Thèse (M.Inf.) -- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, programme extensionné de l'Université du Québec à Montréal, 2004. / Bibliogr.: f. [109]-117. Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:47:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 HelidaSS.pdf: 334424 bytes, checksum: 422d5bbc96e55f5ae734f2475813b59f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-02-15 / Monoidal logic, ML for short, which formalized the fuzzy logics of continuous t-norms and their residua, has arisen great interest, since it has been applied to fuzzy mathematics, artificial intelligence, and other areas. It is clear that fuzzy logics basically try to represent imperfect or fuzzy information aiming to model the natural human reasoning. On the other hand, in order to deal with imprecision in the computational representation of real numbers, the use of intervals have been proposed, as it can guarantee that the results of numerical computation are in a bounded interval, controlling, in this way, the numerical errors produced by successive roundings. There are several ways to connect both areas; the most usual one is to consider interval membership degrees. The algebraic counterpart of ML is ML-algebra, an interesting structure due to the fact that by adding some properties it is possible to reach different classes of residuated lattices. We propose to apply an interval constructor to ML-algebras and some of their subclasses, to verify some properties within these algebras, in addition to the analysis of the algebraic aspects of them

In this thesis we study completeness properties of infinitary propositional logics from the perspective of abstract algebraic logic. The goal is to under- stand how the basic tool in proofs of completeness, the so called Linden- baum lemma, generalizes beyond finitary logics. To this end, we study few properties closely related to the Lindenbaum lemma (and hence to com- pleteness properties). We will see that these properties give rise to a new hierarchy of infinitary propositional logic. We also study these properties in scenarios when a given logic has some (possibly very generally defined) connectives of implication, disjunction, and negation. Among others, we will see that presence of these connectives can ensure provability of the Lin- denbaum lemma. Keywords: abstract algebraic logic, infinitary logics, Lindenbaum lemma, disjunction, implication, negation

Les contraintes arithmétiques sont largement utilisées dans les langages formels comme les expressions, les grammaires d'arbres et les chemins réguliers. Ces contraintes sont utilisées dans les modéles de contenu des types (XML Schemas) pour imposer des bornes sur le nombre d'occurrences de nœuds. Dans les langages de requêtes (XPath, XQuery), ces contraintes permettent de sélectionner les nœuds ayant un nombre limité de nœuds accessibles par une expression de chemin donnée. Les types et chemins étendus avec les contraintes de comptage constituent le prolongement naturel de leurs homologues sans comptage déjà considérés comme des constructions fondamentales dans les langages de programmation et les systèmes de type pour XML. Un des défis majeurs en programmation XML consiste à développer des techniques automatisées permettant d'assurer statiquement un typage correct et des optimisations de programmes manipulant les données XML. À cette fin, il est nécessaire de résoudre certaines tâches de raisonnement qui impliquent des constructions telles que les types et les expressions XPath avec des contraintes de comptage. Dans un futur proche, les compilateurs de programmes XML devront résoudre des problèmes de base tels que le sous-typage afin de s'assurer au moment de la compilation qu'un programme ne pourra jamais générer de documents non valides à l'exécution. Cette thèse étudie les logiques capables d'exprimer des contraintes de comptage sur les structures d'arbres. Il a été montré récemment que le mu-calcul sur les graphes, lorsqu'il est étendu à des contraintes de comptage portant exclusivement sur les nœuds successeurs immédiats est indécidable. Dans cette thèse, nous montrons que, sur les arbres finis, la logique avec contraintes de comptage est décidable en temps exponentiel. En outre, cette logique fournit des opérateurs de comptage selon des chemins plus généraux. En effet, la logique peut exprimer des contraintes numériques sur le nombre de nœuds descendants ou même ascendants. Nous présentons également des traductions linéaires d'expressions XPath et de types XML comportant des contraintes de comptage dans la logique. / Arithmetical constraints are widely used in formal languages like regular expressions, tree grammars and paths. In XML they are used to impose bounds on the number of occurrences described by content models of schema languages (XML Schema, RelaxNG). In query languages (XPath, XQuery), they allow selecting nodes that have a bounded number of nodes reachable by a given path expression. Counting types and paths are thus natural extensions of their countless counterparts already regarded as the core constructs in XML languages and type systems. One of the biggest challenges in XML is to develop automated techniques for ensuring static-type safety and optimization techniques. To this end, there is a need to solve some basic reasoning tasks that involve constructions such as counting XML schemas and XPath expressions. Every compiler of XML programs will have to routinely solve problems such as type and path type- checking, for ensuring at compile time that invalid documents can never arise as the output of XML processing code. This thesis studies efficient reasoning frameworks able to express counting constraints on tree structures. It was recently shown that the mu-calculus, when extended with counting constraints on immediate successor nodes is undecid able over graphs. Here we show that, when interpreted over finite trees, the logic with counting constraints is decidable in single exponential time. Furthermore, this logic allows more general counting operators. For example, the logic can pose numerical constraints on number of ancestors or descendants. We also present linear translations of counting XPath expressions and XML schemas into the logic.

Background: Sustainability is realized by companies to different extends as plenty of pressures operate on projects which influence the outcome. One specific influence are the actors who make sense of the pressures based on organizational and personal experiences. By the combination of institutional logics and organizational sensemaking theory, organizational influences in form of pressures and logics (forming the macro-level) and personal views based on individual sense making (micro-level) are combined to a micro-macro connection. The integration of the both theories leads to a deeper understanding on ‘sustainability integration’. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to understand how individuals handle sustainability in a project in a multinational company with has a focus in sustainability. It is of most interest how the influences, represented by the concept of institutional logics, are constructed by the sensemaking of the actors. Research question: How do employees make sense of a project with a sustainability purpose based on institutional logics? Method: The research design of this thesis is an exploratory case study with data collection by the hands of semi-structured interviews. Abductive reasoning was applied. An epistemological position of constructivism and interpretivism was taken. Conclusion: The findings of this study show that organizational pressures are not explicitly noted by each individual. A collective sensemaking is found in the fact that a sustainable project must be affordable for the customers to meet their needs. This finding however, can be traced back to the organizational level which is coined by a strong value culture.

[pt] Este trabalho aborda problemas de projeto de ontologias tratando-as como teorias e definindo um conjunto de operações que mapeiam ontologias em ontologias, incluindo suas restrições. Inicialmente, o trabalho resume o conhecimento básico necessário para definir a classe de ontologias utilizada e propõe quatro operações para manipular ontologias. Em seguida, mostra o funcionamento destas operações e como elas podem ajudar na criação de novas ontologias. O cerne do trabalho mostra a implementação destas operações em um plug-in do Protégé, detalhando sua arquitetura e incluindo casos de uso. / [en] This work addresses ontology design problems by treating ontologies as theories and by defining a set of operations that map ontologies into ontologies, including their constraints. The work first summarizes the base knowledge needed to define the class of ontologies used and proposes four operations to manipulate them. It then shows how the operations work and how they may help design new ontologies. The core of this work is describing the implementation of the operations over a Protégé plug-in, detailing the architecture and including case-use examples.

[pt] Integração de dados refere-se ao problema de combinar dados que estão armazenados em diferentes fontes, fornecendo ao usuário uma visão unificada dos dados. As consultas são então expressas em um esquema global ou esquema mediado, que deve incluir restrições de integridade que contribuam para um entendimento correto sobre o que a semântica das fontes de dados do ambiente de mediação tem em comum. Esta tese endereça o problema de modelar as restrições de um esquema mediado a partir das restrições dos esquemas importados e dos mapeamentos de esquemas. Argumenta-se que as restrições devem ser modeladas como o ínfimo das restrições dos esquemas exportados, depois de traduzidos para um vocabulário comum. Desta forma, assegura-se que os usuários do esquema mediado interpretarão os resultados das consultas corretamente. Para uma família expressiva de restrições, esta tese mostra como computar eficientemente o ínfimo de conjuntos de restrições. / [en] Data integration refers to the problem of combining data stored in different sources, providing users with a unified view of the data. Queries are then expressed in terms of a global or mediated schema, which should include integrity constraints that contribute to a correct understanding of what the semantics of the data sources have in common. This thesis addresses the problem of modeling the constraints of a mediated schema from the imported schemas constraints and mappings. It argues that the constraints should be modeled as the greatest lower bound of the constraints of the export schemas, after appropriate translation to a common vocabulary. This assures that users of the mediated schema will correctly interpret query results. For a rich family of constraints, it shows how to efficiently compute the greatest lower bound of sets of constraints.

Visando atuação flexível em redes heterogêneas, modernos sistemas multimídia podem adotar o conceito da codificação escalável, onde o fluxo de vídeo é composto por múltiplas camadas, cada qual complementando e aprimorando gradualmente as características de exibição, de forma adaptativa às capacidades de cada receptor. Atualmente, a especificação H.264/SVC representa o estado da arte da área, por sua eficiência de codificação aprimorada, porém demanda recursos computacionais extremamente elevados. Neste contexto, o presente trabalho apresenta uma arquitetura de projeto colaborativo de hardware e software, que explora as características dos diversos algoritmos internos do codificador H.264/SVC, buscando um adequado balanceamento entre as duas tecnologias (hardware e software) para a implementação prática de um codificador escalável de até 16 camadas em formato de 1920x1080 pixels. A partir de um modelo do código de referência H.264/SVC, refinado para reduzir tempos de codificação, foram definidas estratégias de particionamento de módulos e integração entre entidades de software e hardware, avaliando-se questões como dependência de dados e potencial de paralelismo dos algoritmos, assim como restrições práticas das interfaces de comunicação e acessos à memória. Em hardware foram implementados módulos de transformadas, quantização, filtro anti-blocagem e predição entre camadas, permanecendo em software funções de gerência do sistema, entropia, controle de taxa e interface com usuário. A solução completa obtida, integrando módulos em hardware, sintetizados em uma placa de desenvolvimento, com o software de referência refinado, comprova a validade da proposta, pelos significativos ganhos de desempenho registrados, mostrando-se como uma solução adequada para aplicações que exijam codificação escalável tempo real. / In order to support heterogeneous networks and distinct devices simultaneously, modern multimedia systems can adopt the scalability concept, when the video stream is composed by multiple layers, each one being responsible for gradually enhance the video exhibition quality, according to specific receiver capabilities. Currently the H.264/SVC specification can be considered the state-of-art in this area, by improving the coding efficiency, but, in the other hand, impacting in extremely high computational demands. Based on that, this work presents a hardware/software co-design architecture, which explores the characteristics of H.264/SVC internal algorithms, aiming the right balancing between both technologies (hardware and software) in order to generate a practical scalable encoder implementation, able to process up to 16 layers in 1920x1080 pixels format. Based in an H.264/SVC reference code model, which was refined in order to reduce global encoding time, the approaches for module partitioning and data integration between hardware and software were defined. The proposed methodology took into account characteristics like data dependency and inherent possibility of parallelism, as well practical restrictions like influence of communication interfaces and memory accesses. Particularly, the modules of transforms, quantization, deblocking and inter-layer prediction were implemented in hardware, while the functions of system management, entropy, rate control and user interface were kept in software. The whole solution, which was obtained integrating hardware modules, synthesized in a development board, with the refined H.264/SVC reference code, validates the proposal, by the significant performance gains registered, indicating it as an adequate solution for applications which require real-time video scalable coding.

Ontological database management systems are a powerful tool that combine traditional database techniques with ontological reasoning methods. In this setting, a classical extensional database is enriched with an ontology, or a set of logical assertions, that describe how new, intensional knowledge can be derived from the extensional data. Conjunctive queries are therefore answered against this combined knowledge base of extensional and intensional data. Many languages that represent ontologies have been introduced in the literature. In this thesis we will focus on existential rules (also called tuple-generating dependencies or Datalog^± rules), and three established languages in this area, namely guarded-based rules, sticky rules and weakly-acyclic rules. The main goal of the thesis is to enrich these languages with non-deterministic constructs (i.e. disjunctions) and investigate the complexity of the answering conjunctive queries under these extended languages. As is common in the literature, we will distinguish between combined complexity, where the database, the ontology and the query are considered as input, and data complexity, where only the database is considered as input. The latter case is relevant in practice, as usually the ontology and the query can be considered as fixed, and are usually much smaller than the database itself. After giving appropriate definitions to extend the considered languages to disjunctive existential rules, we establish a series of complexity results, completing the complexity picture for each of the above languages, and four different query languages: arbitrary conjunctive queries, bounded (hyper-)treewidth queries, acyclic queries and atomic queries. For the guarded-based languages, we show a strong 2EXPTIME lower bound for general queries that holds even for fixed ontologies, and establishes 2EXPTIME-completeness of the query answering problem in this case. For acyclic queries, the complexity can be reduced to EXPTIME, if the predicate arity is bounded, and the problem even becomes tractable for certain restricted languages, if only atomic queries are used. For ontologies represented by sticky disjunctive rules, we show that the problem becomes undecidable, even in the case of data complexity and atomic queries. Finally, for weakly-acyclic rules, we show that the complexity increases from 2EXPTIME to coN2EXPTIME in general, and from tractable to coNP in case of the data complexity, independent of which query language is used. After answering the open complexity questions, we investigate applications and relevant consequences of our results for description logics and give two generic complexity statements, respectively, for acyclic and general conjunctive query answering over description logic knowledge bases. These generic results allow for an easy determination of the complexity of this reasoning task, based on the expressivity of the considered description logic.

xvii, 191 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / For over a century, researchers from diverse intellectual disciplines have tried to explain the emergence of regional business clusters. I contribute to research on cluster emergence by applying an institutional logics framework to model how cluster emergence is influenced by such factors as supportive institutional logics, knowledge spillover, labor pooling, and technological uncertainty. This study is guided by the research question: How do institutions, specifically, varying levels of a congruous institutional logic, affect regional cluster emergence? Using the passage of the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) as a catalyst for business cluster emergence in the renewable energy sector, this study examines the emergence of wind and solar energy manufacturing clusters. I test hypotheses about the positive influences of a congruous institutional logic across U.S. metropolitan statistical areas to see if the relative prevalence of a congruous institutional logic results in more firms and greater levels of clustering. For example, a pro-environmental sentiment among human populations aligns, or in other words, is congruous, with renewable energy manufacturing. I use fixed effects estimation to test several hypotheses regarding positive direct and moderating effects of institutional alignment on cluster emergence. I find that congruous institutional logics have a positive direct influence on clustering, and as technological uncertainty increases, this positive direct influence is enhanced. I find only partial support for the moderating influence of congruous institutional logics on the positive direct effect of positive externalities on clustering. This study contributes to practice and theory by building a model and supporting hypotheses on the influence of institutional fit on regional cluster emergence. / Committee in charge: Michael Russo, Chairperson, Management; Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Member, Management; Alan Meyer, Member, Management; Glen Waddell, Outside Member, Economics