Herein, we describe our ongoing efforts to develop a robust ontology for amphibian anatomy that accommodates the diversity of anatomical structures present in the group. We discuss the design and implementation of the project, current resolutions to issues we have encountered, and future enhancements to the ontology. We also comment on future efforts to integrate other data sets via this amphibian anatomical ontology.
Visual programming languages have facilitated the application development process, improving our ability to express programs, as well as our ability to view, edit, and interact with them. Yet even in visual programming environments, productivity is often restricted by the primary input sources: the mouse and the keyboard. As an alternative, we investigate a program development interface which responds to the most natural human communication technologies: voice, handwriting, and gesture. Speech-and penbased systems have yet to find broad acceptance in everyday life because they are insufficiently advantageous to overcome problems with reliability. However, we believe that a visual programming environment with a multimodal user interface properly constrained so as not to exceed the limits of the current technology has the potential to increase programming productivity for not only those people who are manually or visually impaired, but for the general population as well. In this paper we report on such a system.
VRCC-3D+ is an implementation of a region connection calculus that qualitatively determines the spatial relation between two 3D objects in terms of connectivity and obscuration. The eight connectivity relations are conceptually the same as RCC8, but calculated in 3D rather than 2D. The fifteen obscuration relations are calculated using the projection of the 3D objects on a particular 2D plane and the distance of the objects from the viewpoint. Herein we present a smaller, more precise set of VRCC-3D+ obscuration relations that retains the qualities of being jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint. However, this new set of relations overcomes two problems that existed in the previous set of fifteen relations: (1) lack of a precise mathematical definition for a key predicate, InFront, and (2) lack of an intuitive mapping of converse relations.
Version control systems (VCS) are widely-used in the software industry. They provide a powerful, collaborative framework that allows software engineers to work together effectively. VCS allow users to track changes and merge ongoing work into concurrently evolving software projects. Distributed VCS such as Git, allow a great degree of flexibility, and provide powerful options for managing personal code and evolving collaborative content. Power incurs responsibility, and introducing collaborative coding and version control tools to new developers can create many challenges. Yet these tools, once mastered, are crucial skills for professional developers. In this paper, the authors introduce VCS to computer science students both in a custom environment specifically designed to support new developers and in a commercially-available native environment suitable for more experienced students. Results show that proper introduction of these powerful tools can make early exposure a positive and valued experience.
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