The PROMPT suite: interactive tools for ontology merging and mapping

Researchers in the ontology-design field have developed the content for ontologies in many domain areas. This distributed nature of ontology development has led to a large number of ontologies covering overlapping domains. In order for these ontologies to be reused, they first need to be merged or aligned to one another. We developed a suite of tools for managing multiple ontologies. These suite provides users with a uniform framework for comparing, aligning, and merging ontologies, maintaining versions, translating between different formalisms. Two of the tools in the suite support semi-automatic ontology merging: P is an interactive ontology-merging tool that guides the user through the merging process, presenting him with suggestions for next steps and identifying inconsistencies and potential problems. A P uses a graph structure of ontologies to find correlation between concepts and to provide additional information for P .     

A conservative pressure-correction method for flow at all speeds

A new fully conservative Mach-uniform staggered scheme is discussed. With this scheme one can compute flow with a Mach number ranging from the incompressible limit M↓0 up to supersonic flow M>1, with nearly uniform efficiency and accuracy. Earlier methods are based on a nonconservative discretisation of the energy equation. This results in small discrepancies in the computed shock speed for the Euler equations. The new method has similar Mach-uniform properties as the earlier methods, but is found to converge to the correct weak solution.     

A nonlinear set‐membership filter for on‐line applications

A guaranteed estimator for a general class of nonlinear systems and on‐line usage is developed and analysed. This filter bounds the linearization error, then applies a linear set‐membership filter such that stability guarantees hold for nonlinear systems. A tight bound on the linearization error is found using interval analysis. This filter recursively estimates an ellipsoidal set in which the true state lies. General assumptions include the use of bounded noises and twice continuously differentiable dynamics. When the system is uniformly observable, it is proven that the nonlinear set‐membership filter is stable. In addition, if no noise is present and the initial error is small, the error between the centre of the estimated set and the true value converges to zero. The result is an estimator which is computationally attractive and can be implemented robustly in real‐time. The proposed method is applied to a two‐state example to demonstrate the theoretical results. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Software release management for component‐based software

Software release management is the process through which software is made available to and obtained by its users. Until now, this process has been relatively straightforward. However, the emergence of component‐based software is complicating software release management. Increasingly, software is constructed via the assembly of pre‐existing, independently produced, and independently released components. Both developers and users of such software are affected by these complications. Developers need to accurately document the complex and changing dependencies among the components constituting the software. Users must be involved in locating, retrieving, and assembling components in order to appropriately bring the software into their particular environment. In this paper, we introduce the problem of release management for component‐based software and discuss SRM, a prototype software release management tool we have developed that supports both developers and users in the software release management process. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

AN ASYMPTOTIC SECOND‐ORDER SMOOTH SLIDING MODE CONTROL

Presented is a method of smooth sliding mode control design to provide for an asymptotic second‐order sliding mode on the selected sliding surface. The control law is a nonlinear dynamic feedback that in absence of unknown disturbances provides for an asymptotic second‐order sliding mode. Application of the second‐order disturbance observer in a combination with the proposed continuous control law practically gives the second‐order sliding accuracy in presence of unknown disturbances and discrete‐time control update. The piecewise constant control feedback is “smooth” in the sense that its derivative numerically taken at sampling rate does not contain high frequency components. A numerical example is presented.     

Measurement methods for LCoS displays

Abstract— Two measurement methods to characterize uniformity and the absolute cell gap of LCoS images will be reviewed. These are simple to use in a production environment and have allowed major improvements in manufacture to be achieved. For the purpose of this paper, the liquid‐crystal mode used is the 45° normally black mode.     

Symbolic performance modeling of parallel systems

Performance prediction is an important engineering tool that provides valuable feedback on design choices in program synthesis and machine architecture development. We present an analytic performance modeling approach aimed to minimize prediction cost, while providing a prediction accuracy that is sufficient to enable major code and data mapping decisions. Our approach is based on a performance simulation language called PAMELA. Apart from simulation, PAMELA features a symbolic analysis technique that enables PAMELA models to be compiled into symbolic performance models that trade prediction accuracy for the lowest possible solution cost. We demonstrate our approach through a large number of theoretical and practical modeling case studies, including six parallel programs and two distributed-memory machines. The average prediction error of our approach is less than 10 percent, while the average worst-case error is limited to 50 percent. It is shown that this accuracy is sufficient to correctly select the best coding or partitioning strategy. For programs expressed in a high-level, structured programming model, such as data-parallel programs, symbolic performance modeling can be entirely automated. We report on experiments with a PAMELA model generator built within a dataparallel compiler for distributed-memory machines. Our results show that with negligible program annotation, symbolic performance models are automatically compiled in seconds, while their solution cost is in the order of milliseconds.     

Modular Reconfigurable Robots in Space Applications

Robots used for tasks in space have strict requirements. Modular reconfigurable robots have a variety of attributes that are well suited to these conditions, including: serving as many different tools at once (saving weight), packing into compressed forms (saving space) and having high levels of redundancy (increasing robustness). In addition, self-reconfigurable systems can self-repair and adapt to changing or unanticipated conditions. This paper will describe such a self-reconfigurable modular robot: PolyBot. PolyBot has significant potential in the space manipulation and surface mobility class of applications for space.     

Automatic Flow-Control Adaptation for Enhancing Network Performance in Computational Grids

With the advent of computational Grids, networking performance over the wide-area network (WAN) has become a critical component in the Grid infrastructure. Unfortunately, many high-performance Grid applications only use a small fraction of their available bandwidth because operating systems and their associated protocol stacks are still tuned for yesterday's WAN speeds. As a result, network gurus undertake the tedious process of manually tuning system buffers to allow TCP flow control to scale to today's WAN Grid environments. And although recent research has shown how to set the size of these system buffers automatically at connection set-up, the buffer sizes are only appropriate at the beginning of the connection's lifetime. To address these problems, we describe an automated and lightweight technique called dynamic right-sizing that can improve throughput by as much as an order of magnitude while still abiding by TCP semantics.