14231112
A Transparent Collaborative Integration Approach for Ad Hoc Product Data
Product data integration is an essential issue for many e-commerce interoperable business systems. Core to this issue is how to maintain semantic consistency between heterogeneous product data that are semantically different in structure, concept and context. To resolve the issue, this paper proposes a transparent collaborative integration approach, which is built on a layered framework of messaging, structure, concept and collaboration. The key to this framework is three collaboration engines, which resolves semantic consistency issues between millions of contextual vocabularies of SMEs
6950256
Context representation, transformation and comparison for ad hoc product data exchange
Product data exchange is the precondition of business interoperation between Web-based firms. However, millions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) encode their Web product data in ad hoc formats for electronic product catalogues. This prevents product data exchange between business partners for business interoperation. To solve this problem, this paper has proposed a novel concept-centric catalogue engineering approach for representing, transforming and comparing semantic contexts in ad hoc product data exchange. In this approach, concepts and contexts of product data are specified along data exchange chain and are mapped onto several novel XML product map (XPM) documents by utilizing XML hierarchical structure and its syntax. The designed XPM has overcome the semantic limitations of XML markup and has achieved the semantic interoperation for ad hoc product data exchange.
37890888
Alibaba International: Building a Global Electronic Marketplace
Alibaba is the largest global electronic marketplace (GEM) in the world in terms of its participated users. It was successful due to the factors of China's foreign trade regime, the image of low product cost of China, Alibaba's contingent adaptation to users' changing requirements and e-commerce environments. Alibaba is not a technically mature GEM platform compared with the ideal functions of GEM. Suggested solution for Alibaba to continuing its success is to adopt a novel GEM connectivity model
17686470
Inter-enterprise business document exchange
Electronic business document interoperation is the cornerstone of business process integration. An essential issue for business document interoperation is to maintain semantic consistency of the exchanged business documents between any two autonomous business communities, where the document sender and receiver have no misunderstanding in using the exchanged documents. Existing approaches to resolving this issue either adopts document standards to map heterogeneous document elements or applies business ontologies to mediate inconsistent document elements. While these approaches are effective in certain degree, the issues of limited flexibility and evolvability in using standards and the lack of accuracy in using ontologies to mediate document elements must be explored and resolved. This paper proposes a Collaborative Document Exchange (CODEX) approach to resolving the issues. In this approach, structures and concepts of business document are separated and layered in CODEX framework. Structures provide the commonality of business documents through classified concept identifiers while concepts support particularity of business documents through collaboration.
9204785
Achieving Transparent Integration of Information, Documents and Processes
While progress is made in the individual integration of business information, documents and processes, the issue of how to vertically integrate these individually integrated results needs to be resolved. This paper proposes a novel TRANSCODE approach to the issue. The approach represents business information, business documents and business processes in three TRANSCODE structures, which are then implemented, conceptualized and reified in an integrated and flexible 3-layer TRANSCODE model
5572698
Concept exchange: constructing interoperable electronic product catalogues in an emergent environment
Research in interoperability of electronic product catalogues has primarily focused on resolving semantic conflicts arisen from the heterogeneously designed electronic product catalogues. We argue that while existing integration strategies providing static connections between various heterogeneous catalogues over mediating ontologies, ontologies themselves exhibit heterogeneity and lack of evolvability. What's more, reclassifying terms to link public ontologies is very difficult to avoid inaccuracy problem that is critical to electronic commerce. This paper highlights the problems of flexibility, exactness and evolvability that have received little attention in the literature and provides an overview of the concept exchange approach to interoperability. It illustrates why this is able to better solve the identified problems, presents the different features compared with other approaches and suggests how the concept exchange framework is working.
10065672
The waiting time distribution for a TDMA model with a finite buffer and state-dependent service
We obtain detailed analytic formulas for the density and probability distribution of the waiting time in a time-division multiple-access (TDMA) model with a finite buffer and state-dependent service. On successive intervals of length equal to the duration of a slot, the density is expressed as a linear combination of beta densities with positive coefficients. A recursive scheme, obtained by a matrix-analytic derivation, allows for the highly efficient computations of the coefficient sequences. An expression for the mean waiting time is derived using the classical queueing formula L=/spl lambda/W. We also demonstrate that our methodology provides a concise treatment of various special cases that have been studied over the past half century.
6234679
A Model-based Approach to Hair Region Segmentation
Hair regions represent an important external feature in many tasks involving the processing of human faces. Currently, the task of locating the hair region in a facial image requires manual intervention. In this paper we examine the different aspects of the hair region segmentation problem and develop an automatic system for such a problem. The system incorporates the human knowledge on where the hair is usually located in a facial image. Segmentation is performed via the classification of image pixels and is based on both textural and geometrical features. Experiments have shown that the segmentation results are generally satisfactory and are at least comparable to the performance of manual extraction.
10173352
Computing the similarity of two sequences with nested arc annotations
We present exact algorithms for the NP-complete LONGEST COMMON SUBSEQUENCE problem for sequences with nested arc annotations, a problem occurring in structure comparison of RNA. Given two sequences of length at most n and nested arc structure, one of our algorithms determines (if existent) in O(3.31k1+k2 ċ n) time an arc-preserving subsequence of both sequences, which can be obtained by deleting (together with corresponding arcs) k1 letters from the first and k2 letters from the second sequence. A second algorithm shows that, (in case of a four letter alphabet) we can find a length l arc-annotated subsequence in O(12lċlċn) time. This means that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the number of deletions as well as when parameterized by the subsequence length. Our findings complement known approximation results which give a quadratic time factor-2-approximation for the general and polynomial time approximation schemes for restricted versions of the problem. In addition, we obtain further fixed-parameter tractability results for these restricted versions.
15601163
High Efficiency Digital Halftoning with Two-Element Error Kernel
A high efficiency and good quality error-diffused halftoning is proposed in this paper. An objective halftone image quality evaluation method based on human visual system obtained by least-mean-square is also introduced. The error diffusion algorithm, first introduced by Floyd and Steinberg in 1975, is currently the most popular method of digital halftoning. However, some annoying shortcomings, such as patches of regular textures, worm effect, and computational complexity still need to be improved. Ostromoukhov proposed a three-element error diffusion solving the problems described above, and achieved excellent performance. In this paper, we further reduced the complexity with the proposed two-element error diffusion by cooperating with the proposed LMS-trained quality evaluation. As demonstrated in experiments, the proposed technique further reduced the complexity by 33% compared to Ostromoukhov's method, and it is still comparable in image quality.
13379605
Protein Fold Recognition Through Application of Residual Dipolar Coupling Data
Residual dipolar coupling (RDC) represents one of the most exciting emerging NMR techniques for studying protein structures. However, solving a protein structure using RDC data alone is a highly challenging problem as it often requires that the starting structure model be close to the actual structure of a protein, for the structure calculation procedure to be effective. We report in this paper a computer program, RDC-PROSPECT, for identification of a structural homolog or analog of a target protein in PDB, which best matches the 15N-1H RDC data of the protein recorded in a single ordering medium. The identified structural homolog/analog can then be used as a starting model for RDC-based structure calculation. Since RDC-PROSPECT uses only RDC data and predicted secondary structure information, its performance is virtually independent of sequence similarity between a target protein and its structural homolog/analog, making it applicable to protein targets out of the scope of current protein threading techniques. We have tested RDC-PROSPECT on all 15N-1H RDC data (representing 33 proteins) available in the BMRB database and the literature. The program correctly identified the structural folds for approximately 80% of the target proteins, significantly better than previously reported results, and achieved an average alignment accuracy of 97.9% residues within 4-residue shift. Through a careful algorithmic design, RDC-PROSPECT is at least one order of magnitude faster than previously reported algorithms for principal alignment frame search, making our algorithm fast enough for large-scale applications.