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Schema merging is the process of incorporating data models into an integrated, consistent schema from which query solutions satisfying all incorporated models can be derived. The efficiency of such a process is reliant on the effective semantic representation of the chosen data models, as well as the mapping relationships between the elements of the source data models. Consider a scenario where, as a result of company mergers or acquisitions, a number of related, but possible disparate data marts need to be integrated into a global data warehouse. The ability to retrieve data across these disparate, but related, data marts poses an important challenge. Intuitively, forming an all-inclusive data warehouse includes the tedious tasks of identifying related fact and dimension table attributes, as well as the design of a schema merge algorithm for the integration. Additionally, the evaluation of the combined set of correct answers to queries, likely to be independently posed to such data marts, becomes difficult to achieve. Model management refers to a high-level, abstract programming language designed to efficiently manipulate schemas and mappings. Particularly, model management operations such as match, compose mappings, apply functions and merge, offer a way to handle the above-mentioned data integration problem within the domain of data warehousing. In this research, we introduce a methodology for the integration of star schema source data marts into a single consolidated data warehouse based on model management. In our methodology, we discuss the development of three (3) main streamlined steps to facilitate the generation of a global data warehouse. That is, we adopt techniques for deriving attribute correspondences, and for schema mapping discovery. Finally, we formulate and design a merge algorithm, based on multidimensional star schemas; which is primarily the core contribution of this research. Our approach focuses on delivering a polynomial time solution needed for the expected volume of data and its associated large-scale query processing. The experimental evaluation shows that an integrated schema, alongside instance data, can be derived based on the type of mappings adopted in the mapping discovery step. The adoption of Global-And-Local-As-View (GLAV) mapping models delivered a maximally-contained or exact representation of all fact and dimensional instance data tuples needed in query processing on the integrated data warehouse. Additionally, different forms of conflicts, such as semantic conflicts for related or unrelated dimension entities, and descriptive conflicts for differing attribute data types, were encountered and resolved in the developed solution. Finally, this research has highlighted some critical and inherent issues regarding functional dependencies in mapping models, integrity constraints at the source data marts, and multi-valued dimension attributes. These issues were encountered during the integration of the source data marts, as it has been the case of evaluating the queries processed on the merged data warehouse as against that on the independent data marts.

Ontologies have become an important tool for representing data in a structured manner. Merging ontologies allows for the creation of ontologies that later can be composed into larger ontologies as well as for recognizing patterns and similarities between ontologies. Ontologies are being used nowadays in many areas, including bioinformatics. In this thesis, we present a desktop version of SAMBO, a system for merging ontologies that are represented in the languages OWL and DAML+OIL. The system has been developed in the programming language JAVA with JDK (Java Development Kit) 1.4.2. The user can open a file locally or from the network and can merge ontologies using suggestions generated by the SAMBO algorithm. SAMBO provides a user-friendly graphical interface, which guides the user through the merging process.

In the robotics domain today there are many uncertainties. Sensors fail to provide complete and reliable information of the world, a world that is dynamic with objects moving in and out of a robot’s perception. One way to mitigate these uncertainties is to share and merge information between robots. However, information sharing itself brings uncertainties and questions that must be addressed. What information is useful to share? How reliable is it? How often should it be shared? How should this information be integrated with the information already present at the receiver? This thesis is intended to deal with the merging of shared information from several distributed robots; information that is mainly useful for determining the real world positions of objects. We have identified some techniques for merging shared information and tested these in various different situations in an effort to determine the most appropriate one. Our tests show that sharing information can be very beneficial when objects are occluded from the view of one or more robots. The tests also show that information sharing is useful for decreasing object position uncertainty.

As the use of renewable energy and the implementation of smart grids becomemore prevalent in Europe, there will be a need to ensure that the quality ofpower supply is not compromised during the integration of distributedgeneration to the main grid. Europe's electricity networks should be flexible,accessible, reliable and economic. In the UK, National Grid has standardisedits substation protection and control equipment commissioning andreplacement policies, yet issues affecting system long life availability remain,one reason being long outage periods during substation secondary equipmentinstallation, commissioning and maintenance. The present use of directhardwired point to point connections between the primary power system plantequipment and substation secondary system protection and control devicesdoes not allow for easy upgrading or replacement of these substationsecondary devices without an outage of the primary plant or substation. Outage and the consequent availability problems associated with secondaryequipment can be addressed by the open utility communication architecturestandard IEC 61850. A well-designed simple, highly reliable, secure, flexibleand long-life communication IEC 61850-based architecture can help mitigatethe impact of using protection and control IEDs (Intelligent Electronic Devices).Faulty IEDs can be replaced with little or no interruption to the overall operationof the substation. Interoperability is a key feature of the adoption of IEC 61850in substations. IEC 61850-compliant protection and control devices cancommunicate with one another, even if they made from different manufacturers. This thesis has proposed a simple, long life IEC 61850 based communicationarchitecture which is expected to be flexible and robust enough to cope withboth growth and outages. Reliability analyses have been carried out on varioushypothetical applications of the proposed process bus architecture to NationalGrid substation bays. A detailed description of how to determine the optimalprocess bus architecture using the life cycle cost evaluation technique has beenprovided. The design and implementation of a test bed used for evaluating theperformance characteristics of merging units has been presented. The resultsof the tests have been fed back to National Grid and the manufacturers, whomay then use the data to assist with the drafting of a Merging Unit Test BedSpecification, and also to help the manufacturers to make refinements to themerging units in order to make interoperability more readily achievable.

Schema merging is the process of incorporating data models into an integrated, consistent schema from which query solutions satisfying all incorporated models can be derived. The efficiency of such a process is reliant on the effective semantic representation of the chosen data models, as well as the mapping relationships between the elements of the source data models. Consider a scenario where, as a result of company mergers or acquisitions, a number of related, but possible disparate data marts need to be integrated into a global data warehouse. The ability to retrieve data across these disparate, but related, data marts poses an important challenge. Intuitively, forming an all-inclusive data warehouse includes the tedious tasks of identifying related fact and dimension table attributes, as well as the design of a schema merge algorithm for the integration. Additionally, the evaluation of the combined set of correct answers to queries, likely to be independently posed to such data marts, becomes difficult to achieve. Model management refers to a high-level, abstract programming language designed to efficiently manipulate schemas and mappings. Particularly, model management operations such as match, compose mappings, apply functions and merge, offer a way to handle the above-mentioned data integration problem within the domain of data warehousing. In this research, we introduce a methodology for the integration of star schema source data marts into a single consolidated data warehouse based on model management. In our methodology, we discuss the development of three (3) main streamlined steps to facilitate the generation of a global data warehouse. That is, we adopt techniques for deriving attribute correspondences, and for schema mapping discovery. Finally, we formulate and design a merge algorithm, based on multidimensional star schemas; which is primarily the core contribution of this research. Our approach focuses on delivering a polynomial time solution needed for the expected volume of data and its associated large-scale query processing. The experimental evaluation shows that an integrated schema, alongside instance data, can be derived based on the type of mappings adopted in the mapping discovery step. The adoption of Global-And-Local-As-View (GLAV) mapping models delivered a maximally-contained or exact representation of all fact and dimensional instance data tuples needed in query processing on the integrated data warehouse. Additionally, different forms of conflicts, such as semantic conflicts for related or unrelated dimension entities, and descriptive conflicts for differing attribute data types, were encountered and resolved in the developed solution. Finally, this research has highlighted some critical and inherent issues regarding functional dependencies in mapping models, integrity constraints at the source data marts, and multi-valued dimension attributes. These issues were encountered during the integration of the source data marts, as it has been the case of evaluating the queries processed on the merged data warehouse as against that on the independent data marts.

A reutilização de conhecimento é uma tarefa chave para qualquer sistema computacional. Entretanto, o reúso indiscriminado desse conhecimento pode gerar resultados conflitantes com o objetivo de uso do conhecimento, levando sistemas a se comportarem de maneira imprevisível. Neste trabalho estudamos as consequências do reúso de conhecimento em ontologias baseadas em lógicas de descrição. Focamos principalmente nos problemas que podem ser causados pela fusão de ontologias. Investigamos e comparamos a capacidade das ferramentas de desenvolvimento de ontologias atuais de lidarem com esses problemas e como a teoria se desenvolveu para resolver os mesmos problemas. Realizamos a construção de um arcabouço lógico e de software, organizado na forma de um processo, que tem como objetivo auxiliar o projetista de ontologias a resolver conflitos advindos da fusão. O processo agrupa tarefas descritas normalmente na literatura em separado. Acreditamos que a união dessas abordagens leva a uma melhor solução de conflitos. Durante o desenvolvimento deste trabalho, concentramos nossos esforços principalmente no desenvolvimento de algoritmos para a construção de sub-ontologias maximais, onde os conflitos não ocorram, bem como a ordenação desses conjuntos segundo critérios comuns discutidos na literatura. Tais estratégias foram implementadas em software e testadas utilizando dados gerados automaticamente e dados reais. / Knowledge reuse is a key task during any system development. Nevertheless, careless knowledge reuse may generate conflicting outcomes regarding the system goal, leading such systems to unpredictable behaviour. With that in mind, during this research we studied the consequences of knowledge reuse in ontologies based on description logics. We focused mainly on conflicts arising from ontology merging. We investigated and compared the features developed for this purpose on ontology development tools and how the theory field proposed to deal with the same issues. We developed both a logical and a software framework grouped into a process that aims to help the ontology designer solve conflicts arising from ontology merging. The process groups common tasks that are normally described separately. We believe that the unification of these approaches should result in a better solution for the merging conflicts. We concentrated our efforts during this work on building algorithms for building maximal sub-ontologies where such conflicts are non-existent as well as means for ordering such sets according to a few relevance criteria commonly described at the literature. Such algorithms were implemented and tested against automatically generated and real data.

Peg solitaire is a game in which pegs are placed in every hole but one and the player jumps over pegs along rows or columns to remove them. Usually, the goal of the player is to leave only one peg. In a 2011 paper, this game is generalized to graphs. In this thesis, we consider a variation of peg solitaire on graphs in which pegs can be removed either by jumping them or merging them together. To motivate this, we survey some of the previous papers in the literature. We then determine the solvability of several classes of graphs including stars and double stars, caterpillars, trees of small diameter, particularly four and five, and articulated caterpillars. We conclude this thesis with several open problems related to this study.

Over the past five decades, Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) have been an active research field. Maps of high accuracy are required for AMRs to operate successfully. In addition to this, AMRs needs to localise themselves reliably relative to the map. Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) address the problem of both map building and robot localisation. When exploring large areas, Multi-Robot SLAM (MRSLAM) has the potential to be far more efficient and robust, while sharing the computational burden across robots. However, MRSLAM encounters issues such as difficulty in map fusion of multi-resolution maps, and unknown relative positions of the robots. This thesis describes a distributed multi-resolution map merging algorithm for MRSLAM. HectorSLAM, which is one of many single robot SLAM implementations, has demonstrated exceptional results and was selected as the basis for the MRSLAM implementation in this project. We consider the environment to be three-dimensional with the maps being constrained to a two-dimensional plane. Each robot is equipped with a laser range sensor for perception and has no information regarding the relative positioning of the other robots. The experiments were conducted both in simulation and a real-world environment. Up-to three robots were placed in the same environment with Hector-SLAM running, the local maps and localisation were then sent to a central node, which attempted to find map overlaps and merge the resulting maps. When evaluating the success of the map merging algorithm, the quality of the map from each robot was interrogated. Experiments conducted on up to three AMRs show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in an indoor environment.

Copenhagen in the turn of the last century; light from the outside world seeks its way along the floor into the interior painted by Vilhelm Hammershoi. Why do I want to stay here? The surrounding space of the room in focus affects our perception of it; in what way are they connected and which sources of light might exist behind? My method has been to phenomenologically explore a set of artworks representing rooms that, to me, convey a sense of desirable place to stay and live in. My intention with these investigations was to build a dwelling space with shared functions; a collective living. I tried to recreate my interpretations from the artworks by building rooms with similar qualities, hoping this project would make more people choose a collective way of living rather than an individual one.