Material addicional: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/6323 / Aquesta tesi doctoral té com a objectiu principal establir les bases per a un sistema de detecció semiautomàtica de relacions conceptuals a partir de textos especialitzats. Per arribar a aquest objectiu, la tesi presenta una definició de relació conceptual en el marc d'un enfocament comunicatiu de la terminologia i, a partir d'aquesta definició, l'autora detecta i aplica diversos marcadors lingüístics verbals per aïllar fragments textuals que continguin unitats de coneixement especialitzat, vehiculades mitjançant termes i relacions conceptuals. D'aquesta manera es pretén recuperar fragments de coneixement especialitzat a partir dels nusos de coneixement i de les seves relacions en textos de l'àmbit del genoma humà.Una de les aportacions principals d'aquesta tesi és l'aplicació d'una tipologia de relacions conceptuals validada empíricament a partir de textos especialitzats a la creació i alimentació d'una ontologia sobre el genoma humà. I orientat a complir l'objectiu general d'aquest treball, la detecció semiautomàtica de relacions conceptuals, l'autora proposa estratègies sintàctiques i semàntiques que permetin refinar al màxim aquests elements clau en l'organització de la informació especialitzada, combinant aquestes estratègies amb un detector i un extractor de terminologia. / The main goal of this Ph. dissertation is to establish the ground basis for a semiautomatic conceptual relations detector on the basis of specialised texts. In order to attain this goal, the Ph. dissertation includes a new definition of conceptual relations in a communicative approach to terminology. From this definition, the author detects and applies different linguistic verbal markers to isolate textual fragments containing specialised knowledge units expressed by terms and conceptual relations. The aim is to retrieve specialised knowledge fragments from knowledge nodes and the relations they establish among them in the human genome domain.One of the main contributions of this work is the application of a typology of conceptual relations empirically validated on the basis of specialised texts on the construction and updating of an ontology about the human genome domain. As for the general goal, the semiautomatic detection of conceptual relations, the author proposes syntactic and semantic strategies for the maximum refinement of the detection of these key elements in the specialised information organisation, together with the use of a term detector and extractor.Podeu consultar material addicional a http://repositori.upf.edu/handle/10230/6323

The dissertation involves an investigation into the circumstances of international competitiveness and how it is pursued by firms from different sugar producing and marketing nations. Understanding of competitiveness has primarily been pursued in terms of economic variables and market conditions. The roles of the government, the socio-cultural-political context in international business, and their effects on competitiveness have largely been ignored. This study integrates perspectives from strategic management, the resource-based view of the firm, and international business to propose a conceptual framework of international competitiveness. The work advances understanding of competitiveness in international business in two ways. First, it develops a conceptual framework that captures the socio-political element of a nation's industry and the crucial role it plays in achieving international competitiveness. Second, it combines firm, industry, strategy, and socio-political influences. Those are involved in a multi-level hierarchical process between firms, industry and the nation that effectively generates competitiveness. The dissertation employs a qualitative method of comparative analysis between Australia, Brazil and the European Union, which are the three dominant sugar producing and exporting economies in the world. A series of propositions are presented on the four identified influences on international competitiveness. How firms from different nations pursue these is highlighted. After considering the varied approaches for attaining international competitiveness, implications for further research and for theory, policy and practice are outlined.

This thesis aims at developing a better understanding of the design process and the tools required to support it. Specifically it focuses on the early or conceptual stages of the industrial design process and the role of emerging technology based artifacts in supporting this activity. The starting point for this thesis is that industrial design focuses on discovery of new knowledge and that this process of discovery is reflective in nature. Further designers make use of artifacts throughout the design process to support them in this discovery and their reflection. To reveal the role of artifacts in this process, a study of the interaction between designers and their artifacts has been undertaken. To intensify these relationships this thesis has focused on design review activity undertaken in the early stages of industrial design process. Two ethnographic case studies were conducted which allowed for teams of final year industrial design students to be observed during a conceptual design review. The first case study focused on the student designers interacting with traditional artifacts such as sketches, form studies and illustrations as part of the design review session. In the second case study, the student designers made use of low fidelity digital models which were displayed in a highly immersive virtual reality environment to support the design review. Both case studies captured a time slice of a larger design project which the students were undertaking as part of their university studies. The design project focused on the redesign of a consumer product where the students were required to innovate on an existing design based on a number of technology and market constraints. The design review session which formed the basis of the case study was part of a weekly design critique which required the students to bring to the class all of their design development progress. Students were offered an additional review session which was held in a virtual reality facility to supplement their weekly design review session which formed the basis of the second case study. The objective of the review sessions were for the designers to discuss their progress, identify where they were having difficulty, be challenged on design decision and develop a shared understanding of their direction with the class. The case study approach has allowed for an authentic in situ account of how designers make use of artifacts within the early stages of an industrial design process. It has allowed for a comparison between traditional and technology based artifacts and has revealed how they impact on the nature of discovery and reflection. Through a detailed qualitative analysis of the video data which was captured from the case studies, this thesis makes a number of substantial contributions to the current knowledge gaps on the role of artifacts and to our understanding of this phase of design activity. It substantiates conceptual design activity as a reflective process allowing for new discoveries to be made by representing our existing knowledge and understandings in artifacts which can be reflected upon and extended to create new meaning and innovation. From this grounded perspective it has enabled further understandings into the role of the artifact in supporting the design activity. Artifacts are seen as critical in supporting early stage design activity. However it is the nature of the interaction between the designers and their artifacts within the different settings which have been revealed through this research which is of significance. The affordances of the different artifacts have been shown to alter how the students situate their activity and modify their actions within a design review. page 5 of 171 Further designers are required to make use of additional resources such as gestures and rich design language to supplement their design engagement; and they are required to adapt to the environment where the review is being undertaken to ensure that the objective of the design review can be achieved. This thesis makes its primary contribution in outlining the differences between the various types of artifacts and how they can be used to positively support early stage design activity. It is recommended that both traditional and virtual artifacts have a role in supporting activity, but future approaches should consider them as complimentary and consider ways in which they can be merged. The significance of the research is three fold. Firstly, from a pedagogical perspective, within an educational or practiced based setting, it provides a framework to consider the use of emerging technology based artifacts to support early stage design activity. Secondly, from a technology development perspective the grounded observation in authentic experience of design activity, it provides the foundation to inspire and develop new interfaces to support designer interactions with artifacts. Finally, it makes a substantial contribution to the growing body of design research substantiating and revealing new understanding between designers and their artifacts to support early stage design activity.

Data are the lifeblood of an organisation, being employed by virtually all business functions within a firm. Data management, therefore, is a critical process in prolonging the life of a company and determining the success of each of an organisation’s business functions. The last decade and a half has seen data warehousing rising in priority within corporate data management as it provides an effective supporting platform for decision support tools. A cross-sectional survey conducted by this research showed that data warehousing is starting to be used within organisations for their engineering asset management, however the industry uptake is slow and has much room for development and improvement. This conclusion is also evidenced by the lack of systematic scholarly research within asset management data warehousing as compared to data warehousing for other business areas. This research is motivated by the lack of dedicated research into asset management data warehousing and attempts to provide original contributions to the area, focussing on data modelling. Integration is a fundamental characteristic of a data warehouse and facilitates the analysis of data from multiple sources. While several integration models exist for asset management, these only cover select areas of asset management. This research presents a novel conceptual data warehousing data model that integrates the numerous asset management data areas. The comprehensive ethnographic modelling methodology involved a diverse set of inputs (including data model patterns, standards, information system data models, and business process models) that described asset management data. Used as an integrated data source, the conceptual data model was verified by more than 20 experts in asset management and validated against four case studies. A large section of asset management data are stored in a relational format due to the maturity and pervasiveness of relational database management systems. Data warehousing offers the alternative approach of structuring data in a dimensional format, which suggests increased data retrieval speeds in addition to reducing analysis complexity for end users. To investigate the benefits of moving asset management data from a relational to multidimensional format, this research presents an innovative relational vs. multidimensional model evaluation procedure. To undertake an equitable comparison, the compared multidimensional are derived from an asset management relational model and as such, this research presents an original multidimensional modelling derivation methodology for asset management relational models. Multidimensional models were derived from the relational models in the asset management data exchange standard, MIMOSA OSA-EAI. The multidimensional and relational models were compared through a series of queries. It was discovered that multidimensional schemas reduced the data size and subsequently data insertion time, decreased the complexity of query conceptualisation, and improved the query execution performance across a range of query types. To facilitate the quicker uptake of these data warehouse multidimensional models within organisations, an alternate modelling methodology was investigated. This research presents an innovative approach of using a case-based reasoning methodology for data warehouse schema design. Using unique case representation and indexing techniques, the system also uses a business vocabulary repository to augment case searching and adaptation. The system was validated through a case-study where multidimensional schema design speed and accuracy was measured. It was found that the case-based reasoning system provided a marginal benefit, with a greater benefits gained when confronted with more difficult scenarios.

Free energy techniques provide the basis for an analysis of aspects of the liquid-vapour interface undertaken in this study. The main focus of this work is an extensive theoretical investigation into properties of the surface tension, including curvature dependence and supersaturation effects, using Monte Carlo computer simulation techniques.

Integration is one of the driving themes in database and applied computing research. Starting with the development of Federated Information Systems and passing over to Enterprise Application Integration, the integration of distributed systems receives a lot of attention with the development of Web services these days. Integration on an architecture independent level can be cast to the integration of autonomous object oriented systems which requires the integration of object structure and object behaviour. Past research has mainly addressed the structural aspects meaning the integration of class attributes and relations. This thesis is addressing the integration of object behaviour and proposes a structured, model-driven approach for the integration of business processes specifying software application behaviour. It consists of the identification of correspondences between business processes on different levels of abstraction and associates the correspondences with integration patterns that lead to a specific technical integration. One advantage of the approach is that correspondences and patterns are defined separately, which enhances the re-usability of patterns in different integration scenarios. Integration scenarios can be distinguished between horizontal and vertical integration, and within or across enterprise borders. Within an enterprise, horizontal integration consists of integrating systems on the same level of abstraction and vertical integration consists of integrating systems on different levels of abstractions, whereas across enterprise borders, horizontal integration consists of determining the most appropriate systems, from among a set of functionally equivalent ones, and vertical integration consists of defining an appropriate combination of systems to create a new one. So far, there exist no approach that attempts to support all integration scenarios within a framework. This thesis proposes an integration approach that is able to support all integration scenarios mentioned before. The approach is built on a meta-meta layer architecture and provides generic methods and techniques for the logical integration of object behaviour based on a domain independent framework. The thesis proposes two alternative outcomes of an integration. First one creates a new global behaviour that integrates local behaviour and can be supported by a service oriented architecture. Second alternative outcome are synchronisation points between business process, so-called inter-process dependencies, that can be supported by an event-driven architecture. The advantages and disadvantages of both are discussed in detail.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 153-168.

Thesis (M.V.A.)--Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 2005. / Title from title screen (viewed 26 May 2008). "Glass"--At the foot of t.p. Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Visual Arts to the Sydney College of the Arts. Degree awarded 2005; thesis submitted 2004. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: page 175-183.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 25-26).