The role of XML in data exchange is evolving from one of merely conveying the structure of data to one that also conveys its semantics. In particular, several proposals for key and foreign key constraints have recently appeared, and aspects of these proposals have been adopted within XMLSchema. Although several validators for XMLSchema appear to check for keys, relatively little attention has b...

in astrophysics necessarily involves the development of models and simulation technology to help us understand the complex phenomena underlying astrophysical events. As with any modeling approach, numerical models and simulation codes developed for astrophysical applications must be thoroughly verified and validated to demonstrate their accuracy and assess their credibility. Although verificati...

Programmers who develop large, mature applications often want to optimize the performance of their program without changing its semantics. They often do so by changing how their program invokes a library function or a function implemented in another module of the program. Unfortunately, once a programmer makes such an optimization, it is difficult for him to validate that the optimization does ...

Ontology quality can be affected by the difficulties involved in ontology modelling which may imply the appearance of anomalies in ontologies. This situation leads to the need of validating ontologies, that is, assessing their quality and correctness. Ontology validation is a key activity in different ontology engineering scenarios such as development and selection. This paper contributes to th...

Background and study aim  Few scales assessing bowel preparation quality have been validated, and direct between-scale comparisons remain scarce. The aim of the study was to compare inter- and intra-rater reliability, predictive abilities for clinical outcomes, and ease of use for each scale. Methods  Colonoscopy video recordings highlighting five colonic segments after washing were viewed in...

An LR(1) parser is a finite-state automaton, equipped with a stack, which uses a combination of its current state and one lookahead symbol in order to determine which action to perform next. We present a validator which, when applied to a context-free grammar G and an automaton A, checks that A and G agree. Validating the parser provides the correctness guarantees required by verified compilers...

It is argued that specifications should be rigorously validated against requirements. This is useful to build confidence in a specification, and to check a specification after it or the requirements have changed. MUSTARD (Multiple-Use Scenario Test and Refusal Description) is introduced as a means of formulating and formalising validation scenarios. The practical use of MUSTARD on a number of c...

This paper responds to a recent challenge for the validity of extrapolation of neurobiological knowledge from laboratory animals to humans. According to this challenge, experimental neurobiology, and thus neuroscience, is in a state of crisis because the knowledge produced in different laboratories hardly generalizes from one laboratory to another. Presumably, this is so because neurobiological...

A rule-based system is a series of if-then statements that utilizes a set of assertions, to which rules are created on how to act upon those assertions. Rule-based systems often construct the basis of software artifacts which can provide answers to problems in place of human experts. Such systems are also referred as expert systems. Rule-based solutions are also widely applied in artificial int...

Diagnostic Techniques are increasingly employed by utilities to manage their infrastructure assets. These are sophisticated techniques being applied to complicated and diverse real world networks. Consequently there are many concerns that these techniques a) are not accurate and b) damage the system by, at the very least, robbing other areas of vitally short resources. Thus there is a compellin...