals for sustainable water resource recovery include maximizing energy generation, minimizing adverse environmental impacts, and recovering beneficial resources. Wastewater biosolids pyrolysis is a promising technology that could help facilities reach these goals because it produces biochar that is a valuable soil amendment as well as bio-oil and pyrolysis gas (py-gas) that can be used for energy. The raw bio-oil, however, is corrosive; therefore, employing it as fuel is challenging using standard equipment. A novel pyrolysis process using wastewater biosolids-derived biochar (WB-biochar) as a catalyst was investigated to decrease bio-oil and increase py-gas yield for easier energy recovery. WB-biochar catalyst increased the py-gas yield nearly 2-fold, while decreasing bio-oil production. The catalyzed bio-oil also contained fewer constituents based on GC-MS and GC-FID analyses. The energy shifted from bio-oil to py-gas, indicating the potential for easier on-site energy recovery using the relatively clean py-gas. The metals contained in wastewater biosolids played an important role in upgrading pyrolysis products. The Ca and Fe in WB-biochar reduced bio-oil yield and increased py-gas yield. The py-gas energy increase may be especially useful at water resource recovery facilities that already combust anaerobic digester biogas for energy since it may be possible to blend biogas and py-gas for combined use

Proof-of-Concept Implementation of the Ahoy Discovery Protocol for Ad-hoc Networks

The context discovery protocol Ahoy has been proposed ear- lier for resource-limited fully-distributed ad-hoc networks. Ahoy has been proven as an efficient context discovery pro- tocol, which generates only little network traffic, in both static and dynamic ad-hoc networks. In this report, we im- plement the prototype of Ahoy and test it on UNIX-like platforms. We show the possibility to implement Ahoy in the real world