This thesis analyzes how the Auto-ID technology and information infrastructure will change the management and distribution of pharmaceutical products within the health care industry by enabling item level product traceability functionality. The complexity of the health care industry is steadily…

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the knowledge and beliefs about malaria transmission and practices for vector control in eight villages on the coastal plain of Chiapas, Mexico. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted during May and June 1995 in Chiapas,…

Une préoccupation essentielle traverse cette thèse: l'indifférence systémique de la Loi internationale sur la propriété intellectuelle a l'égard des savoirs traditionnels autochtones. De manière générale, un écart semble d'ailleurs croissant entre l'importance des accords internationaux sur les questions d'intérêt commercial…

Effective document retrieval using domain knowledge and semantics is one of the major challenges in Information Retrieval. Over the last years, there has been a growing interest in ontologies as an artifact for human knowledge representation and a critical component…

The first two chapters of this thesis investigate a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology progresses, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden, forcing them to spend longer periods in education…

A fuzzy controller is usually designed by formulating the knowledge of a human expert into a set of linguistic variables and fuzzy rules. As it is well known, the use of prior knowledge can dramatically improve the performance and quality…

A fuzzy controller is usually designed by formulating the knowledge of a human expert into a set of linguistic variables and fuzzy rules. As it is well known, the use of prior knowledge can dramatically improve the performance and quality…

Lawyers often need to look for previous similar legal cases when analysing new ones.
The more previous cases, the more time is spent. Classical search engines execute termbased retrieval, which may miss relevant documents as well as fetch several irrelevant…

This work describes a multi agent system designed to support the management of tacit knowledge that belongs to people of an organization. This is a distributed knowledge management system based on the use of mobile agents, which receive the user's…

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are merely blind search algorithms, which only make use of the relative fitness of solutions, but completely ignore the nature of the problem. Their performance can be improved by using new multirecombinative approaches, which provide a good…