Owlgres: A Scalable OWL Reasoner
We present Owlgres, a DL-Lite reasoner implementation written for PostgreSQL, a mature open source database. Owlgres is an OWL reasoner that provides consistency checking and conjunctive query services, supports DL-LiteR as well as the OWL sameAs construct, and is not limited to PostgreSQL. We discuss the implementation with special focus on sameAs and the supported subset of the SPARQL language. Emphasis is given to the implemented optimization techniques which resulted in significant performance improvement. Based on a confidential NASA dataset and part of the DBpedia dataset, we show a typical use case for Owlgres, i.e. given a terminology and a dataset, Owlgres provides querying on a persistent knowledge base with reasoning at query time in the expressivity of DL-LiteR.

title: Managing Change: An Ontology Version Control System
abstract: 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: A flexible hardware encoder for low-density parity-check codes
abstract: We describe a flexible hardware encoder for regular and irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Although LDPC codes achieve better performance and lower decoding complexity than turbo codes, a major drawback of LDPC codes is their apparently high encoding complexity. Using an efficient encoding method proposed by Richardson and Urbanke, we present a hardware LDPC encoder with linear encoding complexity. The encoder is flexible, supporting arbitrary H matrices, rates and block lengths. An implementation for a rate 1/2 irregular length 2000 LDPC code encoder on a Xilinx Virtex-II XC2V4000-6 FPGA takes up 4% of the device. It runs at 143 MHz and has a throughput of 45 million codeword bits per second (or 22 million information bits per second) with a latency of 0.18 ms. The performance can be improved by exploiting parallelism: several instances of the encoder can be mapped onto the same chip to encode multiple message blocks concurrently. An implementation of 16 instances of the encoder on the same device at 82 MHz is capable of 410 million codeword bits per second, 80 times faster than an Intel Pentium-lV 2.4 GHz PC.

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: A Scalable Testing Framework for Location-Based Services
abstract: A novel testing framework for location based services is introduced. In particular, the paper showcases a novel architecture for such a framework. The implementation of the framework illustrates both the functionality and the feasibility of the framework proposed and the utility of the architecture. The new framework is evaluated through comparison to several other methodologies currently available for the testing of location-based applications. A case study is presented in which the testing framework was applied to a typical mobile service tracking system. It is concluded that the proposed testing framework achieves the best coverage of the entire location based service testing problem of the currently available methodologies; being equipped to test the widest array of application attributes and allowing for the automation of testing activities.

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.