Browsing marked-up documents by traversing hyperlinks has become probably the most important means by which documents are accessed, both via the World Wide Web (WWW) and organisational Intranets. However, there is a pressing demand for document management and retrieval systems to deal appropriately with the massive number of documents available. There are two classes of solution: general search engines, whether for the WWW or an Intranet, which make little use of specific domain knowledge or hand-crafted specialised systems which are costly to build and maintain. The aim of this thesis was to develop a document management and retrieval system suitable for small communities as well as individuals in specialised domains on the Web. The aim was to allow users to easily create and maintain their own organisation of documents while ensuring continual improvement in the retrieval performance of the system as it evolves. The system developed is based on the free annotation of documents by users and is browsed using the concept lattice of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). A number of annotation support tools were developed to aid the annotation process so that a suitable system evolved. Experiments were conducted in using the system to assist in finding staff and student home pages at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales. Results indicated that the annotation tools provided a good level of assistance so that documents were easily organised and a lattice-based browsing structure that evolves in an ad hoc fashion provided good efficiency in retrieval performance. An interesting result suggested that although an established external taxonomy can be useful in proposing annotation terms, users appear to be very selective in their use of terms proposed. Results also supported the hypothesis that the concept lattice of FCA helped take users beyond a narrow search to find other useful documents. In general, lattice-based browsing was considered as a more helpful method than Boolean queries or hierarchical browsing for searching a specialised domain. We conclude that the concept lattice of Formal Concept Analysis, supported by annotation techniques is a useful way of supporting the flexible open management of documents required by individuals, small communities and in specialised domains. It seems likely that this approach can be readily integrated with other developments such as further improvements in search engines and the use of semantically marked-up documents, and provide a unique advantage in supporting autonomous management of documents by individuals and groups - in a way that is closely aligned with the autonomy of the WWW.

Serializability is unnecessarily strict for real-time systems because most transactions in such systems occur periodically and changes among data values over a few consecutive periods are often insignificant. Hence, data values produced within a short interval can be treated as if they are "similar" and interchangeable. This notion of similarity allows higher concurrency than serializability, and the increased concurrency may help more transactions to meet their deadlines. The similarity stack protocol (SSP) proposed in [25, 26] utilizes the concept of similarity. The rules of SSP are constructed based on prior knowledge of worst-case execution time (WCET) and data requirements of transactions. As a result, SSP rules need to be re-constructed each time a real-time application is changed. Moreover, if WCET and data require merits of transactions are over-estimated, the benefits provided by similarity can be quickly overshadowed, causing feasible schedules to be rejected. The advantages of similarity and the drawbacks of SSP motivate us to design other similarity-based protocols that can better utilize similarity without relying on any prior information. Since optimistic approaches usually do not require prior information of transactions, we explore the ideas of integrating optimistic approaches with similarity in this thesis. We develop three different protocols based on either the forward-validation or backward-validation mechanisms. We then compare implementation overheads, number of transaction restarts, length of transaction blocking time, and predictabilities of these protocols. One important characteristic of our design is that, when similarity is not applicable, our protocols can still accept serializable histories. We also study how to extend our protocols to handle aperiodic transactions and data freshness in this thesis. Finally, a set of simulation experiments is conducted to compare the deadline miss rates between SSP and one of our protocol. / Graduation date: 1999

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 2006. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 231-251).

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / UMI no. 30-30945. Keywords: schema restructuring; schema changes; meta-data discovery; data mining; data integration. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 256-274).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 208-215). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Revision of Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford, 1979. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [313]-315) and index.

Thesis (M.S. in Operations Research)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): David H. Olwell. Includes bibliographical references (p. 115). Also available online.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-65). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.