published_or_final_version / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Harmony is a major theme in Chinese culture. It is reflected in many forms, e.g. painting and garden design. However, calligraphy gives a straight forward insight into harmony in two dimensions. The main hypothesis was that the principles for building a harmonious calligraphic character could be converted from holistic to deductive and computable ones. These could then be applied to the design of harmonious screen interfaces, which would give visual pleasure. The first aim was to investigate and discover the quantifiable features of harmony in Chinese regular script calligraphy. Calligraphy has been associated in China with harmony and elegance for over 1500 years. There are features that are commonly accepted to establish harmony which can be quantified. However, the principles of Chinese calligraphy are embedded within Chinese culture. Direct translation does not convey the meaning. An extensive study was made of the literature on Chinese calligraphy and a practical exploration of characters was made. This resulted in a small number of principles which were needed to be satisfied for the character to appear harmonious. These were tested on several groups of participants. These principles were then converted into a mathematical form for Chinese regular script calligraphy, and for application to harmonious screen interface design. The mathematical forms were then tested on both Chinese regular script calligraphy and also on interface designs with groups of participants. Finally, an application for comparing harmony in Chinese calligraphic characters and interface designs was created. The “Harmony” application can be used to calculate how a Chinese calligraphic character or an interface design satisfies the principles of harmony and it can give an indication of how harmonious they are.

No description available.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1992 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / Today's complex implementations of integrated packet and circuit switched digital communications networks demand that the software used for controlling these systems be robust, fault tolerant, and capable of runtime recovery from all but the most severe of operational errors. The typical modern switched communications system includes the use of multiple circuit switches, each with potentially thousands of end-user interfaces. Further, these switches are often inter-connected to each other via high-capacity trunks. A single connection between two end-user interfaces often traverses a number of intermediate circuit switches in order to effect the end-to-end communications desired. In this complex, distributed environment, the establishment and dissolution of end-to-end user connections involve far more than simple binary connection states indicating the existence, or non-existence, of a link. More commonly, a single end-to-end connection requires multiple node links across multiple, heterogeneous interfaces. The command and control software used to establish, monitor, and dissolve these connections must be capable of dealing with errors which arise at any node along the way in a consistent and reliable manner. Most critically, the system software must be capable of maintaining an accurate, multi-level mapping of distributed resources' availability, allocation, and status. Further, the software must have the capability of "healing itself" during operational run-time when it can, and of accurately reporting the nature of inconsistencies caused by anomalous events that cannot be fixed on the fly. The Edwards Digital Switch (EDS), developed by CSTI, provides a case study of possible solutions, and potential pitfalls, that can arise in the design, development, and implementation of the controlling software in today's dynamic, distributed communications' system architectures.

The installation process for afloat systems is very stringent. This rigor is necessary to ensure the Warfighters can fully utilize the functionality provided by information technology (IT) aboard a ship, especially when underway -- removed from most technical support and assistance. However, this rigor also increases the difficulty of executing an afloat installation. The purpose of this thesis is to document the lessons learned from the installation of the Ocean Surveillance Information System (OSIS) Evolutionary Development (OED) on board the USS Blue Ridge (LCC-19). OED is an ashore multi-level secure (MLS) command and control and intelligence (C2I) computer system that is fielded at the Joint Intelligence Centers and Joint Analysis Centers. The MLS aspect of OED allows the operator to view and add value to data from multiple security domains on one workstation. In the space, weight, and power (SWAP) constrained environment of a ship, this technology is very advantageous. Since OED is an ashore system, this afloat installation presented a number of challenges and a unique perspective into the installation process. This thesis documents these challenges, how they were overcome and provides future installers recommendations to improve the planning of future afloat installations.

Approved for public release, distribution unlimited / Efforts to improve the military decision and action cycle have centered on automating the command and control process and improving interoperability among joint and coalition forces. However, information automation by itself can lead to increased operator overload when the way this information is stored and presented is not structured and consistently filtered. The majority of messaging systems store information in a document-centric free-text format that makes it difficult for command and control systems, relational databases, software agents and web portals to intelligently search the information. Consistent structure and semantic meaning is essential when integrating these capabilities. Military-grade implementations must also provide high performance. A widely accepted platform-independent technology standard for representing document-centric information is the Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML supports the structured representation of information in context through the use of metadata. By using an XML Schema generated from MIPâ s Land Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (LC2IEDM), it is feasible to compare the syntactic strength of human-readable XML documents with the semantics of LC2IEDM as used within a relational database. The insert, update, retrieve and delete performance of a native-XML database is compared against that of a relational database management system (RDBMS) implementing the same command and control data model (LC2IEDM). Additionally, compression and parsing performance advantages of using various binary XML compression schemes is investigated. Experimental measurements and analytic comparisons are made to determine whether the performance of a native-XML database is a disadvantage to the use of XML. Finally, because of the globally significant potential of these interoperability improvements, a number of look-ahead items to future work are proposed including the use of.