Railway (De-)regulation in EU Member States and the Future of European Rail

Schienenfahrzeugbau, Regulierung, Deregulierung, Eisenbahnpolitik EU-Staaten, Railway vehicles industry, Regulation, Deregulation, Railway policy, EU countries

The WISENT Grid Architecture: Coping with Firewalls and NAT

In energy meteorology research, scientists from several domains such as physics, meteorology and electrical engineering work together to obtain information needed to characterize energy production from regenerative energy sources such as wind and solar power. For this purpose, several scientific applications were developed to process large data sets from heterogenous data sources in complex and sometimes long-running process chains. In our project WISENT a Grid infrastructure is created to speed up execution of these applications and to ease access to computational and data resources. To achieve this goal, Grid software such as Globus Toolkit and Condor is employed to connect the existing resources of each project partner. But this ongoing process is hindered by blocking firewalls due to strong security policies and by the use of network address translation (NAT). In this paper we describe the current Grid architecture and focus on problems that occurred due to the use of firewalls and NAT. We contribute our present solutions and also discuss alternative solution ideas. One solution using the so-called “hole punching” technology is described in more detail

The Design of a Core Value Ontology Using Ontology Patterns

The creation of value is an important concern in organizations. However, current Enterprise Modeling languages all interprete value differently, which has a negative impact on the semantic quality of the model instantiations. This issue need to be solved to increase the relevance of these instantiations for business stakeholders. Therefore, the goal of this paper is the development of a sound Core Value Ontology. In order to do that, we employ a pattern-based ontology engineering approach, which employs the Unified Foundational Ontology

A core ontology of macroscopic stuff

Domain ontologies contain representations of types of stuff (matter, mass, or substance), such as milk, alcohol, and mud, which are represented in a myriad of ways that are neither compatible with each other nor do they follow a structured approach within the domain ontology. Foundational ontologies and Ontology distinguish between pure stuff and mixtures only, if it contains stuff. We aim to fill this gap between foundational and domain ontologies by applying the notion of a `bridging' core ontology, being an ontology of categories of stuff that is formalised in OWL. This core ontology both refines the DOLCE and BFO foundational ontologies and resolves the main type of interoperability issues with stuffs in domain ontologies, thereby also contributing to better ontology quality. Modelling guidelines are provided to facilitate the Stuff Ontology's use

A Motor-Driven, Mechanically Supported Ultracentrifuge for the Separation of Biological Materials

The use of intense centrifugal fields of from 50,000 to 100,000 times gravity, or greater, has become a technic of the first impor-tance for the separation of biological materials. Various types of quantity-ultracentrifuges have been devised for this kind of service, most of them embodying an adaptation of the principle of Henriot and Huguenard (1925) according to which the rotating member is supported and driven by compressed air. Such centrifuges have been applied most extensively to the purification of viruses (Stanley, 1938), although results have been reported which indicate that they may be useful in the separation of substances of smaller unit size, such as antibodies (Wyckoff, 1936; Heidelberger and Pedersen, 1937; Gratia and Goreczky, 1938) and hormones (Severinghaus, Levin and Chiles, 1938). The scope of these centrifuges is in fact limited only by the structural strength of their rotors. The limits for safe routine operation have been defined by Wyckoff and Lagsdin (1937) as 45,000 r.p.m. for the quantity heads of Dowmetal and 60,000 r.p.m. for those of duralumin 14ST, 61 to 7 inches in diameter, which have bee