Description logics are a family of logics that provide formalisms for representing and reasoning about knowledge, based on describing concepts, in a structured and formally well-understood way. They provide the logical foundation for the web ontology language (OWL), which increased awareness of them recently. The most popular techniques for decision procedures for description logics are tableau reasoning methods, which have a long tradition and are well established in automated reasoning. This thesis investigates the possibility of finding a general and optimised blocking mechanism for description logics with the finite model property. It suggests that, while the high branching factor for unrestricted blocking reduces its performance, suitable control of the application of the blocking rule can make the performance acceptable while preserving termination. This claim is supported by experiments that compare the performance of two sample controlled versions of unrestricted blocking. In order to show the generality and power of controlled versions of unrestricted blocking, it is shown how some of the mainstream and most successful standard blocking mechanisms can be approximated as restricted forms of unrestricted blocking. These approximations have the advantage of always being sound compared to their standard versions, which are known to be sound only for some logics. Here, a variation of unrestricted blocking which can ensure strong termination is also introduced. This is done through introducing a new rule that uses the inequality expressions introduced by the blocking rule. The weak termination property of unrestricted blocking is one of its weak points which by this variant of blocking can be addressed. The work presented in this thesis should be of value to people who are working on generalising different aspects of reasoning methods. As blocking plays a critical role in termination of tableau provers, exploration of different variations of unrestricted blocking introduced here may be also of interest for the artificial intelligence researcher.

This is the history of the peasant community of Cannock Chase (Staffs. ) between 1546, when Sir William Paget was granted the Chase, and 1597 when his grandson recovered the lands. It shows that whilst the varying fortunes of the Paget family were closely reflected in the history of the area, most noticeably during the years of attainder when the Crown's lessee destroyed the oak forest, their influence was balanced by the actions and aspirations of many other individuals and groups. The peasant land market is described and the significance of the high incidence of sub-tenanting is considered; evidence on the real cost of copyhold land is presented. The importance of the Chase in the peasant economy, particularly as a place of common pasture for a large communal flock, of which two unique censuses survive, is discussed. The influence and significance of the manor court in both its civil and its criminal jurisdictions is considered, and the peasants' response to a number of social and economic problems is revealed through a detailed study of the court's records. A series of enclosure riots, and other disturbances on the Chase are recounted. Finally, an attempt is made to describe the peasants' attitudes to the Church and to the harsh realities of birth and death.

The Black Country was, and remains, an area characterised by insular and conservative social attitudes. These charactersistics were already strongly evident by the 1860s and thereafter were intensified by the collapse of the area's prosperity consequent on the rapid decline of its two basic industries, coal mining and iron manufacture, and the transformation of its traditional metal using trades by the widespread application of machine methods. The divisive consequences of industrial decline, depressed living standards and social stagnation for working class organisation were compounded by the extreme local particularism of its sub-regions, deriving in the main from an intense localisation of industry. Within this context the progress of the working class movement in the area was uncertain and slow. The first large group of workers to organise were the ironworkers: in the spring of 1863. At this time the impetus to organisation given by a sharp upturn of trade in a strongly cyclical industry proved strong enough to overcome the obstacles inherent in the structure of the industry, and the Associated Ironworkers of Great Britain was formed. The union survived for only five years, but the conflicts which arose with the rival association of the northern ironworkers, the National Association of Ironworkers, during this short time left a legacy of suspicion and hostility between the two groups of ironworkers which long outlasted the two unions. the National Association of Ironworkers narrowly survived the depression of 1867-8 which brought the collapse of the Associated Ironworkers and was re-formed as the National Amalgamated Association of Ironworkers. When the first onset of the great coal and iron boom in 1869-70 brought no recovery of unionism in the Black Country the National Amalgamated Association took the initiative in organising the area and in 1872 its status as the national association for ironworkers was recognised by the Black Country men. Despite the spectacular success of the National Amalgamated Association in the Black Country during the early 1870s the tensions between the south Staffordshire ironworkers and those in the north of England persisted and were again clearly revealed when the dramatic collapse of the iron and coal boom effectively destroyed union organisation in the Black Country. The conciliation movement which had accompanied the rise of the National Amalgamated Association in the Black Country survived the collapse of unionism. The ad hoc South Staffordshire Iron Trade Board which had been established in 1872 broke up in 1875 but was quickly reformed and placed on a firmer institutional basis as the South Staffordshire Mill and Forge Wages Board. Over the next decade leadership of the local ironworkers was exercised by this board, and with its influence in favour of conciliation being strongly reinforced by the continuing shrinkage of the south Staffordshire iron trade the adjustment to decline was made without undue difficulty. The success of the wages board largely obscured the weakness of organisation on the men's side, but intensified pressure on wages consequent on a further marked down turn in trade in the mid 1880s brought into . sharp, focus the importance of complementing conciliation machinery with effective union organisation and the Black Country ironworkers took a leading part in re-forming the National Amalgamated Association of Ironworkers as the Associated Iron and Steel Workers of Great Britain during 1887. The return of union organisation to the south Staffordshire iron trade in turn prompted calls for re-organisation of the wages board and in the following year this was successfully carried through, the change being marked by re-naming the board the Midland Iron and Steel Wages Board. The question of the relationship between the union and the men's representatives on the wages board was resolved at an early stage, and over the next two decades union and board combined to preserve as much as possible of the declining south Staffordshire trade. During this time the position of the Associated Iron and Steel Workers as the strongest union in the iron and steel trade was increasingly challenged by the rise of the British Steel Smelters Association, committed to replacing the subcontract system by direct labour. This development had particularly important implications for the south Staffordshire iron industry, which was organised entirely on a sub-contract basis and while there was no direct challenge to the Associated Iron and Steel Workers in the Black Country the possible consequences of an inter-union clash for the fragile prosperity of the area's industry were dramatically demonstrated at"Hawarden Bridge in 1909- 11. Thereafter such resistance as remained among Black Country ironworkers to the idea of rationalising the industry's fragmented union structure crumbled rapidly and they offered no resistance to the process of union consolidation which culminated in the formation of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation in 1917. The formation of district associations by Black Country miners followed directly from the establishment and initial success of the Associated Ironworkers of Great Britain, and the area was strongly represented at the Leeds conference of November 1863 at which the Miners' National Association was formed. When the National Association failed to support them during a long strike in 1864 the Black Country men rebelled against Alexander Macdonald's leadership and took a leading part in forming the breakaway, P ractical Miners' Association. This organisation collapsed within two years, but doubts about the value of alliances with miners of other areas persisted and were an important factor in shaping the attitudes of Black Country miners for the next half century. These doubts were temporarily overcome during the great boom of the early 1870s. The revival of organisation in the north-east sector of the coalfield was led by the Amalgamated Association of Miners, formed in 1869, and during 1873 the associations of the south-west sector reaffiliated to the National Association. With the collapse of union organisation at the end of the boom doubts revived. Only two Black Country associations affiliated to the ' Miners' National Union, formed in 1875 from what remained of the National and the Amalgamated, and by 1878 both had seceded. By this time a second important characteristic of Black Country miners' organisations, namely marked differences of "temper" between the associations in the northeast and south-west sectors of the coalfield, was becoming increasingly evident. This difference had first become apparent during the great boom when the associations of the south-west sector had acted as pace-setters in the drive for improved wages and shorter hours, but had been largely obscured at that time by the dramatic success of unionism and the wages movement. The collapse of prosperity in 1874 was followed by a long strike as the miners resisted the owners* attempt to impose a wage reduction, and when this ended with the establishment of a sliding scale of wages the difference in temper between the miners! associations of the southwest and north-east sectors were clearly revealed in attitudes to the scale. The difference intensified through the 1880s. Even the necessity of making common cause against the owners during the long strike of 1884 failed to bring any lasting reconciliation, and by 1890 the rise of a powerful national organisation, the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, and changes in the structure of local unionism had produced a situation where Black Country miners were divided into two hostile camps. The miners in the central districts of the coalfield accepted the authority of the South Staffordshire and East Worcestershire Coal Trade, Wages Board while two militant enclaves to north and south were affiliated to the Miners' Federation of Great Britain. / Hostility between the two camps made the 1890s a particularly difficult decade for mining trade unionism in the Black Country, but the growing influence of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain progressively undermined the authority of the wages board until in 1899 the miners of the central districts affiliated and the wages board was reconstituted as a board of conciliation. Resolution of the local position in relation to the Miners' Federation of Great Britain did not, however, eradicate the long standing difference of temper between rival local associations. These persisted to 1914 and beyond and were clearly revealed in differing densities ofiunion membership, differing attitudes to the question of employers' liability and in the different levels at which demands were pitched during the strike for the individual district minimum wage in 1912. The craftsmen of the Black Country were slower to organise than the ironworkers and the miners. The flintglass makers and flint-glass cutters had established strong unions during the 1840s and 1850s, but in the metal using trades no lasting association of workers was formed until 1870 when the nut and bolt workers established a union. This achieved some success during the 1870s, but thereafter its position was progressively undermined as technological change eroded the craft basis of the nut and bolt industry.

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.

The Diploma Thesis is based on the Analysis of the real estete market of flats in Brno – mesto focusing on Brno-stred and Brno – Bystrc. Description and characteristics of selected places in Brno – mesto, the analysis of real estate market with flats for selected places, the description of factors affecting the price of flats, the explanation of pricing definitions, the description of the valuation methods and the history of valuation.

The standard approach to modelling mechanics of continuum based on bal- ances of mass, momentum, angular momentum and energy is a very powerful tool. However, there is no connection between that and the Hamiltonian mechanics, that superbly describes kinematics of isolated particles. Thus, the two topics are rather isolated. Nevertheless, there is another approach to continuum mechan- ics - a one, whose reversible part is based on Hamiltonian mechanics, while the irreversible is generated by a dissipation potential. This framework, called GENERIC, is thus an interesting bridge between con- tinuous and discrete systems. In this thesis, we present the GENERIC framework applied to a continuous body, derive the governing equations and compare them to the standard theory. Both analytical and numerical solutions to a decent range of model examples are presented and analysed.

I takt med att organisationer växer ökar behovet av chefer och därmed mellanchefer. Mellanchefsrollen har kommit att bli en viktig roll inom organisationer och innehar en unik position mellan överordnade och underordnade. Samtidigt kan rollen vara problematisk och det är svårt att enas om en förklaring om vad mellanchefen gör. Studien ämnar undersöka hur rollen som mellanchef uppfattas av olika aktörer inom en organisation. Vidare kompletterar studien tidigare forskning och bidrar med ökad förståelse för mellanchefens situation. Syftet med studien är att problematisera mellanchefsrollen och bidra med olika aktörers perspektiv för att belysa detta. Studien fokuserar på privat sektor då mycket av tidigare forskning om mellanchefsrollen främst undersökt offentlig sektor. Materialet analyseras med kvalitativ innehållsanalys och utgår från tio semistrukturerade intervjuer med mellanchefer och deras närmaste överordnade på ett stort svenskt revisions- och rådgivningsföretag. Mellanchefsrollen undersöks med nyinstitutionell teori och ny-normativ styrning för att förklara vad som motiverar mellanchefen och eventuella skillnader i uppfattning av rollen. Studien visar att uppfattningen av mellanchefsrollen skiljer sig åt mellan mellanchef och respektive överordnad, främst kopplat till fördelning av operativt och strategiskt arbete. Det finns samtidigt olika saker som motiverar mellanchefen i rollen: karriärutveckling, trivsel på företaget och en utvecklande ledarroll. Vidare visar studien att organisationens kontroll och styrning kan förklara varför aktörer inom samma organisation har skilda uppfattningar av mellanchefsrollen och varför mellanchefen motiveras i rollen. / Growing organizations require more managers, including middle managers. The middle manager has become an important role in organizations with a unique position between superiors and subordinates. However, the role can be problematic and there is no universal understanding of what the middle manager actually does. The study aims to examine the understanding of middle managers from different perspectives in the organization. Furthermore, the study is a complement to previous research and increases the understanding of the middle manager role. The purpose of the study is to problematize the middle manager role by comparing different perspectives in the organization. The study focuses on the private sector since most of previous research studies the public sector. Five middle managers and five superiors are interviewed and qualitative content analysis is used to analyze the material. The theoretical perspectives used to explain different aspects of motivation and understandings of the role are neo-institutional theory and neo-normative control. The result of the study indicates no universal understanding of the role between middle managers and their superior, primarily concerning the division between operational and strategic work. Also, various factors motivate middle managers in the role. Moreover, the study shows that organizational control can explain why actors in one organization have different understandings of the role, and why middle managers find motivation.

Visualization is an important tool for presenting data to humans in an easy-to-understand manner. With new radar technology in development that can gather 3D atmosphere data, it opens up new possibilities for using 3D visualization tools to visualize the data, e.g, OpenSpace. OpenSpace is an open-source tool for visualization of the cosmos and universe. An evaluation of different rendering methods inside OpenSpace is evaluated to answer which method is most suitable for visualizing atmospheric 3D data. The data is in the format of HDF5 files and contains a list of beams with samples scattered along the beams, an algorithm is implemented to transform the beam data into a 3D volume which is used inside OpenSpace to be rendered. Tests are implemented to gather information on which parameter in the algorithm affects CPU execution time the most. The tests consist of executing the algorithm 100 times with different combinations of parameters to see which parameter has the largest effect on execution time, and a complexity analysis is calculated to evaluate the complexity of the algorithm. The results of the tests shows that the height of the volume affects execution performance the most on larger sizes. On small sizes, the difference between the different dimensions are insignificant. With the combination of height and smoothing, it slowed the execution time by a larger margin compared to width and smoothing or depth and smoothing. By implementing Volumetric ray casting and Point clouds as rendering methods, the results showed that both can visualize the data in real-time. Volumetric ray casting rendered with a clearer result in comparison to Point clouds, thus, Volumetric ray-casting is the preferred method to use when rendering atmospheric 3D volumes that is able to meet certain criteria.

Computational and modelling skills are vital to most fields of biological research, yet traditional biology majors have no or little opportunity to develop these skills during their undergraduate education. We describe an approach, which can address this issue by a synergy of online resources called MathBench modules and Stock and Flow modelling. Using a step-by-step method starting with a MathBench ‘bootcamp’, we were able to achieve a significant gain in quantitative skills of students with no previous experience with model building. At the end of the course, the students were able to construct and analyse complex models and gained confidence in mathematical skills.

Knowledge representation learning (KRL) has been a long-standing and challenging topic in artificial intelligence. Recent years have witnessed the rapidly growing research interest and industrial applications of KRL. However, two important aspects of KRL remains unsatisfactory in the academia and industries, i.e., the quality and the generalization capabilities of the learned representations. This thesis presents a set of methods target at learning high quality distributed knowledge representations and further empowering the learned representations for more general reasoning tasks over knowledge bases. On the one hand, we identify the false negative issue and the data sparsity issue in the knowledge graph completion (KGC) task that can limit the quality of the learned representations. Correspondingly, we design a ranking-based positive-unlabeled learning method along with an adversarial data augmentation strategy for KGC. Then we unify them seamlessly to improve the quality of the learned representations. On the other hand, although recent works expand the supported neural reasoning tasks remarkably by answering multi-hop logical queries, the generalization capabilities are still limited to inductive reasoning tasks that can only provide entity-level answers. In fact, abductive reasoning that provides concept-level answers to queries is also in great need by online users and a wide range of downstream tasks. Therefore, we design a joint abductive and inductive knowledge representation learning and reasoning system by incorporating, representing, and operating on concepts. Extensive experimental results along with case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in improving the quality and generalization capabilities of the learned distributed knowledge representations.