Data, Information, and Knowledge in the Context of SILS

Data, information, and knowledge are becoming increasingly common terms in the literature of the software industry. This terminology originated some time ago in the disciplines of cognitive science and artificial intelligence to reference three closely related but distinct concepts. Traditionally, mainstream software engineering has lumped all three concepts together as data and has only recently begun to distinguish between them. Unfortunately, the popular desire to distinguish between data, information, and knowledge within the mainstream has blurred the individual meanings of the words to the point where there is no longer a clear-cut distinction between them for most people. This problem is compounded by the fact that the abstract nature of the associated concepts provides wide latitude for their application. The goal of this paper is to make these abstract concepts more concrete by providing examples of their usage taken directly from the design and implementation of the Shipboard Integration of Logistics Systems (SILS), an ONR project sponsored by Dr. Phillip Abraham. This paper does not claim or intend to provide definitive definitions of these terms; rather it seeks to provide a cognitive framework for thinking about these concepts from which observations and conclusions can be made about the differences and relationships between the individual concepts

The Knowledge Level Approach To Intelligent Information System Design

Traditional approaches to building intelligent information systems employ an ontology to define a representational structure for the data and information of interest within the target domain of the system. At runtime, the ontology provides a constrained template for the creation of the individual objects and relationships that together define the state of the system at a given point in time. The ontology also provides a vocabulary for expressing domain knowledge typically in the form of rules (declarative knowledge) or methods (procedural knowledge). The system utilizes the encoded knowledge, often in conjunction user input, to progress the state of the system towards the specific goals indicated by the users. While this approach has been very successful, it has some drawbacks. Regardless of the implementation paradigm the knowledge is essentially buried in the code and therefore inaccessible to most domain experts. The knowledge also tends to be very domain specific and is not extensible at runtime. This paper describes a variation on the traditional approach that employs an explicit knowledge level within the ontology to mitigate the identified drawbacks

A W:B4C multilayer phase retarder for broadband polarization analysis of soft x-ray radiation \ud

A W:B4C multilayer phase retarder has been designed and characterized which shows a nearly constant phase retardance between 640 and 850 eV photon energies when operated near the Bragg condition. This freestanding transmission multilayer was used successfully to determine, for the first time, the full polarization vector at soft x-ray energies above 600 eV, which was not possible before due to the lack of suitable optical elements. Thus, quantitative polarimetry is now possible at the 2p edges of the magnetic substances Fe, Co, and Ni for the benefit of magnetic circular dichroism spectroscopy employing circularly polarized synchrotron radiatio

Lifetimes of ultralong-range Rydberg molecules in vibrational ground and excited state

Since their first experimental observation, ultralong-range Rydberg molecules consisting of a highly excited Rydberg atom and a ground state atom have attracted the interest in the field of ultracold chemistry. Especially the intriguing properties like size, polarizability and type of binding they inherit from the Rydberg atom are of interest. An open question in the field is the reduced lifetime of the molecules compared to the corresponding atomic Rydberg states. In this letter we present an experimental study on the lifetimes of the ^3\Sigma (5s-35s) molecule in its vibrational ground state and in an excited state. We show that the lifetimes depends on the density of ground state atoms and that this can be described in the frame of a classical scattering between the molecules and ground state atoms. We also find that the excited molecular state has an even more reduced lifetime compared to the ground state which can be attributed to an inward penetration of the bound atomic pair due to imperfect quantum reflection that takes place in the special shape of the molecular potential

Near axisymmetric partial wetting using interface-localized liquid dielectrophoresis

The wetting of solid surfaces can be modified by altering the surface free energy balance between the solid, liquid, and vapour phases. Liquid dielectrophoresis (L-DEP) can produce wetting on normally non-wetting surfaces, without modification of the surface topography or chemistry. L-DEP is a bulk force acting on the dipoles of a dielectric liquid and is not normally considered to be a localized effect acting at the interface between the liquid and a solid or other fluid. However, if this force is induced by a non-uniform electric field across a solid -liquid interface, it can be used to enhance and control the wetting of a dielectric liquid. Recently, it was reported theoretically and experimentally that this approach can cause a droplet of oil to spread along parallel interdigitated electrodes thus forming a stripe of liquid. Here we show that by using spiral shaped electrodes actuated with four 90º successive phase shifted signals, a near axisymmetric spreading of droplets can be achieved. Experimental observations show that the induced wetting can achieve film formation, an effect not possible with electrowetting. We show that the spreading is reversible thus enabling a wide range of partial wetting droplet states to be achieved in a controllable manner. Furthermore, we find that the cosine of the contact angle has a quadratic dependence on applied voltage during spreading and deduce a scaling law for the dependence of the strength of the effect on the electrode size

Auto-validation of fluorescent primer extension genotyping assay using signal clustering and neural networks

BACKGROUND: SNP genotyping typically incorporates a review step to ensure that the genotype calls for a particular SNP are correct. For high-throughput genotyping, such as that provided by the GenomeLab SNPstream(® )instrument from Beckman Coulter, Inc., the manual review used for low-volume genotyping becomes a major bottleneck. The work reported here describes the application of a neural network to automate the review of results. RESULTS: We describe an approach to reviewing the quality of primer extension 2-color fluorescent reactions by clustering optical signals obtained from multiple samples and a single reaction set-up. The method evaluates the quality of the signal clusters from the genotyping results. We developed 64 scores to measure the geometry and position of the signal clusters. The expected signal distribution was represented by a distribution of a 64-component parametric vector obtained by training the two-layer neural network onto a set of 10,968 manually reviewed 2D plots containing the signal clusters. CONCLUSION: The neural network approach described in this paper may be used with results from the GenomeLab SNPstream instrument for high-throughput SNP genotyping. The overall correlation with manual revision was 0.844. The approach can be applied to a quality review of results from other high-throughput fluorescent-based biochemical assays in a high-throughput mode