Digitisation, representation, and formalisation - Digital libraries of mathematics

One of the main tasks of the mathematical knowledge management community must surely be to enhance access to mathematics on digital systems. In this paper we present a spectrum of approaches to solving the various problems inherent in this task, arguing that a variety of approaches is both necessary and useful. The main ideas presented are about the differences between digitised mathematics, digitally represented mathematics and formalised mathematics. Each has its part to play in managing mathematical information in a connected world. Digitised material is that which is embodied in a computer file, accessible and displayable locally or globally. Represented material is digital material in which there is some structure (usually syntactic in nature) which maps to the mathematics contained in the digitised information. Formalised material is that in which both the syntax and semantics of the represented material, is automatically accessible. Given the range of mathematical information to which access is desired, and the limited resources available for managing that information, we must ensure that these resources are applied to digitise, form representations of or formalise, existing and new mathematical information in such a way as to extract the most benefit from the least expenditure of resources. We also analyse some of the various social and legal issues which surround the practical tasks.

Profiling management for personalised multimedia delivery on-demand within the AXMEDIS framework

Media content distribution on-demand becomes more complex when performed on a mass scale involving various channels with distinct and dynamic network characteristics, and, deploying a variety of terminal devices offering a wide range of capabilities. It is practically impossible to create and prepackage various static versions of the same content to match all the varying demand parameters of clients for various contexts. In this paper we present a profiling management approach for dynamically personalised media content delivery on-demand integrated with the AXMEDIS Framework. The client profiles comprise the representation of User, Device, Network and Context of content delivery based on MPEG-21:DIA. Although the most challenging proving ground for this personalised content delivery has been the mobile testbed i.e. the distribution to mobile handsets, the framework described here can be deployed for disribution, by the AXMEDIS PnP module, through other channels e.g. satellite, Internet to a range of client terminals e.g. desktops, kiosks, IPtv and other terrminals whose baseline terminal capabilities can be made availabe by the manufacturers as is normal.

Semi-automatic knowledge extraction, representation and context-sensitive intelligent retrieval of video content using collateral context modelling with scalable ontological networks

Automatic indexing and retrieval of digital data poses major challenges. The main problem arises from the ever increasing mass of digital media and the lack of efficient methods for indexing and retrieval of such data based on the semantic content rather than keywords. To enable intelligent web interactions, or even web filtering, we need to be capable of interpreting the information base in an intelligent manner. For a number of years research has been ongoing in the field of ontological engineering with the aim of using ontologies to add such (meta) knowledge to information. In this paper, we describe the architecture of a system (Dynamic REtrieval Analysis and semantic metadata Management (DREAM)) designed to automatically and intelligently index huge repositories of special effects video clips, based on their semantic content, using a network of scalable ontologies to enable intelligent retrieval. The DREAM Demonstrator has been evaluated as deployed in the film post-production phase to support the process of storage, indexing and retrieval of large data sets of special effects video clips as an exemplar application domain. This paper provides its performance and usability results and highlights the scope for future enhancements of the DREAM architecture which has proven successful in its first and possibly most challenging proving ground, namely film production, where it is already in routine use within our test bed Partners' creative processes. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V.

A semiotic framework for information representation of energy consumption in office buildings

Taking a perspective from a whole building lifecycle, occupier's actions could account for about 50% of energy. However occupants' activities influence building energy performance is still a blind area. Building energy performance is thought to be the result of a combination of building fabrics, building services and occupants' activities, along with their interactions. In this sense, energy consumption in built environment is regarded as a socio-technical system. In order to understand how such a system works, a range of physical, technical and social information is involved that needs to be integrated and aligned. This paper has proposed a semiotic framework to add value for Building Information Modelling, incorporating energy-related occupancy factors in a context of office buildings. Further, building information has been addressed semantically to describe a building space from the facility management perspective. Finally, the framework guides to set up building information representation system, which can help facility managers to manage buildings efficiently by improving their understanding on how office buildings are operated and used.