The launching of the JOT provides a welcome opportunity to resume the Eiffel column that ran for many years in JOOP from 1998 (edited first by Rock Howard from whom I took over in 1998). It will run pretty much like its predecessor, with a mix of contributions by guest columnists and by me, and a mix of topics — from language matters to methodological issues of object-oriented software construc...

Sign languages (SL) require a fundamental rethinking of many basic assumptions about human language processing because instead of using linear speech, sign languages coarticulate facial expressions, shoulder and hand movements, eye gaze and usage of a three-dimensional space. SL researchers have therefore advocated SL-specific approaches that do not start from the biases of models that were ori...

Construction Grammar has reached a stage of maturity where many researchers are looking for an explicit formal grounding of their work. Recently, there have been exciting developments to cater for this demand, most notably in Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). Unfortunately, like playing a music instrument, the formalisms used by SBCG and FCG take time ...

The UK construction industry at its best is excellent. Nonetheless there is a deep concern that the industry as a whole is underachieving. Problems such as low and unreliable profitability, a lack of research and development, a shortage of skills, usage of tender price evaluations, and a fragmented industry structure, are widely recognised by the industry. These problems must be tackled in orde...

Certificate of Need (CON) programs represent a patchwork of state regulatory programs across the United States that regulate the availability of selected health care services. Thirty-six states maintain laws designed to ensure access to health care services, maintain or improve quality, and control capital expenditures on health care services and facilities by limiting unnecessary health facili...

Today, the development of new mobile services is associated with high costs and risks. The main aim of our research is to make this development process faster and more efficient by making available a modular service development platform. We decompose existing services into generic components of a mobile service design space to reuse them as building blocks for the construction of new mobile ser...

The construction of databases and the designing search engines and interfaces are no longer the monopoly of major online services or database

42 Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Road transport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Telecommunications . . . . . . . ....

The construction of composite Web Services from service fragments requires semantic descriptions of service offers and service requests. We propose the use of dependencies as a modeling concept to describe service requests and service offers and outline a Web Service Market, that constructs composite services, offered by a temporary network of economically independent service providers, by reso...

We consider a subscription system for digital libraries that offers personalized services to users. The digital library provides access to documents whose content is described using terms from a predefined taxonomy that is a set of terms together with a subsumption relation between terms. The same taxonomy is also used to express the users profiles that represent users preferences on which rely...