The World Wide Web contains a vast amount of information. This feature makes it a very useful part of our everyday activities but the information contained within is made up of an exponentially increasing repository of semantically unstructured data. The semantic web movement involves the evolution of the existing World Wide web in order to enable computers make meaning of and understand the data they process and consequently increase their processing capabilities. Over the past decade a number of new projects implementing the semantic web technology have been developed albeit still in their infancy. These projects are based on semantic data models and one such is the Wikidata project. The Wikidata project is targeted at providing a more semantic platform for editing and sharing data throughout the Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities. This project studies how the Wikidata project facilitates such a semantic platform for the Wikimedia communities and includes the development of an application utilizing the semantic capabilities of Wikidata. The objective of the project is to develop an application capable of retrieving and presenting statistical data and also be able to make missing or invalid data on Wikidata detectable. The result is an application currently aimed at researchers and students who require a convenient tool for statistical data collection and data mining projects. Usability and performance tests of the application are also conducted with the results presented in the report. Keywords: Semantic web, World Wide Web, Semantic data model, Wikidata, data mining.

Title: Solved Problems in Optics Author: Michaela Jungová Department: Department of Physics Education Supervisor: RNDr. Marie Snětinová, Ph.D., Department of Physics Education Abstract: Twenty problems in optics were created for electronic collection of solved problems in physics in my thesis. These problems contain detailed structured solutions with solved hints and pictures as well. You can find the problems in the chapter "Geometrical optics" on the website: http://reseneulohy.cz and on the enclosed CD. One of the chapters in my thesis deals with description of the problems. The thesis also engages in thesis engages in the way how to classify the problems using different standards. A proposal of a problem classification, that has been used in during study of both elementary and high school physics textbooks and collections, is presented in the thesis. The goals of this classification were two: to get the picture of school curriculum connected to optical problems and to propose suitable structure of the chapter Optics in the electronic collection, which is in the aboved mentioned electronic collection. Keywords: solved problems, classification of physics problems, electronic collection, optics

The literature reveals enormous potential of knowledge management for law firms, yet research in knowledge management seems fragmented with extensive theoretical discussions but little empirical evidence. The aim of this study is to empirically determine the guidelines and techniques of knowledge management in law firms in Botswana in the light of the rapid changing legal environment. It identified the different categories of knowledge existing in the law firms in Botswana and considered the factors that would motivate or inhibit the adoption of knowledge management. It also identified the tools and technologies for knowledge management and agents and institutions necessary for knowledge management in law firms in the country. The study adopted the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis. Open and closed ended questionnaires and interview schedules were used to collect both qualitative and quantitative data that was analysed. The survey research design was adopted and census of all the lawyers in the country undertaken. Out of the 217 questionnaires distributed to the 115 registered firms, 140 completed questionnaires were returned, giving a return rate of 64.5%. From the study, it has emerged that law firms in Botswana are significantly affected by the changes in the legal environment. The adoption of formal knowledge management in law firms in Botswana is still however, at an initial stage. Most of the law firms do not have knowledge management policies and guidelines and there are still many challenges to the effective implementation of knowledge management. Nevertheless, it is clear that there is a growing awareness of the key role, importance and potential of knowledge management in an increasingly competitive environment as a means of making law firms more innovative and cost effective. Guidelines for knowledge management in law firms were established and several suggestions on how it can be successfully implemented made in the hope that this would not only improve the awareness and utilisation of knowledge management in the country but could also be adopted in other African countries whose legal environment is similar to that in Botswana. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Information Science / unrestricted

A poet who is a woman and a theologian writes under three pressures, or a triple bind: individuality, spirituality, and society. The desires and drives of the ego and those of spirituality often conflict, and societal expectations which gender bestows add further stress to the poet's efforts. This constant struggle destroys some poets (Plath, Sexton) and renders silent many of the rest. The following collection of poems combats the silence in four progressive sections: The first is an introductory essay which further discusses the triple bind; the second, "Between Two," illustrates spiritual relationships from despair to disillusionment; the third section, "Life in the Mirror," describes deteriorating human relationships; the final section, "Salt," presents problems resolving to a kind of negative capability. This poetry collection continues one woman's poetic struggle toward validity and acceptance.

Tongue-computer interfaces allow people with upper limb disability to control a computer with their tongue. A number of assistive devices, that make use of this technology, have been developed in the last two decades: some employ contact impedance, membrane switches, or miniature joysticks, while others use magnetic or piezoelectric sensors. This thesis proposes a new tongue-computer interface, which was designed to enable users to manipulate a computer pointer by moving the tip of their tongue over an intraoral electrode array. The system maps the contact between the tongue and the electrodes, detects the movements of the tongue, and translates it into pointer movements. Compared to similar devices, the MouthPad does not require any head gear or sensors, and does not employ heavy signal processing. The hardware is simplified by using a small number of electrodes and only one output channel, multiplexed over the electrode array. A low power footprint allows the potential miniaturization of the system, so that it could fit on palatal retainer, and allow for permanent unobtrusive usage. The performance of the device was evaluated by measuring the throughput and the accuracy as defined in ISO 9241-9 standard. Two extra measures proposed in the literature, target re-entry and movement offset, were used for the evaluation of the accuracy. The measured throughput values were situated between 78% and 88% of the throughput rates of regular computer joysticks.

The problems we study in this thesis are all related to covering arrays. Covering arrays are combinatorial designs, widely used as templates for efficient interaction-testing suites. They have connections to many areas including extremal set theory, design theory, and graph theory. We define and study several generalizations of covering arrays, and we develop a method which produces an infinite family of LYM inequalities for graph-intersecting collections. A common theme throughout is the dependence of these problems on graphs. Our main contribution is an extremal method yielding LYM inequalities for $H$-intersecting collections, for every undirected graph $H$. Briefly, an $H$-intersecting collection is a collection of packings (or partitions) of an $n$-set in which the classes of every two distinct packings in the collection intersect according to the edges of $H$. We define ``$F$-following" collections which, by definition, satisfy a LYM-like inequality that depends on the arcs of a ``follow" digraph $F$ and a permutation-counting technique. We fully characterize the correspondence between ``$F$-following" and ``$H$-intersecting" collections. This enables us to apply our inequalities to $H$-intersecting collections. For each graph $H$, the corresponding inequality inherently bounds the maximum number of columns in a covering array with alphabet graph $H$. We use this feature to derive bounds for covering arrays with the alphabet graphs $S_3$ (the star on three vertices) and $\kvloop{3}$ ($K_3$ with loops). The latter improves a known bound for classical covering arrays of strength two. We define covering arrays on column graphs and alphabet graphs which generalize covering arrays on graphs. The column graph encodes which pairs of columns must be $H$-intersecting, where $H$ is a given alphabet graph. Optimizing covering arrays on column graphs and alphabet graphs is equivalent to a graph-homomorphism problem to a suitable family of targets which generalize qualitative independence graphs. When $H$ is the two-vertex tournament, we give constructions and bounds for covering arrays on directed column graphs. FOR arrays are the broadest generalization of covering arrays that we consider. We define FOR arrays to encompass testing applications where constraints must be considered, leading to forbidden, optional, and required interactions of any strength. We model these testing problems using a hypergraph. We investigate the existence of FOR arrays, the compatibility of their required interactions, critical systems, and binary relational systems that model the problem using homomorphisms.

As an academic discipline, the earth sciences generate, use, and retain vast quantities of objects. This ‘material archive’ exists, first and foremost, as a functional scientific resource; the objects that it contains were never intended to express culture. Since the earth sciences rely heavily on claims that its objects of study remain the same as they were in nature, it follows that the specimens contained in university earth science collections are treated as objective scientific evidence. In this sense, the material that is collected, used and retained by earth scientists may appear to be devoid of culture – passive, inert and neutral.This thesis sets out to challenge these assumptions by treating university earth science objects and collections as material culture. In material culture studies, geological materials appear in a variety of different forms and contexts, however, such work has tended to focus on either their occurrence in the landscape, or their use as raw materials from which objects are made. Thus, while the earth sciences provide an abundant source of ‘material’ for material culture studies, rarely (if at all) do they seem to provide the culture. Furthermore, while the treatment of ‘natural’ objects as cultural artefacts has become increasingly popular in museology, much of this work has concentrated on the processes and practices that are enacted on these things in museums. Museology has therefore tended to consider these things in what effectively corresponds to their retirement, meaning that with few exceptions, little attention has been paid to their active use as functional scientific objects. This research explores the implications of treating university earth science objects and collections as material culture through the empirical investigation of contemporary object-related practices in UK earth science departments and university museums. As such this thesis addresses questions surrounding the relevance of existing theories and methods, in both material culture studies and museology, for exploring natural scientific objects and collections. These questions are approached through four thematic chapters concerned with the coming into being of earth science objects, their transformation into collection items, their functions, and their mobility.

This text is a written articulation of my M.F.A. Thesis show titled, The Newlywed wherein description of the work produced and my artistic process is present. This body of work is explored through a fictional character, a newlywed, who acts as an outlet for my recent experiences living in western Massachusetts. The sculptures are made up of collections of the everyday, mundane objects that surround me and that propel me to contemplate where they came from, and what their histories were. The objects then become instruments for the creation of new stories.

<p>Bar coding is an alternative to manual data collection systems, and it provides the means to collect and report information quickly and accurately. Bar coding is widely used in manufacturing environments to track work-in-process, inventory, time and attendance, documents, capital assets, and product quality. In this project, an integrated data collection system using bar code technology is designed and installed in the Automatic Data Collection System Laboratory (ADCSL), at Virginia Tech. In addition, a series of lab exercises and technology demonstrations are developed to better introduce the technology into the Industrial and Systems Engineering curricula. This can provide engineers choosing this major, the necessary background for making meaningful use of bar coding technology once they graduate.</p> / Master of Science

By allowing judgments based on a small number of exemplar documents to be applied to a larger number of unexamined documents, clustered presentation of search results represents an intuitively attractive possibility for reducing the cognitive resource demands on human users of information retrieval systems. However, clustered presentation of search results is sensible only to the extent that naturally occurring similarity relationships among documents correspond to topically coherent clusters. The Cluster Hypothesis posits just such a systematic relationship between document similarity and topical relevance. To date, experimental validation of the Cluster Hypothesis has proved problematic, with collection-specific results both supporting and failing to support this fundamental theoretical postulate. The present study consists of two computational information visualization experiments, representing a two-tiered test of the Cluster Hypothesis under adverse conditions. Both experiments rely on multidimensionally scaled representations of interdocument similarity matrices. Experiment 1 is a term-reduction condition, in which descriptive titles are extracted from Associated Press news stories drawn from the TREC information retrieval test collection. The clustering behavior of these titles is compared to the behavior of the corresponding full text via statistical analysis of the visual characteristics of a two-dimensional similarity map. Experiment 2 is a dimensionality reduction condition, in which inter-item similarity coefficients for full text documents are scaled into a single dimension and then rendered as a two-dimensional visualization; the clustering behavior of relevant documents within these unidimensionally scaled representations is examined via visual and statistical methods. Taken as a whole, results of both experiments lend strong though not unqualified support to the Cluster Hypothesis. In Experiment 1, semantically meaningful 6.6-word document surrogates systematically conform to the predictions of the Cluster Hypothesis. In Experiment 2, the majority of the unidimensionally scaled datasets exhibit a marked nonuniformity of distribution of relevant documents, further supporting the Cluster Hypothesis. Results of the two experiments are profoundly question-specific. Post hoc analyses suggest that it may be possible to predict the success of clustered searching based on the lexical characteristics of users' natural-language expression of their information need.