For example, in this issue of the Journal, a patient with coronary artery disease discusses how he perceived his interactions with his physicians and his concerns about the lack of attention to his values and goals. In a future issue, we expect to publish the reflections of 2 sisters on their father’s experience of a complication in connection with an ICD lead replacement and how they experienc...

This paper gives a brief insight into the current work on the development of an architectural semantics for Open Distributed Processing (ODP). It first provides an introduction to the work on the formalisation in LOTOS and Z of the basic modelling and specification concepts of Part 2, and then focuses on the viewpoint languages of Part 3 of the Basic Reference Model for ODP (RM-ODP). It also sh...

We introduce a novel view on how to deal with the problems of semantic interoperability in distributed systems. This view is based on the concept of emergent semantics, which sees both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the proper interpretation of symbols as the result of a self-organizing process performed by distributed agents exchanging symbols and having utilities depende...

Methods and tools in current use for development work only up to medium sized products. They are insular, fail to recognise the number, diversity and connectivity of views to be considered and make overcoming these deficiencies difficult. My reasons for these assertions are based on my experience over a period of over 30 years in the industry and can be summarised with reference to two large pr...

The structure of this brief paper follows an emerging convention the FAQ Frequently Asked Questions list. FAQs have grown out of Internet newgroups where participants, tired of seeing the same questions repeated by newcomers, provide a list of canned answers to the most frequently asked questions. An FAQ also provides a covert role in defusing tiresome or unduly acrimonious debates by summarisi...

The epidemiologic approach to causal inference (i.e., Hill's viewpoints) consists of evaluating potential causes from the following 2, noncumulative angles: 1) established results from comparative, observational, or experimental epidemiologic studies; and 2) reviews of nonepidemiologic evidence. It does not involve statements of statistical significance. The philosophical roots of Hill's viewpo...

In a scene which is not open, people cann’t watch the scene behind the barrier through the single-viewpoint. And the cross-cutting in the multi-viewpoints space can make up for its shortcomings. The Panoramic technology of single perspective is mature, but the study on muti-perspective is comparatively lack. In this paper a multi-view virtual scene was builted which can be developed the number ...

The use of Viewpoints in requirements engineering is an emerging area of research. This paper establishes the context for viewpoint-based requirements engineering and then gives a critical review of the existing methods. A viewpoint method is seen here as a requirements engineering process of identifying viewpoints, reasoning within a viewpoint, reasoning between different viewpoints, and revis...

1 A productivity growth rates in Africa have lagged behind the rest of the world due to lack of investment in agriculture in general and in agricultural research and development (R&D) in particular.1,2 Low productivity has especially affected basic African food crops such as sorghum, millet, cassava, sweet potato and cowpea, which are barely traded inter nationally and which benefited very litt...

We present a formalisation for the notion of viewpoint, a construct meant for expressing several varieties of relativised truth. The formalisation consists in a logic which extends rst order predicate calculus through an axiomatization of provability and with the addition of proper reeection rules. The extension is not conservative, but consistency is granted. Viewpoints are deened as set of re...