Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Xpath-Based Template Language For Describing The Placement Of Metadata Within A Document, Vijay Kumar Musham

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

In the recent years, there has been a tremendous growth in Internet and online resources that had previously been restricted to paper archives. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools can be used for digitalizing an existing corpus and making it available online. A number of federal agencies, universities, laboratories, and companies are placing their collections online and making them searchable via metadata fields such as author, title, and publishing organization. Manually creating metadata for a large collection is an extremely time-consuming task, and is difficult to automate, particularly for collections consisting of documents with diverse layout and structure. The Extract project …

Integrated Water Resources Management: A Theoretical Exploration Of The Implementation Gap Between The Developed And Developing Worlds, Jennifer S. Schiff

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

As part of its Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations acknowledges that solving the world's water woes requires giving one billion additional people access to safe and affordable drinking water, while also noting that this is a difficult goal to achieve considering present environmental challenges. Amidst this atmosphere of vanishing freshwater, the legislative policy community has begun to encourage diverse discourse on the topic of efficient resource management, but the form and function of such a solution present unique political and theoretical challenges for policymakers and scholars alike. The current consensus among water managers is that a multifaceted policy framework …

A Test Of The Area Of Refuge Hypothesis In Indo-Pacific Marine Biogeography, Jonnell C. Sanciangco

Biological Sciences Theses & Dissertations

Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the marine biogeographic patterns of species richness of the Indo-Pacific. One of these hypotheses suggests that available habitat area is the main predictor of species richness. This is the basis for the area of refuge hypothesis that attempts to explain the global maxima of species richness found in the Coral Triangle, the area encompassing mostly the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. This species-area effect also has habitat heterogeneity as a potential component. The purpose of this study is to test the effects of habitat availability predictors, such as shallow water area and coastline length …

Modeling Decision Making Related To Incident Delays During Hurricane Evacuations, Robert Michael Robinson

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Successful evacuations from metropolitan areas require optimizing the transportation network, monitoring conditions, and adapting to changes. Evacuation plans seek to maximize the city's ability to evacuate traffic to flee the endangered region, but once an evacuation begins, real time events degrade even the best plans.

To better understand behavioral responses made during a hurricane evacuation, a survey of potential evacuees obtained data on demographics, driving characteristics, and the traffic information considered prior to and during an evacuation. Analysis showed significant levels of correlation between demographic factors (e.g., gender, age, social class, etc.) and self-assessed driver characteristics, but limited correlation with …