This dissertation examines the administration of Islamic family law in the British Straits Settlements and the Netherlands Indies through the lens of Arab merchants in colonial courts from 1860 till 1942. During this period, Arab communities tended to seek justice…

The use of clocks for timekeeping seems to be a straightforward and almost intuitive routine. Glancing at mechanical clocks designed in Edo period Japan, however, we witness how modern-day intuitions betray our attempts to understand devices created in a culture…

The underlying assumption of this study is the understanding of a specialized term as a summary of disciplinary knowledge, formalized at a textual level in the contextual relations which structure disciplinary lexical knowledge and are therefore essential for the successful…

Previous work in software product lines showed an increment of up to 10 times in productivity and product quality [SEI Prod_Line]; because of this, the software product line approach is critical for the success of a development project including a…

This paper presents a knowledge-based approach to
reducing impediments to collaboration in a
distributed environment. A major impediment to
such collaboration is the issue of communications -
clearly and efficiently expressing the desires of every
stakeholder in the process, as…

The Semantic Web attempts to reach a state in the future where everything on the Web will no longer be only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified…

Collaborative systems are becoming a widely used tool particularly among professional communities and research groups. They provide a suitable context for distributed people working on the same subject to concentrate their work in a shared place to which everyone has…

In this paper, we present an approach to student's evaluation in a well-defined domain based on a semantic network. A similarity matrix based on the semantic memory structure of humans is used to build a semantic distance model in order…

In this work we analyze the problem of knowledge representation in a collaborative multi-agent system where agents can obtain new information from others through communication. Namely, we analyze several approaches of belief revision in multi-agent systems. We will describe different…

In this article we present a generalized dynamic argumentation framework that handles arguments expressed in an abstract language assumed to be some first order logic fragment. Once the formalism is presented, we propose a reification to the description logic ALC…