In this article we describe our work on the design of urban ontologies in visual form, realized within the framework of the TOWNTOLOGY project. Our contribution relates the development of a design tool of pre-consensual ontology, to help the experts of the field (in our case urban planners) to describe their knowledge. The visual tools are an asset for the collaborative design of domain ontolog...

A standardized, object-oriented building product model for buildings is introduced that can be used as a means of electronic exchange between various software tools. The ability to transfer architectural data between a commercially available computer-aided design (CAD) program and a widely available zone fire simulation tool illustrates the applicability of this model in fire engineering. This ...

When designing a plant for continuous or semi-continuous processes, such as paper pulp or petrochemical production systems, engineers face very complex tasks, which are only in part supported by software tools. The paper analyses the problem, proposes the RCAD software architecture and describes partial implementation results. The architecture, which is based on a simple yet powerful conceptual...

Positive interdependence is the heart of collaborative activities that define collaboration and transform group work into teamwork. To achieve positive interdependence among students, just putting them in group and telling them to work together may not be sufficient. Previously, several types of positive interdependencies have been identified for unsupported group activities. These kinds of int...

The theoretical basis and architecture of the conceptual design tool NDARC (NASA Design and Analysis of Rotorcraft) are described. The principal tasks of NDARC are to design (or size) a rotorcraft to satisfy specified design conditions and missions, and then analyze the performance of the aircraft for a set of off-design missions and point operating conditions. The aircraft consists of a set of...

This paper introduces a new speech design tool (Sesign99) that can convert monotonous synthesized speech into a variety of speech styles. As multimedia services such as games, interactive movies and WWW home pages become more popular, more attention is being focused on the creation, management, and transmission of speech messages. Although speech synthesis-by-rule has improved with recent advan...

autonomous agents achieve functionalities needed to make a role-based organization model.

We have developed an interactive computer modeling tool (DeebSim) for deebrillation device design. This system allows researchers to interactively design and place electrodes within a large-scale thorax model and then compute the electric and potential elds using an adap-tive nite element method. Both visual and quantitative measures have been developed to determine the eecacy of diierent elect...

This paper presents the military rationale for developing an improved understanding of the effects of culture on the performance of military organizations and their partners. In particular the change from conventional high intensity warfare to asymmetric warfare increases the interactions between different cultures within multi-national military forces and in the local populations. A brief desc...

In the present article, a specified Pedagogical Infrastructure Framework, including technical, social, epistemological and cognitive components, is introduced as a conceptual tool for design-based research to examine the design of complex learning settings. The applicability of the framework was assessed by retrospectively exploring an evolving design effort in four, consecutive, undergraduate ...