This paper presents an ontology of lexicalized spatial concepts designed for text processing. The ontology draws on existing linguistic resources and is experimentally shown to improve the automatic extraction of ACE spatial relations, PropBank locative arguments and FrameNet spatial frame elements. We will use the ontology for corpus annotation and automatic inference in the spatial semantic d...

This paper deals with the architectural aspect of virtual environment design. It builds on precedents from the areas of architectural, urban design and environmental cognition and attempts to suggest an architectural way of thinking about designing the spatial elements of a virtual environment. A taxonomy of the objects and the spatial elements that a VE consists of is presented as the main hyp...

Binary computer-generated holograms' (BCGH's) are becoming essential components in optical signal processing schemes. Apart from image reconstruction, these holograms can serve as spatial filters, optical elements, and the basic component in sophisticated interconnection networks.2 The present paper deals with BCGH's presented on spatial light modulators (SLM's), which provide realtime variabil...

Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) are very small devices that contain both mechanical and electrical elements with sizes in the order of microns. Design cycle time is an important consideration in the development and introduction of MEMS devices in the market. To develop extraction tools for MEMS designs, we need geometric algorithms to analyze the spatial layout of the mechanical portion...

Studies on riparian buffers have usually focused on the amount of land needed as habitat for the terrestrial life stages of semiaquatic species. Nevertheless, the landscape surrounding wetlands is also important for other key processes, such as dispersal and the dynamics of metapopulations. Multiple elements that influence these processes should therefore be considered in the delineation of buf...

In this paper, the adaptive, minimum variance (MV) beamformer is applied to ultrasound data. Due to near-field properties, the energy of the ultrasound data reduces towards the edges of the transducer. The influence of this near-field effect is demonstrated, and a method to reduce this influence is proposed. By reducing the number of active sensor elements, an increased resolution can be obtain...