Managing Change: An Ontology Version Control System
In this paper we present the basic requirements and initial design of a system which manages and facilitates changes to an OWL ontology in a multi-editor environment. This system uses a centralized client-server architecture in which the server maintains the current state and full history of all managed ontologies. Clients can access the current ontology version, all historical revisions, and differences between arbitrary revisions, as well as metadata associated with revisions. This system will be used by many other ontology based services, such as incremental reasoning, collaborative ontology development, advanced ontology search, and ontology module extraction. Taken holistically, this network of services will provide a rich environment for the development and management of ontology based information systems. 1 Motivation and Requirements We need for a system that manages access to a changing ontology. This requirement is experienced by a variety applications with different stakeholders. An illustrative use case is presented below. A large distributed organization requires integration and alignment of many heterogeneous data sources and information artifacts. They facilitate such integration by employing one or more expressive OWL ontologies that exist in defined relations to data sources, information artifacts, and an enterprise conceptual model. These ontologies, as a critical infrastructure components, have stakeholders throughout the organization and outside its boundaries. Further, they are developed and maintained concurrently by many parties. Individual stakeholders participate in the ontology engineering process in different ways. Some are primarily consumers, but may make detailed edits to areas of the ontologies critical to them. Others are charged with maintaining high-level ontology coherence and use an integrated ontology development environment, such as Protege-OWL, to collaborate with similar editors in realtime, leveraging tools to maintain a dynamic view of the ontology. All stakeholders rely on the ontologies being available and consistent across the organization. This use case illustrates a set of requirements: Client Performance The network is a potential bottleneck of any distributed or client-server system, but the critical work of ontology development is

title: Opening, Closing Worlds - On Integrity Constraints
abstract: In many data-centric applications it is desirable to use OWL as an expressive schema language where one expresses constraints that need to be satisfied by the (instance) data. However, some features of OWL’s semantics, specifically the Open World Assumption (OWL) and not having a Unique Name Assumption (UNA), make it hard to use OWL for this task. What would trigger a constraint violation in a closed world system like a relational database leads to new inferences in OWL. In this paper, we explore how OWL can be extended to accommodate integrity constraints and discuss several alternatives for the syntax and semantics of such an extension. We primarily focus on applications in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) domain but we are also gathering use cases and requirements from many other application areas to assess which of these alternatives provides the best solution.

title: Mental and Emotional Issues in VDT Work

title: Aristotle: a system for development of program analysis based tools
abstract: Aristotle provides program analysis information, and supports the development of software engineering tools. Aristotle's front end consists of parsers that gather control flow, local dataflow and symbol table information for procedural language programs. We implemented a parser for C by incorporating analysis routines into the GNU C parser; a C++ parser is being implemented using similar techniques. Aristotle tools use the data provided by the parsers to perform a variety of tasks, such as dataflow and control dependence analysis, dataflow testing, graph construction and graph viewing. Most of Aristotle's components function on single procedures and entire programs. Parsers and tools use database handler routines to store information in, and retrieve it from, a central database. A user interface provides interactive menu-driven access to tools, and users can view results textually or graphically. Many tools can also be invoked directly from applications programs, which facilitates the development of new tools. To assist with system development and maintenance, we are also creating support tools for managing bug and test suite databases.

title: The CORC experience: survey of founding libraries. Part I
abstract: This survey, conducted in late 1999, found that CORC founding libraries shared a strong interest in controlling Internet resources and finding ways to catalog such resources quickly. Many cataloged in MARC. Although only a small number of them experimented with Dublin Core, many of them wanted to explore its potential for organizing Internet resources. Other metadata schemes were also used by some libraries. Overall, the founding libraries considered their CORC experience positive, but had several concerns. Their experience suggests that more work is needed to make fast, automated cataloging a reality. Since the findings of this study reflect experience with CORC at the developmental stage, the researchers proposed that CORC usage be monitored to identify trends in organizing Internet resources. A survey of CORC subscribers could be conducted to understand usage patterns and guide CORC’s development and improvement.

title: Engineering with logic: HOL specification and symbolic-evaluation testing for TCP implementations
abstract: The TCP/IP protocols and Sockets API underlie much of modern computation, but their semantics have historically been very complex and ill-defined. The real standard is the de facto one of the common implementations, including, for example, the 15,000--20,000 lines of C in the BSD implementation. Dealing rigorously with the behaviour of such bodies of code is challenging.We have recently developed a post-hoc specification of TCP, UDP, and Sockets that is rigorous, detailed, readable, has broad coverage, and is remarkably accurate. In this paper we describe the novel techniques that were required.Working within a general-purpose proof assistant (HOL), we developed language idioms (within higher-order logic) in which to write the specification: operational semantics with nondeterminism, time, system calls, monadic relational programming, etc. We followed an experimental semantics approach, validating the specification against several thousand traces captured from three implementations (FreeBSD, Linux, and WinXP). Many differences between these were identified, and a number of bugs. Validation was done using a special-purpose symbolic model checker programmed above HOL.We suggest that similar logic engineering techniques could be applied to future critical software infrastructure at design time, leading to cleaner designs and (via specification-based testing using a similar checker) more predictable implementations.

title: Nonparametric regression using linear combinations of basis functions
abstract: This paper discusses a Bayesian approach to nonparametric regression initially proposed by Smith and Kohn (1996. ). In this approach the regression function is represented as a linear combination of basis terms. The basis terms can be univariate or multivariate functions and can include polynomials, natural splines and radial basis functions. A Bayesian hierarchical model is used such that the coefficient of each basis term can be zero with positive prior probability. The presence of basis terms in the model is determined by latent indicator variables. The posterior mean is estimated by Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation because it is computationally intractable to compute the posterior mean analytically unless a small number of basis terms is used. The present article updates the work of Smith and Kohn (1996. ) to take account of work by us and others over the last three years. A careful discussion is given to all aspects of the model specification, function estimation and the use of sampling schemes. In particular, new sampling schemes are introduced to carry out the variable selection methodology.