There has been a long-standing desire in computer science for a way of collecting and using libraries of standard software components. The limited success in actually doing this stems not from any resistance to the idea, nor from any lack…

by John P. Woods., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001., Includes bibliographical references (p. 85).

his dissertation analyzes how local knowledge improves environmental decisions. The premise is that controlling pollution and addressing public health disparities are not problems that professionals alone can solve. Concerned lay publics, especially low-income populations and people of color that experience…

Drawing on an empirical study on automakers? management of supplier
involvement in product development in Japan, this paper shows that when the design of
a component is outsourced to a supplier, how much and what automakers know about
the component…

This report shows how knowledge about the visual world can be built into a shape representation in the form of a descriptive vocabulary making explicit the important geometrical relationships comprising objects' shapes. Two computational tools are offered: (1) Shapestokens are…

This paper examines the issues and the solutions that have been studied in database (DB) integration research and tries to draw lessons from them for knowledge base (KB) integration.

by Jeffrey C. Chi., Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2001., Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-216).

We develop a qualitative method for understanding and representing phase space structures of complex systems and demonstrate the method with a program, MAPS --- Modeler and Analyzer for Phase Spaces, using deep domain knowledge of dynamical system theory. Given a…

This paper describes a natural language system START. The system analyzes English text and automatically transforms it into an appropriate representation, the knowledge base, which incorporates the information found in the text. The user gains access to information stored in…

by Guru Prasanna., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2001., Page 123 blank., Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-122).