Collaborative communities are increasingly supported by systems of information and communication tools. Much current research and development focuses on the technical and semantic aspects of tool system interoperability. However, for developing effective tool systems, their pragmatic evaluation is also essential. This implies that the usage context of tools is taken into account. In this paper,...

This paper presents a qualitative shape description scheme which has been defined in order to have a formal theory to allow the construction of new shapes from a set of given shapes by using a juxtaposition operation. Specifically, the qualitative shape description scheme defined is a pragmatic scheme since it has been defined in order to be applied in the automatic and intelligent assembling o...

We are presenting a software development framework called OSGART for Rapid Application Developement (RAD) in the domain of Mixed Reality (MR). This toolkit is being developed as an extension to OpenSceneGraph [3]. It implements a hierarchical, scenegraph based approach to marker based AR using the AR Toolkit [4]. Due to its’ tight integration with OpenSceneGraph it provides a valuable test envi...

The paper discusses the role of speech in the generation of psychosis. The traditional phenomenological approach describes schizophrenic speech as desocialized, autistic and destructive. Based on 'Speech Act Theory', we argue that patients in an acute psychotic state assign maximal illocutionary force to their utterances and mark these speech acts as felicitous. We hypothesize that the pragmati...

The present paper is intended to provide a unified account for the interpretation of puns from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective. In recent years a few scholars have delved into the processing mechanism of puns, but none of them has demonstrably elucidated the cognitive psychological foundation of puns and the development of our cognitive strategy for pun interpretation. Through careful analyse...

In recent years, AI research has started to take seriously the role of context in developing models. This trend is heralded by a departure from logic-based views and their over-emphasis on the formal aspects of thought processes. The departure, however, has not been complete| some fundamental assumptions of formal logic are still maintained in the new approaches. Similarly, \relevance" remains ...

We propose a pragmatic approach to overcome some diiculties arising in the practical usage of formal speciication techniques. We argue that the transition from informal requirements to a formal speciication should not be made too early, that it is not necessary to formally specify every detail, that diierent formalisms should be combined where appropriate, and that sometimes it may be useful no...