The role of Hellenistic Tell Es-Sweyhat: cultural variation between the core and fringe within the seleucid upper Euphrates

Cultural interaction and diffusion is a multi-faceted phenomenon, which occurs varyingly in different contexts. The site of Tell es-Sweyhat, located in modern Syria, off the east bank of the Euphrates River, was occupied over many time periods. In the Hellenistic period, this site was under the administration of the Seleucid Empire (312 B.C. ? 63 B.C.). Tell es-Sweyhat presents an opportunity to examine adaptations and consistencies in a fringe site in the Seleucid world, which has been interpreted as a military outpost. An analysis of the archaeological pottery assemblage at Tell es-Sweyhat, when compared with the proximate and more prominent site of Jebel Khalid, provides one means of evincing the extent of cultural / technological differences between core and fringe sites in the Seleucid world

Semantic Integration of Sensor Data and Disaster Management Systems: The Emergency Archetype Approach

The Semantic Sensor Web (SSW) allows emergency response management (ERM) systems to consume sensor data and improve response time and effectiveness. It is also a fact that ERM must be carried out as a multiorganizational task to combine sensor data with human decisions and observations. A frequent problem in such scenarios is that current formats for data exchange do not support sensor data in a way that allows semantic interoperability between heterogeneous ERM systems. Therefore, part of the semantic richness coming from the SSW, such as the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (SSNO), is lost when sensor data is embedded in current ERM messages. To bridge the gap, an application of the two-level paradigm to the ERM domain is proposed. The advantages of using “emergency archetypes” include semantic data integration and flexibility to represent new types of messages, without losing the support for seamless exchange between heterogeneous ERM systems. Emergency archetypes can reuse the terminologies and ontologies available in the ERM domain so that systems based on previous formats can switch to archetypes in a straightforward process. Finally, a method to attach rules to emergency archetypes is explained, allowing not only the semantic interoperability of ERM data but also of the inference knowledge that trigger alerts and support decision making