Science and Technology (S and T) information presents a rich resource, essential for managing research and development (R and D) programs. Management of R and D has long been a labor-intensive process, relying extensively on the accumulated knowledge of experts within the organization. Furthermore, the rapid pace of S and T growth has increased the complexity of R and D management significantly. Fortunately, the parallel growth of information and of analytical tools offers the promise of advanced decision aids to support R and D management more effectively. Information retrieval, data mining and other information-based technologies are receiving increased attention. In this thesis, a framework based on text mining techniques is proposed to discover useful intelligence implicit in large bodies of electronic text sources. This intelligence is a prime requirement for successful R and D management. This research extends the approach called Technology Opportunities Analysis (developed by the Technology Policy and Assessment Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, in conjunction with Search Technology, Inc.) to create the proposed framework. The commercialized software, called VantagePoint, is mainly used to perform basic analyses. In addition to utilizing functions in VantagePoint, this thesis also implements a novel text association rule mining algorithm for gathering related concepts among text data. Two algorithms based on text association rule mining are also implemented. The first algorithm called tree-structured networks is used to capture important aspects of both parent-child (hierarchical structure) and sibling relations (non-hierarchical structure) among related terms. The second algorithm called concept-grouping is used to construct term thesauri for data preprocessing. Finally, the framework is applied to Thai S and T publication abstracts toward the objective of improving R and D management. The results of the study can help support strategic decision-making on the direction of S and T programs in Thailand.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2009. / A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney, College of Health and Science, School of Computing and Mathematics, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliographies.

After September 11, 2001, government officials and the engineering community have devoted significant time and resources to protect the country from such attacks again. Because highway infrastructure plays such a critical role in the public’s daily life, research has been conducted to determine the resiliency of various bridge components subjected to blast loads. While more tests are needed, it is now time to transfer the research into tools to be used by the design community. The development of Anti-Terrorism Planner for Bridges (ATP-Bridge), a program intended to be used by bridge engineers and planners to investigate blast loads against bridges, is explained in this thesis. The overall project goal was to build a program that can incorporate multiple bridge components while still maintaining a simple, user-friendly interface. This goal was achieved by balancing three core areas: constraining the graphical user interface (GUI) to similar themes across the program, allowing flexibility in the creation of the numerical models, and designing the data structures using object-oriented programming concepts to connect the GUI with the numerical models. An example of a solver (prestressed girder with advanced SDOF analysis model) is also presented to illustrate a fast-running algorithm. The SDOF model incorporates the development of a moment-curvature response curve created by a layer-by-layer analysis, a non-linear static analysis accounting for both geometric non-linearity as well as material non-linearity, and a Newmark-beta-based SDOF analysis. The results of the model return the dynamic response history and the amount of damage. ATP-Bridge is the first software developed that incorporates multiple bridge components into one user-friendly engineering tool for protecting bridge structures against terrorist threats. The software is intended to serve as a synthesis of state-of-the-art knowledge, with future updates made to the program as more research becomes available. In contrast to physical testing and high-fidelity finite element simulations, ATP-Bridge uses less time-consuming, more cost effective numerical models to generate dynamic response data and damage estimates. With this tool, engineers and planners will be able to safeguard the nation’s bridge inventory and, in turn, reinforce the public’s trust. / text

We introduce a class of program editors that present a program using a rich set of transformations; we call these kinds of editors composable presentation editors. Proper use of these kinds of editors appears to lead to more expressive programs-programs whose structure are aligned with the problem they are trying to solve. By default, the composable presentation editor presents program elements textually as concrete syntax and enables typical editor commands on the program. Metadata on program elements control how the transformations are applied. Customized metadata can re-order, pictorialize, collapse, duplicate, or expand the displayed form of program elements and can additionally alter the available editor commands. We have developed a set of presentation techniques to be used by presentation designers (i.e., the programmers who design how a program is presented in the editor. These techniques relate to well-understood programming language design, editor design, and programming best-practices techniques including scoping, higher order functions, refactoring, prettyprinting, naming conventions, syntax highlighting, and text hovers. We introduce two implementations of composable presentation editors and a number of examples showing how programs can be made more expressive when presentation techniques are properly used. The first implementation is the ETMOP, an open editor, where a metaobject protocol is provided that allows language and editor designers to customize the way program elements are displayed. These customizations are called presenta- tion extensions and the corresponding presentation extension protocol acts in a way similar to the way that syntax macros extend the syntax of a language. The second implementation is Embedded CAL, a closed editor that uses these presentation techniques to embed one language (CAL) inside a host language (Java) through the use of presentation techniques, without changing the syntax or compiler of either language.

This thesis is a study on object-oriented knowledge representation. The study defines the main concepts of the object model. It also shows pragmatically the use of object-oriented methodology in the development of a concrete software system designed as the solution to a specific problem.The problem is to simulate the interaction between several animals and various other objects that exist in a room. The proposed solution is an artificial intelligence (Al) program designed according to the object-oriented model, which closely simulates objects in the problem domain. The AI program is conceived as an inference engine that maps together a given knowledge base with a database. The solution is based conceptually on the five major elements of the model, namely abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, hierarchy, and polymorphism.The study introduces a notation of class diagrams and frames to capture the essential characteristics of the system defined by analysis and design. The solution to the problem allows the application of any object-oriented programming language. Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is the language used for the implementation of the software system included in the appendix. / Department of Computer Science

There are two popular approaches when developing a software system, the first being System Analysis/System Design (SA/SD) and the second being an Object-Oriented (00) approach. In either approach a poor design inevitably produces a poor application. Thus, being able to evaluate the quality of a systems design is advantageous.The Design Metrics Research Team at Ball State University has developed metrics that measure the quality of software systems. From this research the metric D(G) (a composite of the metrics De and D) has been shown to be very effective when used to determine fault prone modules in a system. However, D(G) has been primarily applied to systems developed using the SA/SD approach. This thesis translated D(G) to an 00 setting and empirically evaluated D(G) to determine if D(G) is a good predictor of error-prone classes. The results indicate that De and Di are indeed good predictors of error-prone classes. Of the classes highlighted by De, 67% had errors, while 100% of the classes highlighted by D; had errors. / Department of Computer Science

This study provides information on the effectiveness of design metrics when used on object oriented systems and explores means of increasing metric use-fulness in regard to the problem areas identified. Evidence shows that current metrics are weak in assessing some qualities when faced with concepts central to object orientation. It describes practices in design and implementation that cause complications in calculating metrics and what effects those practices may have on various types of metrics by examining specific examples as well as discussing the theory involved. It examines assumptions which can be made in the formulation of metrics to avoid the issues caused by these practices and what effect these assumptions will have on metric results. / Department of Computer Science

The relational model has dominated the database field because of its reduced application development time and non-procedural data manipulation features. It has significant problems, however, including weak integrity constraints. This paper discusses the need for object oriented techniques to improve on these flaws. Three existing DBMS will be discussed: IRIS, ORION, and OZ. / Department of Computer Science

Change is inevitable and unending in developing large, complex systems. Changes to requirements arise not only from changes in the social context of the system, but also from improved understanding of constraints and tradeoffs as system development proceeds. How to trace software requirements is the problem addressed by this thesis. We present a solution for requirements tracing in the context of object-oriented software development. Our solution consists of a traceability model and a tool to automate the tracing. TOOR, the tool to implement the model, uses a project specification written in FOOPS, a general purpose object-oriented language with specification capabilities, to set up the environment in which a project is carried out. The project specification defines the trace units and traces as objects and relations, respectively. The evolution of objects from requirements sources to requirements to design to code, and generally to any object taking part in the process is dealt with in a uniform way in TOOR: classes are declared for each kind of object we wish to control, and relations are defined between them. TOOR uses regular expressions to provide a selective tracing mode: the actual configuration of objects and relations is considered as a text and regular expressions are used to retrieve parts of the configuration matching the pattern described by them. TOOR enhances the flexibility of regular expressions by extending the pattern matching procedure by providing different ways of specifying how an object or relation is to be matched. Other modes of tracing in TOOR are the interactive tracing through modules and the non-guided tracing through several browsing mechanisms. TOOR modules are used to structure projects by providing hierarchical scopes for objects used in a project development. The tracing mechanisms of TOOR can use the project structure to order searches or to provide boundaries for searching. Browsing objects provides additional flexibility in situations where little information of what has to be traced is possessed and hyper-media features address the need to re-interpret data usually encoded in different formats. The user-definable features of a project specification provides much of the flexibility necessary for effective use of a software tracing tool. Also, the integration of regular expression tracing with other forms of tracing such as browsing and interactive tracing makes TOOK an extremely versatile tool. The user can select the more appropriate form of tracing depending on context and can switch from one form to another as convenient.

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