Abstract: The growth in the volume of text data such as books
and articles in libraries for centuries has imposed to establish
effective mechanisms to locate them. Early techniques such as
abstraction, indexing and the use of classification categories have
marked the birth of a new field of research called "Information
Retrieval". Information Retrieval (IR) can be defined as the task of
defining models and systems whose purpose is to facilitate access to
a set of documents in electronic form (corpus) to allow a user to find
the relevant ones for him, that is to say, the contents which matches
with the information needs of the user.
Most of the models of information retrieval use a specific data
structure to index a corpus which is called "inverted file" or "reverse
index".
This inverted file collects information on all terms over the corpus
documents specifying the identifiers of documents that contain the
term in question, the frequency of each term in the documents of the
corpus, the positions of the occurrences of the word...
In this paper we use an oriented object database (db4o) instead of
the inverted file, that is to say, instead to search a term in the inverted
file, we will search it in the db4o database.
The purpose of this work is to make a comparative study to see if
the oriented object databases may be competing for the inverse index
in terms of access speed and resource consumption using a large
volume of data.
Abstract: Ontologies offer a means for representing and sharing
information in many domains, particularly in complex domains. For
example, it can be used for representing and sharing information
of System Requirement Specification (SRS) of complex systems
like the SRS of ERTMS/ETCS written in natural language. Since
this system is a real-time and critical system, generic ontologies,
such as OWL and generic ERTMS ontologies provide minimal
support for modeling temporal information omnipresent in these SRS
documents. To support the modeling of temporal information, one
of the challenges is to enable representation of dynamic features
evolving in time within a generic ontology with a minimal redesign
of it. The separation of temporal information from other information
can help to predict system runtime operation and to properly design
and implement them. In addition, it is helpful to provide a reasoning
and querying techniques to reason and query temporal information
represented in the ontology in order to detect potential temporal
inconsistencies. To address this challenge, we propose a lightweight
3-layer temporal Quality of Service (QoS) ontology for representing,
reasoning and querying over temporal and non-temporal information
in a complex domain ontology. Representing QoS entities in separated
layers can clarify the distinction between the non QoS entities
and the QoS entities in an ontology. The upper generic layer of
the proposed ontology provides an intuitive knowledge of domain
components, specially ERTMS/ETCS components. The separation of
the intermediate QoS layer from the lower QoS layer allows us to
focus on specific QoS Characteristics, such as temporal or integrity
characteristics. In this paper, we focus on temporal information that
can be used to predict system runtime operation. To evaluate our
approach, an example of the proposed domain ontology for handover
operation, as well as a reasoning rule over temporal relations in this
domain-specific ontology, are presented.
Abstract: Non-destructive testing and evaluation techniques for
assessing the integrity of composite structures are essential to both
reduce manufacturing costs and out of service time of transport means
due to maintenance. In this study, Analyze into non-destructive test
characterization of carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) internal
and external defects using thermo-graphic camera and transient
thermography method. non-destructive testing were characterized by
defect size (Ø8, Ø10, Ø12, Ø14) and depth (1.2mm, 2.4mm).
Abstract: Brown seaweeds are abundant in Portuguese coastline
and represent an almost unexploited marine economic resource. One
of the most common species, easily available for harvesting in the
northwest coast, is Saccorhiza polyschides grows in the lowest shore
and costal rocky reefs. It is almost exclusively used by local farmers
as natural fertilizer, but contains a substantial amount of valuable
compounds, particularly alginates, natural biopolymers of high
interest for many industrial applications.
Alginates are natural polysaccharides present in cell walls of
brown seaweed, highly biocompatible, with particular properties that
make them of high interest for the food, biotechnology, cosmetics
and pharmaceutical industries. Conventional extraction processes are
based on thermal treatment. They are lengthy and consume high
amounts of energy and solvents. In recent years, microwave-assisted
extraction (MAE) has shown enormous potential to overcome major
drawbacks that outcome from conventional plant material extraction
(thermal and/or solvent based) techniques, being also successfully
applied to the extraction of agar, fucoidans and alginates. In the
present study, acid pretreatment of brown seaweed Saccorhiza
polyschides for subsequent microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) of
alginate was optimized. Seaweeds were collected in Northwest
Portuguese coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean between May and
August, 2014. Experimental design was used to assess the effect of
temperature and acid pretreatment time in alginate extraction.
Response surface methodology allowed the determination of the
optimum MAE conditions: 40 mL of HCl 0.1 M per g of dried
seaweed with constant stirring at 20ºC during 14h. Optimal acid
pretreatment conditions have enhanced significantly MAE of
alginates from Saccorhiza polyschides, thus contributing for the
development of a viable, more environmental friendly alternative to
conventional processes.
Abstract: Among modern airflow measurement methods,
Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and Particle Tracking Velocimetry
(PTV), as visualized and non-instructive measurement techniques, are
playing more important role. This paper conducts a comparative
experimental study for airflow measurement employing both
techniques with the same condition. Velocity vector fields, velocity
contour fields, voticity profiles and turbulence profiles are selected as
the comparison indexes. The results show that the performance of both
PIV and PTV techniques for airflow measurement is satisfied, but
some differences between the both techniques are existed, it suggests
that selecting the measurement technique should be based on a
comprehensive consideration.
Abstract: Creating a database scheme is essentially a manual
process. From a requirement specification the information contained
within has to be analyzed and reduced into a set of tables, attributes
and relationships. This is a time consuming process that has to go
through several stages before an acceptable database schema is
achieved. The purpose of this paper is to implement a Natural
Language Processing (NLP) based tool to produce a relational
database from a requirement specification. The Stanford CoreNLP
version 3.3.1 and the Java programming were used to implement the
proposed model. The outcome of this study indicates that a first draft
of a relational database schema can be extracted from a requirement
specification by using NLP tools and techniques with minimum user
intervention. Therefore this method is a step forward in finding a
solution that requires little or no user intervention.
Abstract: Corrosion inhibitors are widely used in concrete
industry to reduce the corrosion rate of steel rebar which is present in
contact with aggressive environments. The present work aims to
using Zamzam water from well located within the Masjid al-Haram
in Mecca, Saudi Arabia 20 m (66 ft) east of the Kaaba, the holiest
place in Islam as corrosion inhibitor for steel in rain water and
simulated acid rain. The effect of Zamzam water was investigated by
electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and Potentiodynamic
polarization techniques in Department of Civil Engineering - IUT
Saint-Nazaire, Nantes University, France. Zamzam water is
considered to be one of the most important steel corrosion inhibitor
which is frequently used in different industrial applications. Results
showed that zamzam water gave a very good inhibition for steel
corrosion in rain water and simulated acid rain.
Abstract: This paper aims to analyze the role of natural
language processing (NLP). The paper will discuss the role in the
context of automated data retrieval, automated question answer, and
text structuring. NLP techniques are gaining wider acceptance in real
life applications and industrial concerns. There are various
complexities involved in processing the text of natural language that
could satisfy the need of decision makers. This paper begins with the
description of the qualities of NLP practices. The paper then focuses
on the challenges in natural language processing. The paper also
discusses major techniques of NLP. The last section describes
opportunities and challenges for future research.
Abstract: Underwater acoustic network is one of the rapidly
growing areas of research and finds different applications for
monitoring and collecting various data for environmental studies. The
communication among dynamic nodes and high error probability in
an acoustic medium forced to maximize energy consumption in
Underwater Sensor Networks (USN) than in traditional sensor
networks. Developing energy-efficient routing protocol is the
fundamental and a curb challenge because all the sensor nodes are
powered by batteries, and they cannot be easily replaced in UWSNs.
This paper surveys the various recent routing techniques that mainly
focus on energy efficiency.
Abstract: The dramatic rise in the use of Social Media (SM)
platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide access to an
unprecedented amount of user data. Users may post reviews on
products and services they bought, write about their interests, share
ideas or give their opinions and views on political issues. There is a
growing interest in the analysis of SM data from organisations for
detecting new trends, obtaining user opinions on their products and
services or finding out about their online reputations. A recent
research trend in SM analysis is making predictions based on
sentiment analysis of SM. Often indicators of historic SM data are
represented as time series and correlated with a variety of real world
phenomena like the outcome of elections, the development of
financial indicators, box office revenue and disease outbreaks. This
paper examines the current state of research in the area of SM mining
and predictive analysis and gives an overview of the analysis
methods using opinion mining and machine learning techniques.
Abstract: In oases, the surface water resources are becoming
increasingly scarce and groundwater resources, which generally have
a poor quality due to the high levels of salinity, are often
overexploited. Water saving have therefore become imperative for
better oases sustainability. If drip irrigation is currently recommended
in Morocco for saving water and valuing, its use in the sub-desert
areas does not keep water safe from high evaporation rates. An
alternative to this system would be the use of subsurface drip
irrigation. This technique is defined as an application of water under
the soil surface through drippers, which deliver water at rates
generally similar to surface drip irrigation. As subsurface drip
irrigation is a recently introduced in Morocco, a better understanding
of the infiltration process around a buried source, in local conditions,
and its impact on plant growth is necessarily required. This study
aims to contribute to improving the water use efficiency by testing
the performance of subsurface irrigation system, especially in areas
where water is a limited source. The objectives of this research are
performance evaluation in arid conditions of the subsurface drip
irrigation system for young date palms compared to the surface drip.
In this context, an experimental test is installed at a farmer’s field in
the area of Erfoud (Errachidia Province, southeastern Morocco),
using the subsurface drip irrigation system in comparison with the
classic drip system for young date palms. Flow measurement to
calculate the uniformity of the application of water was done through
two methods: a flow measurement of drippers above the surface and
another one underground. The latter method has also helped us to
estimate losses through evaporation for both irrigation techniques. In
order to compare the effect of two irrigation modes, plants were
identified for each type of irrigation to monitor certain agronomic
parameters (cumulative numbers of palms and roots development).
Experimentation referred to a distribution uniformity of about 88%;
considered acceptable for subsurface drip irrigation while it is around
80% for the surface drip irrigation. The results also show an increase
in root development and in the number of palm, as well as a
substantial water savings due to lower evaporation losses compared
to the classic drip irrigation.
The results of this study showed that subsurface drip irrigation is
an efficient technique, which allows sustainable irrigation in arid
areas.
Abstract: This paper describes a logical method to enhance
security on the grid computing to restrict the misuse of the grid
resources. This method is an economic and efficient one to avoid the
usage of the special devices. The security issues, techniques and
solutions needed to provide a secure grid computing environment are
described. A well defined process for security management among
the resource accesses and key holding algorithm is also proposed. In
this method, the identity management, access control and
authorization and authentication are effectively handled.
Abstract: Aim of this work was to study the genetic basis for oil
accumulation in olive fruit via tracking DGAT2 (Diacylglycerol
acyltransferase type-2) gene in three Egyptian Origen Olive cultivars
namely Toffahi, Hamed and Maraki using molecular marker
techniques and bioinformatics tools. Results illustrate that, firstly:
specific genomic band of Maraki cultivars was identified as DGAT2
(Diacylglycerol acyltransferase type-2) and identical for this gene in
Olea europaea with 100% of similarity. Secondly, differential
genomic band of Maraki cultivars which produced from RAPD
fingerprinting technique reflected predicted distinguished sequence
which identified as DGAT2 (Diacylglycerol acyltransferase type-2)
in Fragaria vesca subsp. Vesca with 76% of sequential similarity.
Third and finally, specific genomic specific band of Hamed cultivars
was identified as two fragments, 1- Olea europaea cultivar Koroneiki
diacylglycerol acyltransferase type 2 mRNA, complete cds with two
matches regions with 99% or 2- Predicted: Fragaria vesca subsp.
vesca diacylglycerol O-acyltransferase 2-like (LOC101313050),
mRNA with 86 % of similarity.
Abstract: Yttrium oxide (Y2O3) films have been successfully
deposited with yttrium-ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid (EDTA·Y·H)
complexes prepared by various milling techniques. The effects of the
properties of the EDTA·Y·H complex on the properties of the
deposited Y2O3 films have been analyzed. Seven different types of the
raw EDTA·Y·H complexes were prepared by various commercial
milling techniques such as ball milling, hammer milling, commercial
milling, and mortar milling. The milled EDTA·Y·H complexes
exhibited various particle sizes and distributions, depending on the
milling method. Furthermore, we analyzed the crystal structure,
morphology and elemental distribution profile of the metal oxide films
deposited on stainless steel substrate with the milled EDTA·Y·H
complexes. Depending on the milling technique, the flow properties of
the raw powders differed. The X-ray diffraction pattern of all the
samples revealed the formation of Y2O3 crystalline phase, irrespective
of the milling technique. Of all the different milling techniques, the
hammer milling technique is considered suitable for fabricating dense
Y2O3 films.
Abstract: Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), inspired by the
human immune system, are algorithms and mechanisms which are
self-adaptive and self-learning classifiers capable of recognizing and
classifying by learning, long-term memory and association. Unlike
other human system inspired techniques like genetic algorithms and
neural networks, AIS includes a range of algorithms modeling on
different immune mechanism of the body. In this paper, a mechanism
of a human immune system based on apoptosis is adopted to build an
Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to protect computer networks.
Features are selected from network traffic using Fisher Score. Based
on the selected features, the record/connection is classified as either
an attack or normal traffic by the proposed methodology. Simulation
results demonstrates that the proposed AIS based on apoptosis
performs better than existing AIS for intrusion detection.
Abstract: In this paper, the influence of upstream structures on the flow patternaround and inside the wind-catcher is experimentally investigated by smoke flow visualization techniques. Wind-catchers are an important part of natural ventilation in residential buildings or public places such as shopping centers, libraries, etc. Wind-catchers might be also used in places of high urban densities; hence their potential to provide natural ventilation is dependent on the presence of upstream structures. In this study, the two-sided wind-catcher model was based on a real wind-catcher observed in the city of Yazd, Iran. The present study focuses on the flow patterns around and inside the isolated two-sided wind-catcher, and on a two-sided wind-catcher in the presence of an upstream structure. The results show that the presence of an upstream structure influences the airflow pattern force and direction. Placing a high upstream structure reverses the airflow direction inside the wind-catcher.
Abstract: Existing methods of data mining cannot be applied on
spatial data because they require spatial specificity consideration, as
spatial relationships.
This paper focuses on the classification with decision trees, which
are one of the data mining techniques. We propose an extension of
the C4.5 algorithm for spatial data, based on two different approaches
Join materialization and Querying on the fly the different tables.
Similar works have been done on these two main approaches, the
first - Join materialization - favors the processing time in spite of
memory space, whereas the second - Querying on the fly different
tables- promotes memory space despite of the processing time.
The modified C4.5 algorithm requires three entries tables: a target
table, a neighbor table, and a spatial index join that contains the
possible spatial relationship among the objects in the target table and
those in the neighbor table. Thus, the proposed algorithms are applied
to a spatial data pattern in the accidentology domain.
A comparative study of our approach with other works of
classification by spatial decision trees will be detailed.
Abstract: Asphaltic concrete for pavement construction in India
are produced by using crushed stone, gravels etc. as aggregate. In
north-Eastern region of India, there is a scarcity of stone aggregate.
Therefore the road engineers are always in search of an optional
material as aggregate which can replace the regularly used material.
The purpose of this work was to evaluate the utilization of
substandard or marginal aggregates in flexible pavement
construction. The investigation was undertaken to evaluate the effects
of using lower quality aggregates such as over burnt brick aggregate
on the preparation of asphalt concrete for flexible pavements. The
scope of this work included a review of available literature and
existing data, a laboratory evaluation organized to determine the
effects of marginal aggregates and potential techniques to upgrade
these substandard materials, and a laboratory evaluation of these
upgraded marginal aggregate asphalt mixtures. Over burnt brick
aggregates are water susceptible and can leads to moisture damage.
Moisture damage is the progressive loss of functionality of the
material owing to loss of the adhesion bond between the asphalt
binder and the aggregate surface. Hence zycosoil as an anti striping
additive were evaluated in this study. This study summarizes the
results of the laboratory evaluation carried out to investigate the
properties of asphalt concrete prepared with zycosoil modified over
burnt brick aggregate. Marshall specimen were prepared with stone
aggregate, zycosoil modified stone aggregate, over burnt brick
aggregate and zycosoil modified over burnt brick aggregate. Results
show that addition of zycosoil with stone aggregate increased
stability by 6% and addition of zycosoil with over burnt brick
aggregate increased stability by 30%.
Abstract: Essential oils are expensive phytochemicals produced
and extracted from specific species belonging to particular families in
the plant kingdom. In the United Arab Emirates country (UAE), is
located in the arid region of the world, nine species, from the
Lamiaceae family, having the capability to produce therapeutic grade
essential oils. These species include; Mentha spicata, Ocimum
forskolei, Salvia macrosiphon, Salvia aegyptiaca, Salvia macilenta,
Salvia spinosa, Teucrium polium, Teucrium stocksianum and Zataria
multiflora. Although, such potential species are indigenous to the
UAE, however, there are almost no studies available to investigate
the chemical composition and the quality of the extracted essential
oils under the UAE climatological conditions. Therefore, great
attention has to be given to such valuable natural resources, through
conducting highly supported research projects, tailored to the UAE
conditions, and investigating different extraction techniques,
including the application of the latest available technologies, such as
superficial fluid CO2. This is crucially needed; in order to accomplish
the greatest possibilities in the medicinal field, specifically in the
discovery of new therapeutic chemotypes, as well as, to achieve the
sustainability of this natural resource in the country.
Abstract: Two micromechanical models for 3D smart composite
with embedded periodic or nearly periodic network of generally
orthotropic reinforcements and actuators are developed and applied to
cubic structures with unidirectional orientation of constituents.
Analytical formulas for the effective piezothermoelastic coefficients
are derived using the Asymptotic Homogenization Method (AHM).
Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is subsequently developed and used
to examine the aforementioned periodic 3D network reinforced smart
structures. The deformation responses from the FE simulations are
used to extract effective coefficients. The results from both
techniques are compared. This work considers piezoelectric materials
that respond linearly to changes in electric field, electric
displacement, mechanical stress and strain and thermal effects. This
combination of electric fields and thermo-mechanical response in
smart composite structures is characterized by piezoelectric and
thermal expansion coefficients. The problem is represented by unitcell
and the models are developed using the AHM and the FEA to
determine the effective piezoelectric and thermal expansion
coefficients. Each unit cell contains a number of orthotropic
inclusions in the form of structural reinforcements and actuators.
Using matrix representation of the coupled response of the unit cell,
the effective piezoelectric and thermal expansion coefficients are
calculated and compared with results of the asymptotic
homogenization method. A very good agreement is shown between
these two approaches.