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

Context can be described as the totality of ideas, situations and information that (a) related to, (b) provide the origins for, and (c) influence our response, perspective or judgment of a thing. Design always takes place in a context. However,…

The studies on the formation of psychology's professors were locating us in the construction process of the professional knowledge in professors but in psychologists that exercise the teaching too, visualizing the paper that built knowledge assumed between both environments (academic…

The human tongue is a versatile, lithe and structurally complex muscular organ that is of paramount importance for many physiological tasks. The lingual musculature is composed of various orthogonally oriented myofiber populations. Furthermore, coupling this knowledge of tissue myoarchitecture with…

This Ph.D. thesis has covered the scientific issues of defect reactions involving dopants and impurities in Si, and the applications of this knowledge to reactive ion etching (RIE) and Fe gettering processes. The reactions among self-interstitials (Sii), vacancies (V), impurities…

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,…

Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP) is a knowledge representation formalism that combines results from Logic Programming and Defeasible Argumentation to provide reasoning based on contradictory and potentially incomplete information. DeLP allows information representation by using weak rules and provides an argumentation…

Geographic knowledge discovery (GKD) is the process of extracting information and knowledge from massive georeferenced databases. Usually the process is accomplished by two different systems, the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the data mining engines. However, the development of those…

To have a sustainable competitive advantage, an organization should realize how to create, distribute and utilize knowledge through an organization and how attach it to organizational process. Another important thing is a manager should know what kind of knowledge they…

The knowledge that consumers have of products and services as well as other factors serves as an indicator as to which product or store to “pick”. The products and store location add to the ease with which consumers are able…