Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1995. / Typescript. Bibliography: leaf 55.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1993. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-80). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Aberdeen University, 2008. / Title from web page (viewed on Mar. 23, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--New York--Columbia university. / Bibliogr. p. 125-136. Index.

Report (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1994. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-62). Also available via the Internet.

The ways in which English men and women used numbers underwent a transformation during the last half of the sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth century. This dissertation analyses the changes in how ordinary, non university-educated, people encountered, perceived and employed numbers in their lives. It argues that as a result of this greater engagement with the ‘new’ Hindu- Arabic number system there was an increased sense of number awareness within the population as a whole and in Kent in particular. At the beginning of the sixteenth century most English men and women expressed numerical concepts through a combination of performative and object-based systems, such as finger methods, tally sticks and counting tables. Those who used written systems relied primarily on number words and Roman numerals. From 1539 onwards with the publication of an ever-increasing number of vernacular arithmetic textbooks, together with rising literacy rates and increased educational opportunity, the number of people using Hindu-Arabic numerals increased. By the mid seventeenth century both Roman numerals and Hindu- Arabic were used interchangeably and by the late seventeenth century Hindu-Arabic numerals became dominant. During this same period people increasingly used numbers to interpret the world around them as trade, exploration and scientific advances required a more numerate population. Mathematical texts and teachers stressed the utility of numbers. Almanacs became ubiquitous and provide an insight into the rate at which the ‘new’ number system spread throughout society. By examining a diverse array of sources and placing a case study of Kent within the wider national framework, this dissertation considers the ways in which increased educational opportunities led to the development of numeracy within the populace. It asserts that literacy is the key driver for numeracy and hence educational opportunity is inextricably linked to the development of numeracy.

Extending Descriptions Logics (DLs) with a temporal dimension to aid in the ability to model meaningful temporal information is an active and popular research area that has gathered a lot of attention over recent years. DLs underpin the Web Ontology Language (OWL) which offers a way to describe ontologies for the semantic web. Representing temporal information in ontologies plays an important role, specifically for those ontologies where time information is inherently embedded in the information they describe. This is very common for ontologies in the bio-health domain, for example ontologies that describe the development of anatomies of biological entities, stage based development, evolution of diseases and so on. As expressive as DLs are, given that they are fragments of First Order Logic, they are static in nature and are limited in what they can express from a temporal view point, hence the surge in temporal extensions to DLs over recent years. In this thesis we investigate the use of temporal extensions of DLs as suitable representations for the temporal information required for bio-health ontologies. We first set out to find out exactly what types of temporal information need to be modelled, before going on to evaluate current temporal extensions and representations to determine their suitability. We then go on to introduce several new temporal extensions to DLs and evaluate their suitability.

Answering conjunctive queries over ontology-enriched datasets is a core reasoning task for many applications of semantic technologies. Conjunctive query answering is, however, computationally very expensive, which has led to the development of query answering procedures that sacrifice either the expressive power of ontology languages, or the completeness of query answers in order to improve scalability. This thesis describes a hybrid approach to query answering over OWL 2 ontologies that combines a datalog reasoner with a fully-fledged OWL 2 reasoner in order to provide scalable "pay-as-you-go" performance. The key feature of this hybrid approach is that it delegates the bulk of the computation to the datalog reasoner and resorts to expensive OWL 2 reasoning only as necessary to fully answer the query. Although the main goal of this thesis is to efficiently answer queries over OWL 2 ontologies, the technical results are more general and the approach is applicable to first-order knowledge representation languages that can be captured by rules allowing for existential quantification and disjunction in the head; the only assumption is the availability of a datalog reasoner and a fully-fledged reasoner for the language of interest, both of which are used as "black boxes". All techniques proposed in this thesis are implemented in the PAGOdA system, which combines the datalog reasoner RDFox and the OWL 2 reasoner HermiT. An extensive evaluation shows that PAGOdA succeeds in providing scalable pay-as-you-go query answering for a wide range of OWL 2 ontologies, datasets and queries.