Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Semantic Web Technology In Support Of Bioinformatics For Glycan Expression, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York, Christopher Thomas, Meenakshi Nagarajan, John A. Miller, Krzysztof Kochut, Satya S. Sahoo, Xiaochuan Yi

Kno.e.sis Publications

Due to the complexity of biological systems, interpretation of data obtained by a single experimental approach can often be interpreted only if viewed from a broader context, taking into account the information obtained by many diverse techniques. The vast amount of interpreted experimental data that is now available via the internet opens the possibility of collecting the relevant pieces of information that will enable scientists to form hypotheses based on the integration of this diverse information. However, the sheer volume of data that is available makes it very difficult to select the information necessary to make a coherent model of …

Lsdis: Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The LSDIS (Large Scale Distributed Information Systems) lab was established in 1994 with the guidance and direction provided by Dr. Amit P. Sheth with the help of Dr. John A. Miller and Dr. Krzysztof J. Kochut. In 1998 this faculty group was further strengthened by the addition of Dr. Ismailcem B. Arpinar. LSDIS is the largest research group in Computer Science at UGA and one of the strongest in its area. During Fall 2004, it is funding 15 students (majority of them PhD), and has one research staff.

Over the years LSDIS has been actively involved in research projects in …

On Thacker's Biomedia (2004), Nicholas Ruiz Iii

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Only we could have done it. The Code (DNA and its analogs, etc.) that we perhaps only narrate, never forgetting all of the fictions that narration portends, today consciously edits the text that evolution has edited unconsciously for eons. Thacker considers how humans -- perhaps little more than interactive Code, manipulate the Code -- with the technology of the Code. No other faction of Code has yet to make such heady ‘gains.’ Where posthumanity was always a literary endeavor, a literary bypass, out of instrumental science and into fictive states, it now is a technical endeavor, encompassing a …

Is Chaos Theory Postmodern Science?, J. Linn Mackey

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Based on a comparison between the theories of N. Katherine Hayles (Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science) and Vladimir Tasic (Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought), J. Linn Mackey asks the question Is Chaos Theory Postmodern Science and looks at parallels between the literature dubbed as postmodern and the scientific branch more properly termed complex dynamics. His conclusions are surprising: both Hayles and Tasic miss important connective elements of both the science and the practice of postmodernism. Postmodern science does, in fact, exist, and literature just may be it.

Logic Programs, Iterated Function Systems, And Recurrent Radial Basis Function Networks, Sebastian Bader, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Graphs of the single-step operator for first-order logic programs—displayed in the real plane—exhibit self-similar structures known from topological dynamics, i.e., they appear to be fractals, or more precisely, attractors of iterated function systems. We show that this observation can be made mathematically precise. In particular, we give conditions which ensure that those graphs coincide with attractors of suitably chosen iterated function systems, and conditions which allow the approximation of such graphs by iterated function systems or by fractal interpolation. Since iterated function systems can easily be encoded using recurrent radial basis function networks, we eventually obtain connectionist systems which …

Enhancing Web Services Description And Discovery To Facilitate Composition, Preeda Rajasekaran, John A. Miller, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services are in the midst of making the transition from being a promising technology to being widely used in the industry. However, most efforts to use Web services have been manual, thus slowing down the ever changing and dynamic businesses of today. In this paper, we contend that more expressive descriptions of Web services will lead to greater automation and thus provide more agility to businesses. We present the METEOR-S front-end tools for source code annotation and semantic Web service description generation. We also present WSDL-S, a language created for incorporating semantic descriptions in the industry wide accepted WSDL, …

Workflow Management Systems And Erp Systems: Differences, Commonalities, And Applications, Jorge Cardoso, Robert P. Bostrom, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Two important classes of information systems, Workflow Management Systems(WfMSs) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, have been used to support e-business process redesign, integration, and management. While both technologies can help with business process automation, data transfer, and information sharing, the technological approach and features of solutions provided by WfMS and ERP are different. Currently, there is a lack of understanding of these two classes of information systems in the industry and academia, thus hindering their effective applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive comparison between these two classes of systems. We discuss how the two types of systems …

Learning Mixture Models With The Regularized Latent Maximum Entropy Principle, Shaojun Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Fuchun Peng, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents a new approach to estimating mixture models based on a recent inference principle we have proposed: the latent maximum entropy principle (LME). LME is different from Jaynes' maximum entropy principle, standard maximum likelihood, and maximum a posteriori probability estimation. We demonstrate the LME principle by deriving new algorithms for mixture model estimation, and show how robust new variants of the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm can be developed. We show that a regularized version of LME (RLME), is effective at estimating mixture models. It generally yields better results than plain LME, which in turn is often better than …

Discovery Of Web Services In A Federated Registry Environment, Kaarthik Sivashanmugam, Kunal Verma, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The potential of a large scale growth of private and semi-private registries is creating the need for an infrastructure which can support discovery and publication over a group of autonomous registries. Recent versions of UDDI have made changes to accommodate interactions between distributed registries. In this paper, we discuss METEOR-S Web service Discovery Infrastructure, which provides an ontology-based infrastructure to access a group of registries that are divided based on business domains and grouped into federations. We also discuss how Web service discovery is carried out within a federation.

Probing The Posthuman: Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 And The Mind-Body Problem, Miranda Campbell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In this paper, Miranda Campbell discusses Richard Powers' novel Galatea 2.2 and argues that this work is situated at the intersection of the posthumanist and humanist discourses. Campbell examines Powers' approach to the mind-body problem, his interrogation of the limits and limitations of posthumanism, and its dissolution of the importance of the body, difference, and agency. In the posthuman setting of the Center for Advanced Science of this novel, scientists integrate the mind into the body through its designation as a mechanically functioning brain. At the Center, the binary of human and machine begins to erode with the …

On Mitchell's Me++: The Cyborg Self And The Networked City, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Reminiscent of books by other MIT luminaries like Neil Gershenfeld's When Things Start to Think (2000) and Rodney Brooks' Flesh and Machines (2002), William Mitchell's Me++ reminds me, yet again, of why it is so exciting to be alive in an age of wireless phones, high-speed data transmission, and cybernetic systems. Unfortunately, after a couple of years of reading Wired and developing a festering cynicism for high-tech solutions to social problems that have been caused by previous high-tech solutions (like titanic ships, combustion engines, splitting atoms, and all kinds of really horrible weapons), I am more interested in …

Review Of Cybering Democracy, By Diana Saco, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Sweto: Large-Scale Semantic Web Test-Bed, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Chris Halaschek, Amit P. Sheth, I. Budak Arpinar, Gowtham Sannapareddy

Kno.e.sis Publications

The emergent Semantic Web community needs a common infrastructure for testing the scalability and quality of new techniques and software which use machine processable data. Since ontologies are a centerpiece of most approaches, we believe that for an accurate evaluation of tools for quality, scalability and performance, the research community needs a freely available ontology with a large description base. If the use of tools is to be for advanced semantic applications, such as those in business intelligence and national security, then instances in the knowledge base should be highly interconnected. Thus, we propose and describe a Semantic WEb Technology …

Semantic Web Technology Evaluation Ontology (Sweto): A Test Bed For Evaluating Tools And Benchmarking Applications, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, Amit P. Sheth, I. Budak Arpinar, Chris Halaschek

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Meteor-S Web Service Annotation Framework, Abhijit A. Patil, Swapna A. Oundhakar, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

The World Wide Web is emerging not only as an infrastructure for data, but also for a broader variety of resources that are increasingly being made available as Web services. Relevant current standards like UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP are in their fledgling years and form the basis of making Web services a workable and broadly adopted technology. However, realizing the fuller scope of the promise of Web services and associated service oriented architecture will requite further technological advances in the areas of service interoperation, service discovery, service composition, and process orchestration. Semantics, especially as supported by the use of ontologies, …

Sempl: A Semantic Portal, Matthew Perry, Eric Stiles

Kno.e.sis Publications

Semantic Web technology is intended for the retrieval, collection, and analysis of meaningful data with significant automation afforded by machine understandability of data [1]. As one illustration of semantic web technology in action, we present SEMPL, a semantic web portal for the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems lab (LSDIS) at the University of Georgia. SEMPL, which is powered by a state of the art commercial system, Semagix Freedom [7], uses an ontology-driven approach to provide semantic browsing, linking, and contextual querying of content within the portal. By using the ontology based information integration technique, SEMPL can specify the context of …

Indexing Genomic Databases, Gina Cooper, Michael L. Raymer, Travis E. Doom, Dan E. Krane, Natsuhiko Futamura

Kno.e.sis Publications

Current biological sequence comparison tools utilize full database searches to find approximate matches between a database and a query. A new approach to sequence comparisons can be performed by indexing the database using a novel indexing scheme. An indexed scheme can immediately eliminate highly mismatched sequences thereby improving performance and accuracy. iBlast is proposed as an indexed version of BLAST. In its initial implementation, iBlast uses a sequence-based index to catalog genomic databases in an NCR Teradata RDBMS. Several types of indexes and querying methods are explored to determine the most efficient solution utilizing the parallel nature of the Teradata …

The Digital Divide: A Study Of The Intra-Ethnic Divide Within The African American Population In Johnson City, Tennessee., Sonja E. Schreckenberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined how much access African American adults 25 years and older, living in Johnson City, Tennessee had to computers, and the factors that most influenced such access. Data was collected from 271 persons living in the area. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS software to determine how certain demographics would contribute to the level of computer access.

Results from the study revealed that a digital divide existed within the African American community, with income being a strong determinant of access to computers. The highest level of access for the sample was in the salary range of $50,000-74,999. Computer …

The Airline Quality Rating 2004, Brent D. Bowen, Dean Headley, Uno Aviation Institute

Faculty Books and Monographs

UNOAI Report 04-1

The Airline Quality Rating (AQR) was developed and first announced in early 1991 as an objective method of comparing airline quality on combined multiple performance criteria. This current report, the Airline Quality Rating 2004, reflects monthly Airline Quality Rating scores for 2003. AQR scores far the calendar year 2003 are based on 15 elements in four major areas that focus on airline performance aspects important to air travel consumers.

The Airline Quality Rating 2004 is a summary of month-by-month quality ratings for U.S. airlines that have at least 1% of domestic passenger volume during 2003. Using the …

Quality Of Service For Workflows And Web Service Processes, Jorge Cardoso, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller, Jonathan Arnold, Krzysztof J. Kochut

Kno.e.sis Publications

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been used to support various types of business processes for more than a decade now. In workflows or Web processes for e-commerce and Web service applications, suppliers and customers define a binding agreement or contract between the two parties, specifying quality of service (QoS) items such as products or services to be delivered, deadlines, quality of products, and cost of services. The management of QoS metrics directly impacts the success of organizations participating in e-commerce. Therefore, when services or products are created or managed using workflows or Web processes, the underlying workflow engine must accept …

Review Of Art And Fear, By Paul Virilio, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

On Misa, Brey, And Feenberg's Modernity And Technology, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In the course of my own research on culture and technology, I have marveled at the vast pool of valuable resources available in both Cultural Studies and Science and Technology Studies. And I have been equally amazed by the disciplinarity that seems to keep each of these approaches from interacting with each other, in spite of the fact that they share common ancestors like Marx, Heidegger, and Mumford. And so I found myself intrigued by the arrival of Misa, Brey, and Feenberg's edited volume, Modernity and Technology -- a deliberate effort to reconcile the theoretical question of Modernity …

Ten Suggestions To Strengthen The Science Of Ecology, Gary E. Belovsky, Daniel B. Botkin, Todd A. Crowl, Kenneth W. Cummins, Jerry F. Franklin, Malcolm L. Hunter, Anthony Joern, David B. Lindenmayer, James A. Macmahon, Chris R. Margules, J. Michael Scott

Papers in Ecology

There are few well-documented, general ecological principles that can be applied to pressing environmental issues. When they discuss them at all, ecologists often disagree about the relative importance of different aspects of the science’s original and still important issues. It may be that the sum of ecological science is not open to universal statements because of the wide range of organizational, spatial, and temporal phenomena, as well as the sheer number of possible interactions.We believe, however, that the search for general principles has been inadequate to establish the extent to which generalities are possible.We suggest that ecologists may need to …

Precious Red Coral: Markets And Meanings, Susan J. Torntore

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Beads and other ornamental items made of precious red coral have been utilized by various cultures worldwide for thousands of years. Depending on its properties and market context, this highly valued material has meant different things to different peoples through time. The current industry—based in Torre del Greco in southern Italy—reflects past traditions but also incorporates new ideas into the production of beads and jewelry for the three principal world markets: fashion, ethnic, and tourist. These reflect the historic trade and use of red coral beads in several West African, European, and American cultural settings. This article describes the Torrese …

Incised Dentalium Shell Beads In The Plateau Culture Area, Roderick Sprague

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Whole dentalium and segments of dentalium shell have been used as beads in the Northwest Coast and interior Plateau culture areas both prehistorically and ethnographically. Incised whole shells, and no more than five known examples of incised segments, have been recovered from the Plateau, limited to archaeological contexts. A review of the reported incising clearly shows the use of design elements typical of the Plateau Culture Area as often also used on bone, antler, wood, and historic copper in addition to dentalium. The Asotin site (45-AS-9), one of the few well-dated Plateau burial sites with incised beads indicates that this …

Beads: Journal Of The Society Of Bead Researchers - Volume 16 (Complete)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Bead Making At Murano And Venice, B. Harvey Carroll Jr., Jamey D. Allen

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

"Bead Making at Murano and Venice," by B. Harvey Carroll, Jr., is a rare eyewitness account of beadmaking in and around Venice, Italy, towards the end of the First World War and documents the technology of the time as well as what impact the war had on the industry. Carroll's report takes us through the various steps in the production of drawn or tube beads and also provides a historical perspective of the industry. Although the report presents much useful information, we now know much more about most aspects of glass beadmaking and endnotes provide much additional information and clarification.

Front Matter

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Reviews And End Matter (V. 16, 2004)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Gem and Ornamental Materials of Organic Origin, by Maggie Campbell Pedersen (2004), reviewed by Stefany Tomalin

World on a String: Parts One, Two, and Three, by Diana Friedberg and Lionel Friedberg (2004-2005), reviewed by Lois Rose Rose

Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Beadwork from Canadian Collections, by Marie-Louise Labelle (2005), reviewed by Margret Carey.

Table Of Contents (V. 16, 2004)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.