The theoretical properties of qualitative spatial reasoning in the RCC-8 framework have been analyzed extensively. However, no empirical investigation has been made yet. Our experiments show that the adaption of the algorithms used for qualitative temporal reasoning can solve large RCC-8 instances, even if they are in the phase transition region { provided that one uses the maximal tractable su...

The use of rigorous qualitative research methods can enhance the development of quality measures, the development and dissemination of comparative quality reports, as well as quality improvement efforts. This paper describes how such methods have been and can be used, and identifies how to improve the use of such methods in studying quality of care. Focus groups and cognitive interviews are now...

In this work is presented the application of qualitative models and statistical methods in quality control of production procedures of various components of an automatic industrial press machine. The methodology of creating a descriptive model of a manufacturing process is presented using qualitative methods of description and a qualitative modeling and simulation application (QMTOOL). The simu...

In this paper, we introduce the HashRF(p, q) algorithm for computing RF matrices of large binary, evolutionary tree collections. The novelty of our algorithm is that it can be used to compute arbitrarilysized (p × q) RF matrices without running into physical memory limitations. In this paper, we explore the performance of our HashRF(p, q) approach on 20,000 and 33,306 biological trees of 150 ta...