Contributions in Merlin

Mit der Verlegung des Glasfasernetzes bis in die Haushalte vollzieht die Schweiz einen bedeutenden Schritt beim Ausbau ihrer Telekom-Infrastruktur. Dabei stellen sich Fragen bezüglich des künftigen Wettbewerbs- bzw. Regulierungsregimes, zumal die geltende Gesetzgebung keinen regulierten Netzzugang bei Glasfaser vorsieht. Zwar planen neben Swisscom auch zahlreiche städtische Elektrizitätswerke Investitionen in Glasfasernetze, doch ist damit ein stabiler und effektiver Infrastrukturwettbewerb nicht mit Sicherheit gewährleistet. Die Studie von Avenir Suisse schlägt einen differenzierten Regulierungsansatz vor, welcher grundsätzlich von einem funktionierenden Infrastrukturwettbewerb ausgeht und von einem regulierten Netzzugang absieht. Werden jedoch die Voraussetzungen für effektiven Wettbewerb nicht oder nicht mehr erfüllt, erfolgt ein regulierter Netzzugang auf regionaler Ebene. Die Effektivität dieses Ansatzes wird entscheidend gestärkt, wenn der Regulator auf die Gestaltung der Investitionspartnerschaften zwischen Swisscom und den Elektrizitätswerken Einfluss nehmen kann. Ausserdem würde die Funktionsfähigkeit des Wettbewerbes nachhaltig verbessert, wenn die Elektrizitätswerke eine gemeinsame Netzgesellschaft bildeten.

null

null

null

Mobile robots often encounter complex obstacles during their operation, not the least of which are stairs. Suitable mechanical structures and adequate control algorithms are both equally important in stair climbing. This paper proposes a novel design for a multi-active crawler robot (MACbot) capable of autonomous stair climbing. The MACbot has four track modules for extended mobility and a recovery arm that facilitates self-rescue capabilities. By adopting the proposed smart clutch mechanism, the MACbot can provide a variety of motions with a minimum number of motors. This paper presents a static analysis for the mechanical design and details the stability analysis for an autonomous stair climbing algorithm. A series of experiments show that the MACbot can autonomously climb stairs reasonably well.

Attempto Controlled English (ACE) is a mature and expressive knowledge representation language. To test the limits of ACE's expressivity we describe ACE and its associated tools in ACE itself. While this abstract and the reference section use unconstrained English, the rest of the article is expressed in ACE and can be submitted to the Attempto Parsing Engine (APE). The plain text version of the content of this paper and the lexicon needed to parse it can be found online.

The existing Semantic Web languages have a very technical focus and fail to provide good usability for users with no background in formal methods. We argue that controlled natural languages like Attempto Controlled English (ACE) can solve this problem. ACE is a subset of English that can be translated into various logic based languages, among them the Semantic Web standards OWL and SWRL. ACE is accompanied by a set of tools, namely the parser APE, the Attempto Reasoner RACE, the ACE View ontology and rule editor, the semantic wiki AceWiki, and the Protune policy framework. The applications cover a wide range of Semantic Web scenarios, which shows how broadly ACE can be applied. We conclude that controlled natural languages can make the Semantic Web better understandable and more usable.

In software development, a major difficulty comes from the intrinsic complexity of software systems and the size of which can easily reach millions of lines of code. But software is an intangible artifact that does not have any natural visual representation. While many software visualization techniques have been proposed in the literature, they are often difficult to interpret. In fact, the user of such representations is confronted with an artificial world that contains and represents intangible objects. The goal of our EVOSPACES project was to investigate effective visual metaphors (i.e., analogies) between natural objects and software objects so that we can exploit the cognitive understanding of the user. The difficulty of the approach is that the common sense expectations about the displayed world should also apply to the world of software objects. To solve this common sense representation problem for software objects our project addressed both the small-scale (i.e., the level of individual objects) and the large-scale (i.e., the level of groups of objects). After many experiments we decided for a "city" metaphor: at the small scale we included different houses and their shapes as visual objects to cover size, structure and history. At the large-scale level we arrange the different types of houses in districts and include their history in diverse layouts. The user then is able to use EVOSPACES virtual software city to navigate and explore all kinds of aspects of a city and its houses: size, age, historical evolution, changes, growth, restructuring, and evolution patterns such as code smells or architectural decay. For that we have developed a software environment named EVOSPACES as a plug-in to Eclipse so that visual metaphors can quickly be implemented in an easily navigable virtual space. Due to the large amount of information we complemented the flat 2D world with full-fledged immersive 3D representation. In this virtual software city, the dimensions and appearance of the buildings can be set according to software metrics. The user of the EVOSPACES environment can then explore a given software system by navigating through the corresponding virtual city.