We describe an adaptation of the knowledge gradient, originally developed for discrete ranking and selection problems, to the problem of calibrating continuous parameters for the purpose of tuning a simulator. The knowledge gradient for continuous parameters uses a continuous approximation…

Information Retrieval Systems normally deal with keywordbased technologies. Although those systems reach satisfactory results, they aren’t able to answer more complex queries done by users, especially those directly in natural language. To do that, there are the KnowledgeBased Systems, which…

This dissertation sets a detailed, technical history of ideas of Dutch-born lens maker and natural philosopher Nicolas Hartsoeker (1656-1725). Hartsoeker's case exemplifies the kinds of intellectual journeys a university-educated man with technical skills undertook to navigate the chaos and uncertainty…

When building Hypermedia/Web Applications, (different) designers are often faced with the same problems over and over again. Those recurring problems soon yield elegant solutions, which can be conveniently described as design patterns. In this paper we present two patterns for…

An audience driven philosophy for web site design takes the different target audiences as an explicit starting point, and organizes the basic navigation structure accordingly. However, for the designer it is not always easy, or sometimes even impossible, to assess…

The aim of this work is to relate two apparently independent concepts as belief revision and relevance. We propose a formal characterization for the notion of (ir)relevance by means of a set of postulates. Then we define (ir)relevance using change…

Nowadays, data intensive applications are in constant demand and there is need of computing environments with better intelligent capabilities than those present in today's Database Management Systems (DBMS). To build such systems we need formalisms that can perform complicate inferences,…

In this work, we discuss aspects of a framework to support the understanding and the improvement in hypermedia development processes. The framework is built taking into account two modeling approaches and four domain levels. The modeling approaches are called prescriptive…

In order to deal with the Ontology Change problem and considering an environment where Description Logics (DLs) are used to describe ontologies, the question of how to integrate distributed ontologies appears to be in touch with Belief Revision since DL…

Modeling is one of the most crucial activities during all the phases in any software development life cycle. Typically, system development is a very complex task, and working with models helps to handle this complexity in an organized way, allowing…