Gazetteers are catalogs of geographic objects, typically classified using terms taken from a thesaurus. Mediated access to several gazetteers requires the use of a strategy to deal with the heterogeneity of different thesauri. This paper outlines the implementation of a mediator for heterogeneous gazetteers. The mediator incorporates an instance-based technique to align thesauri that uses the r...

The popularization of computers and the Internet have produced an explosion in the amount of inform~ttion, ntaking difficult to find the.hi. The. problem with oxisting information-locating support systemns is that ahhough they allow user to search through a large, nunfl)e.r of information sources, they provide very limited capabilitie.s for locating. combining and processing informations. The l...

Explanation is an informative message that a Speaker S addresses to a Hearer H with several, often intermingled purposes, such as to justify a decision taken, to clarify the meaning of terms or to instruct on how to perform some complex action. The explanation content is thus a function of its communicative goals, of the way that these goals can be reached (the "discourse strategies") and of th...

In this article we present the use of knowledge for a Mediation System, developed to give support to participants in mechanical-system-designer activities. To use a cooperative system sufficient assistance is needed to facilitate and coordinate actors’ activities. To accomplish this goal we introduce an artificial actor: Mediator. The Mediator forms part of the group of collaborative, with the ...

The Mediator is a highly conserved, large multiprotein complex that is involved essentially in the regulation of eukaryotic mRNA transcription. It acts as a general transcription factor by integrating regulatory signals from gene-specific activators or repressors to the RNA Polymerase II. The internal network of interactions between Mediator subunits that conveys these signals is largely unknow...

The area of data integration has gained increased popularity in recent years. This paper describes a data browser for a data integration system where an intermediate layer of a distributed multidatabase system, a mediator database system, is used to query and integrate data from heterogeneous data sources. The data sources can be regular relational databases but also other data producing progra...

As part of the MKBEEM project, we present an ontology based mediation framework for electronic commerce applications. The framework is based on a mediator/wrapper approach that supports an integrated view over multiple heterogeneous sources. The MKBEEM mediation system allows to fill the gap between customers queries (possibly expressed in a natural language) and diverse specific providers offe...

Distributed systems require declarative access to diverse information sources. One approach to solving this heterogeneous distributed database problem is based on mediator architectures. In these architectures, mediators accept queries from users, process them with respect to wrappers, and return answers. Wrapper provide access to underlying sources. To eeciently process queries, the mediator m...

Digital libraries are more and more available on the web. However, retrieving information in these libraries is not easy because of sources heterogeneity and distribution. Thus, we propose the use of virtual integration with mediator-wrapper architecture. This architecture allows access to relational sources, XML documents and text files. The mediator schema is based on XML and Xquery as query ...

This paper investigates the effect that an option to call a mediator has on using voluntary agreements to solve a land conflict using a framed field experiment in the highlands of Ethiopia. A game theoretical model to describe this situation is constructed including a discussion related to social preferences, which subsequently the experimental design is based on. Our results indicate that almo...