An approach to ontology for institutional facts in the semantic web

Refinement in software engineering allows a specification to be developed in stages, with design decisions taken at earlier stages constraining the design at later stages. Refinement in complex data models is difficult due to lack of a way of defining constraints, which can be progressively maintained over increasingly detailed refinements. Category theory provides a way of stating wide scale constraints. These constraints lead to a set of design guidelines, which maintain the wide scale constraints under increasing detail. Previous methods of refinement are essentially local, and the proposed method does not interfere very much with these local methods. The result is particularly applicable to semantic web applications, where ontologies provide systems of more or less abstract constraints on systems, which must be implemented and therefore refined by participating systems. With the approach of this paper, the concept of committing to an ontology carries much more force. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Complementary methods to investigate the development of clogging within a horizontal sub-surface flow tertiary treatment wetland

A combination of experimental methods was applied at a clogged, horizontal subsurface flow (HSSF) municipal wastewater tertiary treatment wetland (TW) in the UK, to quantify the extent of surface and subsurface clogging which had resulted in undesirable surface flow. The three dimensional hydraulic conductivity profile was determined, using a purpose made device which recreates the constant head permeameter test in-situ. The hydrodynamic pathways were investigated by performing dye tracing tests with Rhodamine WT and a novel multi-channel, data-logging, flow through Fluorimeter which allows synchronous measurements to be taken from a matrix of sampling points. Hydraulic conductivity varied in all planes, with the lowest measurement of 0.1 md1 corresponding to the surface layer at the inlet, and the maximum measurement of 1550 md1 located at a 0.4m depth at the outlet. According to dye tracing results, the region where the overland flow ceased received five times the average flow, which then vertically short-circuited below the rhizosphere. The tracer break-through curve obtained from the outlet showed that this preferential flow-path accounted for approximately 80% of the flow overall and arrived 8 h before a distinctly separate secondary flow-path. The overall volumetric efficiencyof the clogged system was 71% and the hydrology was simulated using a dual-path, dead-zone storage model. It is concluded that uneven inlet distribution, continuous surface loading and high rhizosphere resistance is responsible for the clog formation observed in this system. The average inlet hydraulic conductivity was 2 md1, suggesting that current European design guidelines, which predict that the system will reach an equilibrium hydraulic conductivity of 86 md1, do not adequately describe the hydrology of mature systems.

State-of-the-art in integrated vehicle health management

Integrated vehicle health management (IVHM) is a collection of data relevant to the present and future performance of a vehicle system and its transformation into information can be used to support operational decisions. This design and operation concept embraces an integration of sensors, communication technologies, and artificial intelligence to provide vehicle-wide abilities to diagnose problems and recommend solutions. This article aims to report the state-of-the-art of IVHM research by presenting a systematic review of the literature. The literature from different sources is collated and analysed, and the major emerging themes are presented. On this basis, the article describes the IVHM concept and its evolution, discusses configurations and existing applications along with main drivers, potential benefits and barriers to adoption, summarizes design guidelines and available methods, and identifies future research challenges.

Electronic dispersion compensation using full optical-field reconstruction in 10Gbit/s OOK based systems

We investigate the design of electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) using full optical-field reconstruction in 10Gbit/s on-off keyed transmission systems limited by optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). By effectively suppressing the impairment due to low- frequency component amplification in phase reconstruction, properly designing the transmission system configuration to combat fiber nonlinearity, and successfully reducing the vulnerability to thermal noise, a 4.8dB OSNR margin can be achieved for 2160km single-mode fiber transmission without any optical dispersion compensation. We also investigate the performance sensitivity of the scheme to various system parameters, and propose a novel method to greatly enhance the tolerance to differential phase misalignment of the asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer. This numerical study provides important design guidelines which will enable full optical-field EDC to become a cost-effective dispersion compensation solution for future transparent optical networks.

A computer simulation model for single -lane roundabouts

During the past three decades, the use of roundabouts has increased throughout the world due to their greater benefits in comparison with intersections controlled by traditional means. Roundabouts are often chosen because they are widely associated with low accident rates, lower construction and operating costs, and reasonable capacities and delay. ^ In the planning and design of roundabouts, special attention should be given to the movement of pedestrians and bicycles. As a result, there are several guidelines for the design of pedestrian and bicycle treatments at roundabouts that increase the safety of both pedestrians and bicyclists at existing and proposed roundabout locations. Different design guidelines have differing criteria for handling pedestrians and bicyclists at roundabout locations. Although all of the investigated guidelines provide better safety (depending on the traffic conditions at a specific location), their effects on the performance of the roundabout have not been examined yet. ^ Existing roundabout analysis software packages provide estimates of capacity and performance characteristics. This includes characteristics such as delay, queue lengths, stop rates, effects of heavy vehicles, crash frequencies, and geometric delays, as well as fuel consumption, pollutant emissions and operating costs for roundabouts. None of these software packages, however, are capable of determining the effects of various pedestrian crossing locations, nor the effect of different bicycle treatments on the performance of roundabouts. ^ The objective of this research is to develop simulation models capable of determining the effect of various pedestrian and bicycle treatments at single-lane roundabouts. To achieve this, four models were developed. The first model simulates a single-lane roundabout without bicycle and pedestrian traffic. The second model simulates a single-lane roundabout with a pedestrian crossing and mixed flow bicyclists. The third model simulates a single-lane roundabout with a combined pedestrian and bicycle crossing, while the fourth model simulates a single-lane roundabout with a pedestrian crossing and a bicycle lane at the outer perimeter of the roundabout for the bicycles. Traffic data was collected at a modern roundabout in Boca Raton, Florida. ^ The results of this effort show that installing a pedestrian crossing on the roundabout approach will have a negative impact on the entry flow, while the downstream approach will benefit from the newly created gaps by pedestrians. Also, it was concluded that a bicycle lane configuration is more beneficial for all users of the roundabout instead of the mixed flow or combined crossing. Installing the pedestrian crossing at one-car length is more beneficial for pedestrians than two- and three-car lengths. Finally, it was concluded that the effect of the pedestrian crossing on the vehicle queues diminishes as the distance between the crossing and the roundabout increases. ^

Experimental and Analytical Methodologies for Predicting Peak Loads on Building Envelopes and Roofing Systems

The performance of building envelopes and roofing systems significantly depends on accurate knowledge of wind loads and the response of envelope components under realistic wind conditions. Wind tunnel testing is a well-established practice to determine wind loads on structures. For small structures much larger model scales are needed than for large structures, to maintain modeling accuracy and minimize Reynolds number effects. In these circumstances the ability to obtain a large enough turbulence integral scale is usually compromised by the limited dimensions of the wind tunnel meaning that it is not possible to simulate the low frequency end of the turbulence spectrum. Such flows are called flows with Partial Turbulence Simulation. In this dissertation, the test procedure and scaling requirements for tests in partial turbulence simulation are discussed. A theoretical method is proposed for including the effects of low-frequency turbulences in the post-test analysis. In this theory the turbulence spectrum is divided into two distinct statistical processes, one at high frequencies which can be simulated in the wind tunnel, and one at low frequencies which can be treated in a quasi-steady manner. The joint probability of load resulting from the two processes is derived from which full-scale equivalent peak pressure coefficients can be obtained. The efficacy of the method is proved by comparing predicted data derived from tests on large-scale models of the Silsoe Cube and Texas-Tech University buildings in Wall of Wind facility at Florida International University with the available full-scale data. For multi-layer building envelopes such as rain-screen walls, roof pavers, and vented energy efficient walls not only peak wind loads but also their spatial gradients are important. Wind permeable roof claddings like roof pavers are not well dealt with in many existing building codes and standards. Large-scale experiments were carried out to investigate the wind loading on concrete pavers including wind blow-off tests and pressure measurements. Simplified guidelines were developed for design of loose-laid roof pavers against wind uplift. The guidelines are formatted so that use can be made of the existing information in codes and standards such as ASCE 7-10 on pressure coefficients on components and cladding.

Iowa Statewide Recreational Trails Plan, 1990

The Iowa Statewide Recreational Trails Plan was developed in response to the State Legislature's recognition of the increased public demand for quality outdoor recreational facilities and the numerous benefits associated with the development and usage of trail systems. The plan presents a statewide trails system that will serve as a basis for trail planning efforts throughout the state. Included are design guidelines for each of the major trail modes contained within the plan including bike, hiking, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling, off-road vehicles, and equestrian, as well as for locating trails within the highway right-of-way. Also included are estimates of implementation costs and financing alternatives. This report contains the complete plan. Separately bound documents include the Executive Summary and two additional appendices: (1) Trails Plan Resource Inventory and (2) Summary of Public Comments and Summary of Technical Advisory Committee Comments.

Random Access over Multi-Packet Reception Channels: A Mean-Field Approach

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Exploring Relationships Between Vector-Borne Diseases and Landscape Architecture: Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus and Landscape Architecture

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

A influência de decisões arquitetônicas na eficiência energética do Campus vol. 1/UFRN

Building design is an effective way to achieve HVAC energy consumption reduction. However, this potentiality is often neglected by architects due to the lack of references to support design decisions. This works intends to propose architectural design guidelines for energy efficiency and thermal performance of Campus/UFRN buildings. These guidelines are based on computer simulations results using the software DesignBuilder. The definition of simulation models has begun with envelope variables, partially done after a field study of thirteen buildings at UFRN/Campus. This field study indicated some basic envelope patterns that were applied in simulation models. Occupation variables were identified with temperature and energy consumption monitoring procedures and a verification of illumination and equipment power, both developed at the Campus/UFRN administration building. Three simulation models were proposed according to different design phases and decisions. The first model represents early design decisions, simulating the combination of different types of geometry with three levels of envelope thermal performance. The second model, still as a part of early design phase, analyses thermal changes between circulation halls lateral and central and office rooms, as well as the heat fluxes and monthly temperatures in each circulation hall. The third model analyses the influence of middle-design and detail design decisions on energy consumption and thermal performance. In this model, different solutions of roofs, shading devices, walls and external colors were simulated. The results of all simulation models suggest a high influence of thermal loads due to the incidence of solar radiation on windows and surfaces, which highlights the importance of window shading devices, office room orientation and absorptance of roof and walls surfaces

Surface thermal analysis of North Brabant cities and neighbourhoods during heat waves

The urban heat island effect is often associated with large metropolises. However, in the Netherlands even small cities will be affected by the phenomenon in the future (Hove et al., 2011), due to the dispersed or mosaic urbanisation patterns in particularly the southern part of the country: the province of North Brabant. This study analyses the average night time land surface temperature (LST) of 21 North-Brabant urban areas through 22 satellite images retrieved by Modis 11A1 during the 2006 heat wave and uses Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper to map albedo and normalized difference temperature index (NDVI) values. Albedo, NDVI and imperviousness are found to play the most relevant role in the increase of nighttime LST. The surface cover cluster analysis of these three parameters reveals that the 12 “urban living environment” categories used in the region of North Brabant can actually be reduced to 7 categories, which simplifies the design guidelines to improve the surface thermal behaviour of the different neighbourhoods thus reducing the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in existing medium size cities and future developments adjacent to those cities.

Ground Plane Slot Structures for Isolation of Cosited Microstrip Antennas

Ground plane slot structures have been shown to reduce coupling between cosited antennas. Although some such structures have already been reported, no analytical model exists to describe their behavior and there are no design guidelines. In this work, the behavior of reported ground plane structures is used as a clue to obtain generalizable information about such structures' behavior. The structures' scalability and excitation behavior is investigated. Next a circuit model is derived that describes the interaction of microstrip patch antennas with a ground plane slot structure based on mutual admittances between the ground plane slots and the effective slots at the antennas' radiating edges. The circuit model leads to design guidelines for the ground plane slot structure and an approximate relationship between mutual admittances which must be satisfied in order to isolate the antennas. Finally, we present a novel ground plane slot structure that mitigates some of the disadvantages of earlier designs.

A Visual Analytics Approach to Comparing Cohorts of Event Sequences

Sequences of timestamped events are currently being generated across nearly every domain of data analytics, from e-commerce web logging to electronic health records used by doctors and medical researchers. Every day, this data type is reviewed by humans who apply statistical tests, hoping to learn everything they can about how these processes work, why they break, and how they can be improved upon. To further uncover how these processes work the way they do, researchers often compare two groups, or cohorts, of event sequences to find the differences and similarities between outcomes and processes. With temporal event sequence data, this task is complex because of the variety of ways single events and sequences of events can differ between the two cohorts of records: the structure of the event sequences (e.g., event order, co-occurring events, or frequencies of events), the attributes about the events and records (e.g., gender of a patient), or metrics about the timestamps themselves (e.g., duration of an event). Running statistical tests to cover all these cases and determining which results are significant becomes cumbersome. Current visual analytics tools for comparing groups of event sequences emphasize a purely statistical or purely visual approach for comparison. Visual analytics tools leverage humans' ability to easily see patterns and anomalies that they were not expecting, but is limited by uncertainty in findings. Statistical tools emphasize finding significant differences in the data, but often requires researchers have a concrete question and doesn't facilitate more general exploration of the data. Combining visual analytics tools with statistical methods leverages the benefits of both approaches for quicker and easier insight discovery. Integrating statistics into a visualization tool presents many challenges on the frontend (e.g., displaying the results of many different metrics concisely) and in the backend (e.g., scalability challenges with running various metrics on multi-dimensional data at once). I begin by exploring the problem of comparing cohorts of event sequences and understanding the questions that analysts commonly ask in this task. From there, I demonstrate that combining automated statistics with an interactive user interface amplifies the benefits of both types of tools, thereby enabling analysts to conduct quicker and easier data exploration, hypothesis generation, and insight discovery. The direct contributions of this dissertation are: (1) a taxonomy of metrics for comparing cohorts of temporal event sequences, (2) a statistical framework for exploratory data analysis with a method I refer to as high-volume hypothesis testing (HVHT), (3) a family of visualizations and guidelines for interaction techniques that are useful for understanding and parsing the results, and (4) a user study, five long-term case studies, and five short-term case studies which demonstrate the utility and impact of these methods in various domains: four in the medical domain, one in web log analysis, two in education, and one each in social networks, sports analytics, and security. My dissertation contributes an understanding of how cohorts of temporal event sequences are commonly compared and the difficulties associated with applying and parsing the results of these metrics. It also contributes a set of visualizations, algorithms, and design guidelines for balancing automated statistics with user-driven analysis to guide users to significant, distinguishing features between cohorts. This work opens avenues for future research in comparing two or more groups of temporal event sequences, opening traditional machine learning and data mining techniques to user interaction, and extending the principles found in this dissertation to data types beyond temporal event sequences.

A influência de decisões arquitetônicas na eficiência energética do Campus vol. 1/UFRN

Building design is an effective way to achieve HVAC energy consumption reduction. However, this potentiality is often neglected by architects due to the lack of references to support design decisions. This works intends to propose architectural design guidelines for energy efficiency and thermal performance of Campus/UFRN buildings. These guidelines are based on computer simulations results using the software DesignBuilder. The definition of simulation models has begun with envelope variables, partially done after a field study of thirteen buildings at UFRN/Campus. This field study indicated some basic envelope patterns that were applied in simulation models. Occupation variables were identified with temperature and energy consumption monitoring procedures and a verification of illumination and equipment power, both developed at the Campus/UFRN administration building. Three simulation models were proposed according to different design phases and decisions. The first model represents early design decisions, simulating the combination of different types of geometry with three levels of envelope thermal performance. The second model, still as a part of early design phase, analyses thermal changes between circulation halls lateral and central and office rooms, as well as the heat fluxes and monthly temperatures in each circulation hall. The third model analyses the influence of middle-design and detail design decisions on energy consumption and thermal performance. In this model, different solutions of roofs, shading devices, walls and external colors were simulated. The results of all simulation models suggest a high influence of thermal loads due to the incidence of solar radiation on windows and surfaces, which highlights the importance of window shading devices, office room orientation and absorptance of roof and walls surfaces

UTFORMNING AV GÅNG-, CYKEL- OCH MOPED-NÄT ANPASSAT FÖR ELCYKEL

Purpose: An increase in the number of pedelecs on Swedish roads is according to studies soon reality. This creates a need to adapt the bmp-grid (bike-, moped- and pedestrian-grid) to pedelecs for them to experience good security, accessibility and comfort while using it. The guidelines Swedish municipalities follow are VGU(Design of Roads and Streets) and the GCM-manual(Bike-, moped-, and pedestrian-manual) which currently do not take society’s future increase of pedelecs into account. VGU and the GCM-manual are tools that are commonly used during planning and design of roads and streets. The aim of the thesis is to use current advice and recommendations on how to adapt the bmp-grid to the pedelec and with this complete current guidelines for bmp-infrastructure. Method: The document-analysis is made on current federal documents that have an impact on bmp-design. Scetch-suggestions were then developed from the author’s personal improvement suggestions and from advice and recommendations gathered during the document-analysis and the theoretical framework. Findings: It was discovered that if the bmp-grid’s design allow bikes traveling up to 30km/h and has a good standard for bicycles according to VGU, then the infrastructure generally fulfil the needs of the pedelec. Altough there are still areas in VGU that needs complements. This need to be done on the design-guidelines so they can aid the adaption of the infrastructure to the pedelec during the planning- and design process. Necessary steps according to the result is to give clearer notifications on bmp-design, issue guidelines for choosing DTS, motivate minimal widths on roads, categories bikers and pedestrians into separate groups, give out more detailed descriptions of when separation of bikers and pedestrians should be done and also to specify different types of bike-users. When taking needs and claim of the pedelec into consideration the result shows that: adaption of the whole bmp-grid to the pedelec is not possible, to simplify priorities the bmp-grid needs to be divided into different sections, space should be taken from the car-traffic, solutions with mixed-traffic and bike-fields for pedelecs can be used in low-speed areas, larger opportunities to connect towns to increase commuting with bicycles appeared with the pedelec. Implications: After examining current guidelines regarding the design of the bmp-grid and gathering opinions on this from interviews the conclusion is that several areas in VGU needs completion. The following are recommendations on how to take the pedelec into consideration during the design-process:• Connect towns and urban-areas with bmp-grids to make use of pedelecs capacity.• Where there is not enough space for both cars and separated pedelec- and bike lanes the speed for car-traffic can be lowered to 30km/h. This creates opportunities with mixed-traffic or bike-lanes.• The width of existing roads and streets are often greater than what’s described in VGU. They can be made smaller to free space on roads for bicycle-infrastructure.• To prioritize which parts of the bmp-grid that needs design to allow pedelecs the bmp-grid can be divided into main- and local grid. The main grid should be design with consideration to the needs and claim of the pedelecs. Limitations: The limitation of the study lies in that none of the interviews where done with employees in any of the bigger municipalities in Sweden. This gives the study a general application in small- to middle-sized cities but not in bigger cities.Keywords: elcykel, ebike, pedelec, utformning, cykel, infrastruktur, infrastructure, society, planering, utformning, säkerhet, fordonstyp