In this paper, an approach to decision making in managing human resources that integrates multi-attribute decision making techniques with expert systems is described. The approach is based on the explicit articulation of qualitative decision knowledge which is represented by a tree of attributes and decision rules. The decision making process is supported by DEXi, a specialized expert system sh...

This article presents an extension to the basic Entity-Relationship (E-R) database modeling approach for use in designing geographic databases. This extension handles the standard spatial objects found in geographic information systems, multiple representations of the spatial objects, temporal representations, and the traditional coordinate and topological attributes associated with spatial obj...

In much of the world, large scale soil maps which would better inform land use decisions are not available. The major impediment to collection of large scale data is the cost of field survey over large areas. One promising approach to increase the efficiency of soil survey is soil-landscape modelling. Soil-landscape models formalise relationships between soil attributes and other environmental ...

We present the design and performance evaluation of a new secure DSR routing protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) called Security Aware Dynamic Source Routing (SADSR) that incorporates security attributes as parameters into a route discovery. The proposed protocol can be implemented based on the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol with suitable modification. SADSR enables the ...

This paper proposes a novel framework for composing web databases. Web databases are assumed to have explicit descriptions of I/O attributes and are considered as components of functional compositions. A user writes a script to connect output channels and input channels of components. A script determines a directed graph that may contain cycles which formalizes interactive and iterative behavio...

Reasoning by analogy is an important component of common sense reasoning whose formalization has undergone recent improvements with the logical and algebraic study of the analogical proportion. The starting point of this study considers analogical proportions on a formal context. We introduce analogical complexes, a companion of formal concepts formed by using analogy between four subsets of ob...

An ontology is a structured semantic model, composed of concepts, relations and instances. Data is a more primitive but concrete assembly of instances described by their attributes. An example of topic ontology is Open Directory of Web documents used in Google organizing documents into topics and subtopics, such as “Science”, “Arts”, etc. However, many ontologies are originally manually develop...

Energy consumption has become one of the important system properties that should be controlled by embedded control software. There is usually an inherent trade-off between energy consumption and several system qualities. As such, optimization techniques should be adopted for making the desired trade-off among quality attributes. Implementations of these techniques are usually ad-hoc and system-...

This paper presents an investigation of lexical chaining (Morris and Hirst, 1991) for measuring discourse coherence quality in test-taker essays. We hypothesize that attributes of lexical chains, as well as interactions between lexical chains and explicit discourse elements, can be harnessed for representing coherence. Our experiments reveal that performance achieved by our new lexical chain fe...

The present research rests and elaborates on sociomaterial aspects of virtual practices, as manifested through distributed and collaborative work. This is approached through an interpretive case study of music notation lessons (MNLs) using the DIAMOUSES system. Our empirical data suggest that sociomateriality shifts the focus of designing interactive technologies from mere considerations of dig...