One of the factors that seems to influence an individual’s effectiveness in requirements engineering activities is his or her knowledge of the problem being solved, i.e., domain knowledge. While in-depth domain knowledge enables a requirements engineer to understand the problem easier, he or she can fall for tacit assumptions of the domain and might overlook issues that are obvious to domain experts and thus remain unmentioned. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the impact of domain knowledge on different requirements engineering activities. The main research question this thesis attempts to answer is “How does one form the most effective team, consisting of some mix of domain ignorants and domain awares, for a requirements engineering activity involving knowledge about the domain of the computer-based system whose requirements are being determined by the team?” This thesis presents two controlled experiments and an industrial case study to test a number of hypotheses. The main hypothesis states that a requirements engineering team for a computer-based system in a particular domain, consisting of a mix of requirements analysts that are ignorant of the domain and requirements analysts that are aware of the domain, is more effective at requirement idea generation than a team consisting of only requirements analysts that are aware of the domain. The results of the controlled experiments, although not conclusive, provided some support for the positive effect of the mix on effectiveness of a requirements engineering team. The results also showed a significant effect of other independent variables, especially educational background. The data of the case study corroborated the results of the controlled experiments. The main conclusion that can be drawn from the findings of this thesis is that the presence in a requirements engineering team of a domain ignorant with a computer science or software engineering background improves the effectiveness of the team.

This thesis is concerned with the validation of chess endgame strategies. It is also concerned with the synthesis of strategies that can be validated. A strategy for a given player is the specification of the move to be made by that player from any position that may occur. This move may be dependent on the previous moves of both sides. A strategy is said to be correct if following the strategy always leads to an outcome of at least the same game theoretic value as the starting position. We are not concerned with proving the correctness of programs that implement the strategies under consideration. We shall be working with knowledge-based programs which produce playing strategies, and assume that their concrete implementations (in POP2, PROLOG etc.) are correct. The synthesis approach taken attempts to use the large body of heuristic knowledge and theory, accumulated over the centuries by chessmasters, to find playing strategies. Our concern here is to produce structures for representing a chessmaster's knowledge wnich can be analysed within a game theoretic model. The validation approach taken is that a theory of the domain in the form of the game theoretic model of chess provides an objective measure of the strategy followed by a program. Our concern here is to analyse the structures created in the synthesis phase. This is an instance of a general problem, that of quantifying the performance of computing systems. In general to quantify the performance of a system we need,- A theory of the domain. - A specification of the problem to be solved. - Algorithms and/or domain-specific knowledge to be applied to solve the problem.

In contemporary software development, an emergent understanding of the problem domain and envisioned goals forms the basis of designing, testing and development activities. Lack of a common understanding of the domain can result in costly rework or client dissatisfaction. Research shows that the development of shared understanding in this context is a complex and error-prone process and there is room for improvement. Is this because practitioners are not following suggested practice from literature? Or are the actual barriers to shared understanding not being addressed by current tools and techniques? Is the development of shared domain understanding even viewed as problematic (or even important) by practitioners? These are some questions that need to be investigated in order to effectively design process improvements and tool support in this area, yet there is little information related to this. This study takes a multi-case study approach, which incorporate semi-structured interviews with representative from ten small-to-medium organisations. This study focuses on the vendor’s perspective and includes a mix of application domains. Result of the interviews is analysed to discover themes and patterns related to an analysis framework constructed from the literature review. The findings indicate that vendors perceive the process of developing shared application-domain understanding with their clients as being both problematic and important to a successful implementation. Twelve barriers have been identified from the analysis. The results also confirm that the process of sharing understanding development is generally perceived as being evolutionary and collaborative. This process is described by most interviewees comprises iterative phases of elicitation, confirmation and refinement of the understanding. A definite preference for face-to-face interaction is evident at regular times throughout development, particularly in early stages, although the importance of ad-hoc communications by phone or email, as domain knowledge needs arise, is also emphasised. Access to cooperative domain-expert throughout development is generally seen as a critical success factor. Several companies report using in-house domain-expert as client “proxies” in this regard. There is a mix of attitudes apparent regarding the direct communications of developers with client stakeholders. This ranged from insisting that developers are involved from initial elicitation and “kick-off” meetings, to “shielding” developers almost entirely from client. In terms of representations of understanding, participants relate natural-language, screen-shots, mock-ups, prototypes and product-demonstrations as the most useful artefacts for sharing and confirming understanding of the problem domain. They emphasise the importance of flexibility and client familiarity with the representations. In general, there is no clear separation between problem and solution spaces evident when the interviewees discussed representations of understanding, and the preference seems to be for concrete rather than abstract representations. In conclusion, comparisons between the findings and literature generally confirm contemporary thinking regarding domain knowledge sharing, although a number of barriers were given particular emphasis in this field study. The use of computer-based tool support is not widespread and the need to improve the domain knowledge sharing process and tool support in practice is widely acknowledged by the participants in this investigation. This study has identified some fruitful areas of research in this regard.

abstract: Bridging semantic gap is one of the fundamental problems in multimedia computing and pattern recognition. The challenge of associating low-level signal with their high-level semantic interpretation is mainly due to the fact that semantics are often conveyed implicitly in a context, relying on interactions among multiple levels of concepts or low-level data entities. Also, additional domain knowledge may often be indispensable for uncovering the underlying semantics, but in most cases such domain knowledge is not readily available from the acquired media streams. Thus, making use of various types of contextual information and leveraging corresponding domain knowledge are vital for effectively associating high-level semantics with low-level signals with higher accuracies in multimedia computing problems. In this work, novel computational methods are explored and developed for incorporating contextual information/domain knowledge in different forms for multimedia computing and pattern recognition problems. Specifically, a novel Bayesian approach with statistical-sampling-based inference is proposed for incorporating a special type of domain knowledge, spatial prior for the underlying shapes; cross-modality correlations via Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis is explored and the learnt space is then used for associating multimedia contents in different forms; model contextual information as a graph is leveraged for regulating interactions among high-level semantic concepts (e.g., category labels), low-level input signal (e.g., spatial/temporal structure). Four real-world applications, including visual-to-tactile face conversion, photo tag recommendation, wild web video classification and unconstrained consumer video summarization, are selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approaches. These applications range from classic research challenges to emerging tasks in multimedia computing. Results from experiments on large-scale real-world data with comparisons to other state-of-the-art methods and subjective evaluations with end users confirmed that the developed approaches exhibit salient advantages, suggesting that they are promising for leveraging contextual information/domain knowledge for a wide range of multimedia computing and pattern recognition problems. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Computer Science 2011

In the wake of diversifying economy through science and technology, the government of Botswana is particularly inclined to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS). IPR in its nature of advocating exclusive rights by the creator comes into direct conflict with the practice and understanding of IKS as community property, and a shared resource. To date, there is very little research work that explores policymakers’ knowledge about IPR and IKS in developing countries. Botswana, a developing country is yet to benefit from this type of research. This research investigated policymakers’ knowledge and practices of IPR on IKS in Botswana. The focus was on policymakers’ knowledge and practices, interaction with policy, and how their actions could be understood and explained. The study was conducted in four government departments, and one non-governmental organisation. Semi-structured interviews and document analysis were used to collect data. The findings of the study show that there is general lack of understanding about IPR in the public domain. Policymakers nonetheless know quite substantially about IPR and very little about IKS. This position puts indigenous knowledge on the periphery, and on the brink of being swallowed by other technologies. Moreover, the study uncovered evidence that the IPR and IKS activities are fragmented and policymakers treat each other with a great deal of suspicion and misunderstanding, hence affecting successful implementation of policy and projects particularly between two units in the study- the ministry of Communication, Science and Technology and the ministry of Trade and Industry. The study concludes by arguing that policymakers still require a great deal of assistance to really make sense of their practice. A lot of teaching and learning about policy is necessary to encourage broader participation in science policymaking in the context of a developing country like Botswana. / Dissertation (MEd (Science and Technology Education))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Curriculum Studies / unrestricted

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This thesis aims to investigate toxic remarks in three different ranks in League of Legends, Bronze, Gold, and Diamond. The purpose is to understand how toxic communication between players would change depending on rank. A framework from Neto, Alvino and Becker (2018) was adopted to define and count toxic remarks. The method relied on participant observation to gather data; three different ranks were specified for data collection. Fifteen games were played in each of the ranks; Bronze, Gold, and Diamond. Each game was recorded, transcribed and analyzed by dividing each toxic remark registered into Neto, Alvino and Becker’s predetermined categories. The study concluded that domain language is more often used by players with a higher rank, meaning that high ranked players tend to use toxicity that requires previous game knowledge to understand. On the contrary, low ranked players tend to stick to basic complaints and insults when using toxicity to remark teammates while playing. / Syftet med detta examensarbete är att undersöka förekomsten av toxiska yttranden i tre olika ranger i League of Legends: Brons, Guld och Diamant. Målet är att försöka förstå hur toxiska yttranden spelarna emellan ändras beroende på rang. För att kunna definiera och räkna toxiska yttranden användes ett ramverk som utformats av Neto, Alvino och Becker (2018). Som metod för insamlingen av data från de tre olika rangerna användes deltagarobservationer. Femton matcher spelades i var och en av rangerna Brons, Guld och Diamant. Varje match spelades in, transkriberades och analyserades och de toxiska yttrandena delades upp i Neto och Beckers olika kategorier. Utifrån studien kan slutsatsen dras att domänspråk är oftare använt av spelare i högre ranger och att domänspråk är kopplat till slang inom spel som kräver tidigare kunskap i spelet för att förstå. I motsats till detta använder spelare i lägre ranger mer basala klagomål och förolämpningar när toxiska yttranden riktas mot andra spelare.

In this work we propose a solution that would help automate the part of knowledge discovery in databases. Domain knowledge has an important role in the automation process which is necessary to include into the proposed program for data preparation. In the introduction to this work, we focus on the theoretical basis of knowledge discovery of databases with an emphasis on domain knowledge. Next, we focus on the basic principles of data pre-processing and scripting language LMCL that could be part of the design of the newly established applications for automated data preparation. Subsequently, we will deal with application design for data pre-processing, which will be verified on the data the House of Commons.

Motivated by the increasing significance of information technology (IT) in today's open system organisations, the objective of this research is to uncover the relationships between business executives and their IT counterparts, which are essential toward improving organisational performance. In the process, a structural equation modelling is utilised to analyse the responses of a sample of 141 Portuguese executives. The results of testing the nine research hypotheses tend to underscore the significance of the trust between business and IT executives. Such trust is capable of fostering an organisational culture, which is conducive to the enhancement of the organisational performance. The ability of these business and IT executives to work together cultivates a knowledge domain, which generates effective solutions and applications to organisational problems. In turn, this contributes to improving the competitive performance of the organisation.

In this thesis a new concept called domain knowledge management for informationproviding dialogue systems is introduced. Domain knowledge management includes issues related to representation and use of domain knowledge as well as access of background information sources, issues that previously have been incorporated in dialogue management. The work on domain knowledge management reported in this thesis can be divided in two parts. On a general theoretical level, knowledge sources and models used for dialogue management, including domain knowledge management, are studied and related to the capabilities they support. On a more practical level, domain knowledge management is examined in the contexts of a dialogue system framework and a specific instance of this framework, the ÖTRAF system. In this system domain knowledge management is implemented in a separate module, a Domain Knowledge Manager. The use of a specialised Domain Knowledge Manager has a number of advantages. The first is that dialogue management becomes more focused as it only has to consider dialogue phenomena, while domain-specific reasoning is handled by the Domain Knowledge Manager. Secondly, porting of a system to new domains is facilitated since domain-related issues are separated out in specialised domain knowledge sources. The third advantage with a separate module for domain knowledge management is that domain knowledge sources can be easily modified, exchanged, and reused. / <p>Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2001:27.</p>