in the early stages of a construction project, the reliability and accuracy of conceptual cost estimates are major concerns for clients and cost engineers. previous studies applied scoring methods and established common rules or mathematical methods to assess the quality of cost estimates. however, those approaches have some limitations in adapting to real-world projects or require understandin...

The part-of or part-whole construct is a fundamental element of many conceptual modeling grammars that is used to associate one thing (a component) with another thing (a composite). Substantive theoretical issues surrounding the part-whole construct remain to be resolved, however. For instance, contrary to widespread claims, the relationship between components and composites is not always trans...

The paper describes a prototype tool, named DIXSE, which supports the integration of XML Document Type Definitions (DTDs) into a common conceptual schema. The mapping from each individual DTD into the common schema is used to automatically generate wrappers for XML documents, which conform to a given DTD. These wrappers are used to populate the common conceptual schema thereby achieving data in...

The types of knowledge used during requirements acquisition are identified and a tool to aid in this process, ReqColl (Requirements Collector) is introduced. The tool uses conceptual graphs to represent domain concepts and attempts to recognise new concepts through the use of a matching facility. The overall approach to requirements capture is first described and the approach to matching illust...