Bücher der Reihe Research Reports Esprit

ICEIMT '97 is the second International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology. The conference papers present points of view of users, vendors, and researchers, the current state of research and development worldwide, and the needs to be identified and summarized in project proposals.

Data fusion, the ability to combine data derived fromseveral sources to provide a coherent, informative, anduseful characterization of a situation,is a challengingtask. There is no unified and proven solution which isapplicable in all circumstances, but there are manyplausible and useful approaches which can be and are used tosolve particular applications. This volume presents the proceedings of the workshop DataFusion Applications hosted in Brussels by the 1992 ESPRITConference and Exhibition. It contains 22 papers from 69experts,who present advanced research results on datafusion together with practicalsolutions to multisensor datafusion in a wide variety of applications: real-time expertsystems, robotics, medical diagnosis and patientsurveillance, monitoring and control, marine protection,surveillance and safety in public transportation systems,image processing and interpretation, and environmentalmonitoring. The research forms part of the ESPRIT projectDIMUS (Data Integration in Multisensor Systems).

This book is intended to give an overview of the major results achieved in the field of natural speech understanding inside ESPRIT Project P. 26, "e;Advanced Algorithms and Architectures for Speech and Image Processing"e;. The project began as a Pilot Project in the early stage of Phase 1 of the ESPRIT Program launched by the Commission of the European Communities. After one year, in the light of the preliminary results that were obtained, it was confirmed for its 5-year duration. Even though the activities were carried out for both speech and image understand- ing we preferred to focus the treatment of the book on the first area which crystallized mainly around the CSELT team, with the valuable cooperation of AEG, Thomson-CSF, and Politecnico di Torino. Due to the work of the five years of the project, the Consortium was able to develop an actual and complete understanding system that goes from a continuously spoken natural language sentence to its meaning and the consequent access to a database. When we started in 1983 we had some expertise in small-vocabulary syntax-driven connected-word speech recognition using Hidden Markov Models, in written natural lan- guage understanding, and in hardware design mainly based upon bit-slice microprocessors.

The Translator's Workbench Project was a European Community sponsored research and development project which dealt with issues in multi-lingual communication and docu- mentation. This book presents an integrated toolset as a solution to problems in translation and docu- mentation. Professional translators and teachers of translation were involved in the proc- ess of software development, starting with a detailed study of the user requirements and ending with several evaluation-and-improvement cycles of the resulting toolset. English, German, Greek, and Spanish are addressed in the contributions, however, some of the techniques are inherently language-independent and can thus be extended to cover other languages as well. Translation can be viewed broadly as the execution of three cognitive processes, and this book has been structured along these lines: * First, the translation pre-process, understanding the target language text at a lexico- semantic level on the one hand, and making sense of the source language document on the other hand. The tools for the pre-translation process include access to electronic networks, conversion of documents from one format to another, creation of terminol- ogy data banks and access to existing data banks, and terminology dictionaries. * Second, the translation process, rendering sentences in the source language into equiva- lent target sentences. The translation process refers to the potential of conventional machine translation systems, like METAL, and of the statistically oriented translation memory.

The Product Data Technology Advisory Group, short PDTAG, was established on 30 September 1992 under the auspices of the ESPRIT CIME Division of the Directorate General XIII of the European Commission. Its goals include promoting European cooperation and improving the European infrastructure in Product Data Technology, particularly in connection with the new standard STEP (ISO 10303). The dissemination of information on Product Data Technology and on European contributions to STEP is of crucial importance to this development. The current volume is the first title in a new PDTAG subseries to Springer Publishers' Research Reports ESPRIT. This new subseries intends to form a comprehensive repository of publications on Product Data Technology resulting from ESPRIT Projects and from European contributions to standardisation based on ISO/STEP. PDTAG welcomes the opportunity to make this information more accessible under the format of a coherent subseries within the established framework of Research Reports ESPRIT. Much valuable background on the new international PDT standard can thus be found in the same collection.

The Commission of the European Union, through its Fourth Framework R&D programme is committed to the development of the Information Society. There is no doubt that there will be many radical changes in all aspects of society caused by the far-reaching impact of continuing advances in information and communi- cation technologies. Many of these changes cannot be predicted, but that uncer- tainty must not stop us from moving forward. The challenge is to ensure that these technologies are put to use in the most beneficial manner, taking fully into account the rich cultural and linguistic backgrounds within the peoples of Europe. We have a duty to ensure that the ultimate end-users of the technology are involved in the development and application of that technology to help shape its use. Without this active involvement, designers will not understand the individual and organisational requirements of the users, and the users will not understand the impact and applicability of the new technology. Failure on either account will lead to a sense of resentment on the part of the users and a lost opportunity to improve the quality of human life. The work, sponsored by the Human Comfort & Security sub-domain of the ESPRIT programme, has a central part to play in the creation of the Information Society, lying as it does at the interface between the technology and the user.

The content of this book is the result of the work and the experiences of an interdisciplinary and strictly European group of researchers who have attempted to give birth to a new fibre communication network concept by exploiting the potential benefits of optical coherent transmission. The run towards this ambitious goal started in 1985 on the basis of the ESPRIT program incentives by an "e;ad hoc"e; consortium of industrial partners and research institutions. The first three years were dedicated to a feasibility study carried out by a reduced number of "e;pioneers"e;. In 1989 the team was extended to eleven partners. There was already clear evidence of the increasing interest in Europe in exploring the actual limits of optical fibre coherent systems; the project had innovative and very advanced features that were gradually refined by incorporating the latest technological developments to which it has directly contributed. The main objective of the project targeted the development of the necessary building blocks to show experimentally the performance and the flexibility built into the proposed concept of multi-channel ultra-wideband network. The system concept developed within this project associates optical frequency division multiplexing with a suitable network architecture and management techniques to allow very high flexibility and efficiency in handling simultaneous transmission over the network (on each optical frequency) of multiple virtual channels each operating with a wide range of information rates ranging from a fraction of a Mb/s up to a maximum value in excess of 160 Mb/s.

Delta-4 is a 5-nation, 13-partner project that has been investigating the achievement of dependability in open distributed systems, including real-time systems. This book describes the design and validation of the distributed fault-tolerant architecture developed within this project. The key features of the Delta-4 architecture are: (a) a distributed object-oriented application support environment; (b) built-in support for user-transparent fault- tolerance; (c) use of multicast or group communication protocols; and (d) use of standard off- the-shelf processors and standard local area network technology with minimum specialized hardware. The book is organized as follows: The first 3 chapters give an overview of the architecture's objectives and of the architecture itself, and compare the proposed solutions with other approaches. Chapters 4 to 12 give a more detailed insight into the Delta-4 architectural concepts. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to providing a firm set of general concepts and terminology regarding dependable and real-time computing. Chapter 6 is centred on fault-tolerance techniques based on distribution. The description of the architecture itself commences with a description of the Delta-4 application support environment (Deltase) in chapter 7. Two variants of the architecture - the Delta-4 Open System Architecture (OSA) and the Delta-4 Extra Performance Architecture (XPA) - are described respectively in chapters 8 and 9. Both variants of the architecture have a common underlying basis for dependable multicasting, i. e.

Formal methods for hardware design still find limited use in industry. Yet current practice has to change to cope with decreasing design times and increasing quality requirements. This research report presents results from the Esprit project FORMAT (formal methods in hardware verification) which involved the collaboration of the enterprises Siemens, Italtel, Telefonica I+D, TGI, and AHL, the research institute OFFIS, and the universities of Madrid and Passau. The work presented involves advanced specification languages for hardware design that are intuitive to the designer, like timing diagrams and state based languages, as well as their relation to VHDL and formal languages like temporal logic and a process-algebraic calculus. The results of experimental tests of the tools are also presented.

In this ESPRIT research report of a group of engineers in the CAD*I project the possibility of using a database management system (DBMS) for computer aided design (CAD) purposes is analyzed and conditions are derived that enable CAD systems to manage CAD models containing increasing amounts of data and more and more intelligent relations.

This book reports research conducted in the ESPRIT project PECOS, which investigated the requirements for effective CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) with special reference to cooperation among organisations in large projects.

Detailed studies of technical documentation requirements have revealed that in particular the following functionality is not usually provided by such simple documentation systems: Technical documentation is often very large;

The market for information technology products is rapidly changing from a manufactur er-driven market where new products were determined by the evolution of technology, to a user-driven market where users buy only products corresponding exactly to their needs and where competition is very strong.

Internationally recognized experts in the field of holographic interferometric testing, X-ray testing, and structural analysis by finite element techniques have come together in ESPRIT project 898 to develop a system that integrates these techniques.

Reiner Anderl The Advanced Modelling part of the CAD*I project aimed at the development of a new generation of modelling techniques as a basic functionality of future CAD/CAM systems.

This volume documents the concepts, experiences, results, and conclusions of the ESPRIT project NEUTRABAS (Neutral Product Definition Database for Large Multifunctional Systems).

This volume describes manufacturing message specification (MMS), an OSI communication protocol used between manufacturing devices such as numerical controllers and robots. It offers advice on which services are best suited for specific applications.

This volume describes the computer integrated manufacturing and engineering environment, a software platform for the development and execution of distributed manufacturing applications in an open environment. It provides the reader with insight into issues affecting distributed manufacturing.

Reports the achievements of an ESPRIT project on the problems linked with the control of light-weight robots. It describes the design and development of a high-performance robot for use in Flexible Automated Assembly Program (FAAS) environments.

Neural network technology encompasses a class of methodswhich attempt to mimic the basic structures used in thebrain for information processing.

Design can be identified and considered in the context of many activities related to pUblishing: creating a product ad in a magazine, designing the layout of a newspaper, authoring a book.

The purpose of this book is to present a project from the ESPRIT Specific Programme of European Research and Development in Information Technology, project number 6310, known as MMTCA: Multimedia Toolbox for Cooperative Applications.

The content of this book is an information model for technical drawings, the so-called "Drafting Model". Within the Drafting Model the annotation representations are described on the one hand informally and on the other hand formally using a high level language for information modeling, EXPRESS.

This final report on the Esprit project ORCHESTRA deals with the design and development of an advanced groupware environment. It provides a global perspective on the project from the technical, research and development, and marketing points of view.

Product Data Technology encompasses the information related to all stages in the product life cycle from product design via production planning, production processes, production control etc.

Traditionally, the European-based biannual international conference "EUROSPEECH" dealing with all aspects of speech science and technology is preceded by an "ESPRIT Speech Projects Days", which presents a particularly well timed opportunity to measure progress in speech technology and ap plications in Europe.

Enterprise operation efficiency is seriously constrained by the inability to provide the right information, in the right place, at the right time.

The aim of this study is to provide evidence of the relevance of functional programming for software engineering, both from a research and a practical point of view. Formal techniques such as abstract interpretation and program transformation are presented and applied to practical problems.