Since the pre-Socratic period of philosophy, there have been two basic metaphysical views. One holds that there are substances or things, that is, atemporal entities in the world. The other insists that there are processes, that is, intrinsically temporal phenomena. These metaphysical assumptions tend to strongly influence how the subject of the inquiry or action is conceptualized. The thing-or...

The success of symmetry applications in many scientific disciplines has motivated us to explore symmetry in software. Our exploration is based on an informal notion that symmetry is the possibility of making a change together with some aspect that is immune to this change. In this view, symmetry has a duality of change and constancy whereby some aspect of an object can be changed while leaving ...

We present here a prototype ofa clinical information system for the archiving and the management of multimedia and temporally-oriented clinical data related to PTCA patients. The system is based on an object-oriented DBMS and supports multiple views and view schemas on patients' data. Remote data access is supported too.

This paper describes a knowledge-representation system IFS (Intelligent Framework Services) being developed as a part of the JESSI Common Frame project. The system is based on a combination of frames and rules, which are integrated through the object-oriented view with multiple approaches to uncertainty processing, and coupled to an object-oriented database.

In the study, the potential role of formal concept analysis in concept-oriented view generation for clinical data is investigated. A concept-oriented view generation system for clinical data was developed as a Protege-2000 JAVA tab plug-in called FCAView Tab. A collection of discharge summaries in Japanese was mapped to Protege-2000 as a virtual patient record system. A natural language process...

This paper introduces a new view point in knowledge management by introducing KM-Services as a basic concept for Knowledge Management. This text discusses the vision of service oriented knowledge management (KM) as a realisation approach of process oriented knowledge management. In the following process oriented knowledge management as it was defined in the EU-project PROMOTE (IST-1999-11658) i...

Service Oriented Architectures represent a huge step towards providing simpler, more dynamic and cheaper integration solutions. But SOA cannot and it is not meant to solve all the heterogeneity problems inherent to enterprise integration tasks. Semantics is coming to offer the tools to enable scalable, efficient and cost effective solutions to some of these problems. Using ontologies and semant...

Service-oriented architectures, business process management (BPM) systems, and BPM in general receive a lot of attention these days and the number of articles which describe the benefits and great potential of these technologies has significantly increased. It is something like a second wave after the first (and short) workflow hype in the middle of the 90’s. However, the contemporary hype in n...