CONTENTS: 1 OBJECTIVE........................................................................................................................2 2 GENERAL SCIENTIFIC STATUS.....................................................................................2 3 FORMAL ONTOLOGY IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS...................................................2 4 CURRENT STATUS OF TOP-LEVEL ONTOLOGY.........................................................3 5 APPLICATIONS IN THE FIELD OF CLINICAL TRIALS................................................3 5.1 CLINICAL TRIALS: AIMS AND RELEVANCE.......................................................................3 5.2 STATUS OF PREVIOUS AND PRESENT MEDICAL CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS..........................4 5.3 TOWARDS A FUTURE GENERATION OF COMPUTER-BASED CLINICAL<

With the increasing access to various types of remotely sensed and ancillary spatial data, there is a growing demand for an independent source of reliable ground data to systematically support information extraction for gaining an understanding of earth systems. Conventionally maps, ad-hoc sample campaigns or exclusively remotely sensed data are used but these approaches are not well suited for effective data integration. This paper discusses avenues towards alternative methods for field data acquisition geared to the extraction of information from remotely sensed and ancillary spatial datasets from a geoscience perspective. We foresee that the merging of expertise in recently developed mobile technology, database design and thematic geoscientific knowledge, provides the potential to deliver innovative strategies for the acquisition and analysis of ground data that could profoundly alter the methods how we model earth systems today. With further development and maturation of such research methodologies we ultimately envisage a situation where planners and researchers can with the same ease as they nowadays download remotely sensed data over the web, download standardized and reliable `factual' datasets from the surface of the earth to process downloaded remotely sensed data for effective extraction of information. This could result in a worldwide reduction of duplicative ground surveys and at the same time provide a wealth of information that is far more relevant to the societal needs, as the deliveries of today.

Suppose you own a garden-variety object such as a hat or a shirt. Your property right then follows the ageold saw according to which possession is nine-tenths of the law. That is, your possession of a shirt constitutes a strong presumption in favor of your ownership of the shirt. In the case of land, however, this is not the case. Here possession is not only not a strong presumption in favor of ownership; it is not even clear what possession is. Possessing a thing like a hat or a shirt is a rather straightforward affair: the person wearing the hat or shirt possesses the shirt or the hat. But what is possession in the case of land? This essay seeks to provide an answer to this question in the form of an ontology of landed property. 1. The Boundaries of Landed Property: How Far Does Your Property Extend? In his far-reaching study of property rights, Richard Pipes discusses the etymology of ‘possession ’ and cognate terms. He tells us: Some primates assert exclusive claims to land by physically occupying or “sitting ” on it. This behavior is not so different from that of humans, as indicated by the etymology of words denoting possession in many languages. Thus, the German verb for “to own”, besitzen, and the noun for “possession”, Besitz, literally reflect the idea of sitting on or, figuratively, settling upon. The Polish

1 Project description 1 1.1 Software complexity and computer education...................... 1 1.2 An approach to handle software complexity and computer education......... 2 1.3 Comparison with other approaches............................ 3

SUMMARY: Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Geographical Information System (GIS) are being used in tandem to support a variety of decisions throughout the life cycle of civil infrastructure systems. Existing CAD and GIS platforms have been developed independently with different purposes resulting in significant differences in terms of data formats they support, terminology they utilize, semantics of concepts they represent, and reasoning techniques on which they are based. For this reason, existing CAD and GIS platforms are currently not interoperable, resulting in wasted time and money due to limitations associated with exchange of data and knowledge. Within the context of this paper, we highlight a set of interoperability challenges associated with CAD and GIS platforms and describe a web-service based approach that will enable semantic interoperability between these two platforms. The paper specifically discusses research challenges associated with different components of such a proposed semantic web-based approach; namely task decomposition, ontology identification, web service discovery and matching, and service composition. KEYWORDS: semantic web services, CAD-GIS, interoperability, web service composition, automated planning, web service discovery