An abstract of the dissertation of Susan Loucette Price for the Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science presented March 7, 2008. Title: Semantic Components: A Model for Enhancing Retrieval of DomainSpecific Information Despite the success of general Internet search engines, information retrieval remains an incompletely solved problem. Our research focuses on supporting domain experts when they...

Many recently emerging component-based Web portal application platforms allow end users to compose dynamic Web dialogues on the fly. Experts predict that this paradigm will enable a class of new applications for Web-based content delivery in information-rich, agile business domains, such as health care. We present a conceptual analysis of the user-based composition paradigm currently used and a...

To distinguish things, we use terms which characterize them for us. For two balls it may be their color, for two people it may be their height, or their manner of speaking. In order to illustrate the differences in meaning for many words J. j. KATZ and J. A. FODOR (1963) proposed the use of "semantic characteristics ". They give an example for the meanings of man and ball: man- ...-(physical ob...

Component-based software engineering on the Web differs from traditional component and software engineering. We investigate Web component engineering activites that are crucial for the development, composition, and deployment of components on the Web. The current Web Services and Semantic Web initiatives strongly influence our work. Focussing on Web component composition we develop description ...

Metric systems for semantics, or semantic cognitive maps, are allocations of words or other representations in a metric space based on their meaning. Existing methods for semantic mapping, such as Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, are based on paradigms involving dissimilarity metrics. They typically do not take into account relations of antonymy and yield a large number...