18846046
Fluid ontologies for digital museums
With the advent and accessibility of the Internet, artistic and indigenous communities are beginning to realize how digital technologies can be used as a means for documenting and preserving their histories and cultures. However, it is not yet clear what knowledge architectures are most appropriate for creating a digital museum in order to facilitate an effective collection, organization, conservation, and experience of cultural and artistic heritage. In this paper, we discuss the concept of “fluid ontologies,” a novel, dynamic structure for organizing and browsing knowledge in a digital museum. Fluid ontologies are flexible knowledge structures that evolve and adapt to communities’ interest based on contextual information articulated by human contributors, curators, and viewers, as well as artificial bots that are able to track interaction histories and infer relationships among knowledge pieces and preferences of viewers. Fluid ontologies allow for a tighter coupling between communities’ interests and the browsing structure of a digital museum. We present the key ideas behind the use of fluid ontologies within the context of digital museum design and seminal work in metadata/dynamic ontologies, particularly as it pertains to objects of cultural heritage, and discuss these characteristics in three concrete examples: (1) Village Voice, an online agora that ties together the narratives created by a group of Somali refugees using an iteration of community-designed ontologies, (2) Eventspace, a node-based collaborative archive for design activities, and (3) Tribal Peace, an online digital museum still under construction and evaluation that uses proactive agents to tie distributed Kumeyaay, Luiseno, and Cupeno reservations together in their quest to achieve greater political sovereignty .
2569105
Implicit brushing and target snapping: data exploration and sense-making on large displays
During grouping tasks for data exploration and sense-making, the criteria are normally not well-defined. When users are bringing together data objects thought to be similar in some way, implicit brushing continually detects for groups on the freeform workspace, analyzes the groups' text content or metadata, and draws attention to related data by displaying visual hints and animation. This provides helpful tips for further grouping, group meaning refinement and structure discovery. The sense-making process is further enhanced by retrieving relevant information from a database or network during the brushing. Closely related to implicit brushing, target snapping provides a useful means to move a data object to one of its related groups on a large display. Natural dynamics and smooth animations also help to prevent distractions and allow users to concentrate on the grouping and thinking tasks. Two different prototype applications, note grouping for brainstorming and photo browsing, demonstrate the general applicability of the technique.
15852893
The swisshouse: an inhabitable interface for connecting nations
We present the Swisshouse, a novel type of "inhabitable interface" that supports direct and indirect communication and cultural awareness of habitants in different nations. The Swisshouse allows unsophisticated users to collaborate and be aware of each other over distance. By carefully sculpting the space and choreographing interactive elements in the space, the Swisshouse allows users to instantly separate, combine, and customize environments for specific collaborative activities. By providing visual representations of remote users and places, the Swisshouse provides awareness of the culture, presence and identities of virtual participants. And by tagging physical users with RFID tags, the Swisshouse makes participants aware of the social interaction occurring in the physical space. The combination of these primitives provides a single consistent inhabitable interface that integrates architectural and user interface design thinking, hardware and software design. To illustrate the power of this convergent approach, we describe several examples of real-life applications including a remote lecture, a brainstorming session, a business meeting, and an exhibition.
10392277
Visibility Culling Using Plenoptic Opacity Functions for Large Data Visualization
4329264
A generalization of the theorem of Lekkerkerker and Boland
Each fixed graph H gives rise to a list H-colouring problem. The complexity of list H-colouring problems has recently been fully classified: if H is a bi-arc graph, the problem is polynomial-time solvable, and otherwise it is NP-complete. The proof of this fact relies on a forbidden substructure characterization of bi-arc graphs, reminiscent of the theorem of Lekkerkerker and Boland on interval graphs. In this note we show that in fact the theorem of Lekkerkerker and Boland can be derived from the characterization.
12118210
Reconciling Agent Ontologies for Web Service Applications
Because there is still no agreed-upon global ontology, Web services supplied by different providers typically have individual and unique semantics, described by independently developed ontologies. The seamless connection of these distributed Web services for business-to-business applications depends heavily on reconciling the disparate semantics, possibly by integrating the ontologies. In this paper, we describe an approach to reconcile ontologies from distributed Web services. Our approach is totally automated, and features the following: i) alignment of the ontologies is performed without previous agreement on the semantics of the terminology in each ontology; ii) both linguistic and contextual features are considered; iii) the use of WordNet for linguistic analysis; iv) integration of heuristic knowledge for contextual analysis; and v) inference of new relationships by applying several rules based on domain-independent relationships and property lists. Experiments have been carried out to show the promising results of our system.
4772181
Convex-Round and Concave-Round Graphs
We introduce two new classes of graphs which we call convex-round, respectively concave-round graphs. Convex-round (concave-round) graphs are those graphs whose vertices can be circularly enumerated so that the (closed) neighborhood of each vertex forms an interval in the enumeration. Hence the two classes transform into each other by taking complements. We show that both classes of graphs have nice structural properties. We observe that the class of concave-round graphs properly contains the class of proper circular arc graphs and, by a result of Tucker [ Pacific J. Math., 39 (1971), pp. 535--545], is properly contained in the class of general circular arc graphs. We point out that convex-round and concave-round graphs can be recognized in O(n+m) time (here n denotes the number of vertices and m the number of edges of the graph in question). We show that the chromatic number of a graph which is convex-round (concave-round) can be found in time O(n+m) (O(n2)). We describe optimal O(n+m) time algorithms for finding a maximum clique, a maximum matching, and a Hamiltonian cycle (if one exists) for the class of convex-round graphs. Finally, we pose a number of open problems and conjectures concerning the structure and algorithmic properties of the two new classes and a related third class of graphs.
16266978
Ontology Reconciliation for Service-Oriented Computing
Service-oriented computing (SOC) is viewed as the computing paradigm of the near future, allowing for the dynamic interaction of services provided by distributed business partners. Being a declarative knowledge representation model, ontologies serve as a foundation for SOC. Due to the heterogeneous nature of independently designed ontologies, it is problematic for partners to understand the concepts adopted in ontologies from other sources. In order for partners to achieve seamless collaboration of services, they need to reconcile their ontologies with each other. During the alignment process and the following service interactions, compatibility is an important measurement that has been neglected in most research work. We extend a vector system to encode ontology compatibility. In addition, we present a new model - probabilistic center ontology - for better recording and maintenance of ontology alignment results. Our precise and efficient approach is verified by both theoretic proofs and experimental results