Update my homepage yesterday

I spent the whole day on updating my homepage. 

1. The description of courses in the semester, Fall, 2005 was added. 

2. Modifications were done with the courses in Spring, 2005. (more materials were provided to download.)

3. New resume replaced the old one. 

Jokes

1.  I guess we just have to get used to roughing it.
2.  Basic training has a way of making a soldier feel that he or she is being worked like a dog. Now I have proof. While on KP duty at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, I was hauling containers of vegetables. On the side of one box was this: “FOR ANIMAL OR MILITARY USE ONLY.”
3. Tiring of the same old buzz cut from the base barber at Fort Dix, New Jersey, I went into town to get my haircut. The hairdresser noticed my accent and asked where I was from. “Trinidad,” I said. “Is that in Arabia?” “The Caribbean.” She laughed, “I never was good at geometry.”
4.  I was waiting for a flight to Texas along with four servicemen in desert camouflage uniforms. Over the top pocket of their uniform shirts was the branch of the military in which they served, followed by their last names. They were U.S. Navy, Ramirez, U.S. Army, Larkin and U.S. Army, O’Brien. The fourth man wasn’t a soldier. Above his shirt pocket it read, “D.O.D. Civilian, Coward.”
5.  Fifteen years of blissful civilian life ended when I re-upped with the Air National Guard recently. It took time getting back into the swing of things, and after a particularly rough day I missed chow, which meant dinner would be a dreaded MRE: Meal Ready to Eat. As I sat on my bunk staring at “dinner,” I said to a far younger airman, “Well, I guess we just have to get used to roughing it.” “Dude, tell me about it,” he said. “We only get basic cable!”
6. Traveling through Spain, my friend Amy and I soaked in the culture, gorged ourselves on excellent food and, basically, indulged our every whim. One day, we walked into a shop that had the most gorgeous coats. As we tried a few on, we noticed the odd looks we were getting from the shopkeepers. We didn’t know why, until one kind Englishspeaking patron took pity on us. “Excuse me,” she said. “This is a dry cleaners.”
7.  Applicants for jobs at the company where my friend Diana works are asked to fill out a questionnaire. Among the things candidates list is their high school and when they attended. One prospective employee dutifully wrote the name of his high school, followed by the dates attended: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,Thursday and Friday.”

The implementation of the interface for KADIS

The interface of Kadis aims to assist users to make a query through web browser by means of Internet techniques. It exploits the client-server architecture. The data are stored at the server side, and all processing work, such as query processing, data processing etc. is also done at the side of server. The user reads data and produces the query at the side of client through a web browser, for the moment only IE is completely supported. The basic operating procedure is present as a flow-chart in the following figure.

Below, we will give a detailed description of the very procedure.

1. There are two kinds of data used here, one is to do with the information collected from the original dataset of archeology, and the other is meta-data used to describe the relationships hiding in the former.

2. Two kinds of format are used to store the data, one is mysql, and the other is XML. So the mysql server is used in our project, which stores and manages the data related to the users' profiles, the original data from excel files, and those intermediary assistant to the query and display of data. With the natural tree-structure of XML, we construct the hierarchical structure of concepts in the ontology of each dataset. These XML files help us to display the archeological concepts hold in the original dataset in a tree-similar way (we can also call it hierarchical structure).

3. In the implementation, PHP language is used at the side of server, and Javascript is at the client side. I have to say, there are not many comments in the code. I also believe it's not easily to be maintained. I would rather take this very implementation as a temporary one, which is supposed to be constructed from the scratch if the project KADIS is formally and financially supported at last.

Kadis report at 2006-01-09

The report gives a simple description of overview of the implementation of interface for KADIS.

In the very phase, my work is to do with an implementation of the simple interface for the project Kadis. The interface will show a light on the basic interactive operations between web browser and users who are potentially interested with this project. On the other hand, my work is a natural extension from those of Toufeeq. So it's necessary to describe his work at the first place. According to him, he worked on the integration of ontology from different data base, honestly just two. The figure below presents the overview of the work that has been done for the project. The part above the dash line is done by Toufeeq, and the part below is mine.

Toufeeq's work:

1. For each different dataset, there is a corresponding 'code' scheme recording the code-value pair for each term used in the dataset. It's a system to simplify notes in the file. Toufeeq used Protege (an open-source software special in the management of ontology information. ) to construct and manage the ontology structure of each dataset based on its code scheme. The corresponding owl file is generated for each code scheme.

Some improvements are required:

1) The terms in the code file (.doc) are not completely consistent with those in the owl file.

2) The owl file is hard to understand. It's not a good idea to generate the ontology file automatically by Protege.

3) I am thinking whether it's a good way to organize the ontological information with the software Protege. It's glad to know it's open source project, but that's not mean it's the best choice in our own project. On the other hand, I am curious of the ability to control and exploit such a software efficiently before taking a lot time on understanding and learning to use.

2. The integration of different ontology are done by means of Protege, but human interference is necessary. I believe the role of human interference in the procedure is much more important than that of Protege. Protege is at all a tool, it's able to assist to represent and communicate, but not come up with solutions. So the main problem is still to do with people.

Some improvements are required on the basis of the current work.

1) A document is required to describe the work that has been finished in detail.

2) Please pay more attention to the algorithm to resolve the conflicts in the different ontological system, not to the tools or something else.

3) By the way, Toufeeq programmed a little to assist the generation of integrating dataset according to the integrated ontology scheme (owl file). I hate to do an evaluation of other's code, but I have to say, these code are not useful in the following work unfortunately.

(Toufeeq has said good-bye to this project, I guess, pleased. But I can not for the moment, faced with such an awful mess. There is a lot of work to do. I hope I'd better not spend too much time on that because I have other stuff to do. )

My work: query and display the results through web services

1) Based on the owl files provided by Toufeeq, I combined the ontology structure and code scheme with an XML scheme.

2) Base on the Xml Scheme and the original excel files, I convert the codes in the excel file into their corresponding values. And the new excel files are produced storing the values of each items instead of the code/numbers. This process is implemented by programming in Java.

3) With a software, all excel datasets are converted in the form of MySql.

4) The rest is to construct an interface to implement the query and display results by means of Web Services. The basic architecture is client-server, and the languages used here include php, javascript. If possible more details are going to be provided in the following days.