The requirements engineering process involves a clear understanding of the requirements of the intended system. This includes the services required of the system, the system users, its environment and associated constraints. This process involves the capture, analysis and resolution of many ideas, perspectives and relationships at varying levels of detail. Requirements methods based on global r...

It has often been observed that many jokes rely on the audience reinterpreting the initial part of the joke once the punchline is encountered. In order to elaborate on this account, we outline how these reinterpretations may happen in various ways. The examples we consider suggest that the generalisation is best stated not in terms of syntactic or even semantic forms, since the same mechanism s...

In this paper, we introduce the knowledge representation based on viewpoints on which relies the KASIMIR system, aimed at decision helping in oncology. The design of viewpoints is considered on both theoretical and practical levels, and takes its place in the range of work on the subject that has a rather long history in the domain of object-based knowledge representation systems. From the theo...

77 T he individual biological organism is more than a mere aggregate of disparate body functions. Angyal (1941) remarked that there are no irrelevant properties to the component subunits of a biological organism. The feature is a definitive characteristic of systemic organizations. The idea of transformation of an aggregate of functions to a system was used by Sri Aurobindo in order to explicat...

Alchemy traces its roots back to the Egyptian civilisation where it emerged as a practising art and science and an expression of the Egyptian religion. Thus it was that the Egyptian Thoth, the god of mathematics and science, became the inspirational source for the Hellenistic figure of Hermes Trismegistus, who in turn became the model for the medieval Mercurius. The Greeks learned their Alchemy...

This seems simple enough, but let’s play with this definition. The Pythagoreans, an ancient sect of mathematical mystics, said that a number is perfect if it equals the sum of its positive integral divisors, excluding itself. For example, 6 = 1 + 2 + 3and 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14are perfect numbers. On the other hand, 10 is not perfect because 1 + 2 + 5 = 8, and 12 is not perfect because 1+2+3+4...