The use of methodologies in software and knowledge engineering is very extensive due to their important advantages. In the case of the development of ontologies, until now, several methodological proposals have been presented for building ontologies. Some of these methodologies are designed for building ontologies from scratch or reusing other ontologies without modifying them, concretely, the following cases can be mentioned: the Cyc methodology, the approach proposed by Uschold and King, Grüninger and Fox's methodology, the KACTUS methodology, METHONTOLOGY and the SENSUS methodology. There is even a proposal for re-engineering ontologies, and several proposals for collaborative construction of ontologies.

In this article, we describe the methodologies and check their degree of maturity, contrasting them with respect to the IEEE standard for software development. Before this, we justify to what extent this standard can be used. A conclusion to this study is that there is no completely mature methodological proposal for building ontologies, since there are some important activities and techniques that are missing in all these methodologies. However, all the methodologies do not have the same degree of maturity. In fact, METHONTOLOGY is a very mature methodology. The other conclusion of this article is that, although work to unify proposals can be interesting, maybe several approaches should coexist.

Every finitary endofunctor of $\Set$ is proved to generate a free iterative theory in the sense of Elgot. This work is based on coalgebras, specifically on parametric corecursion, and the proof is presented for categories more general than just $\Set$.

In this paper I discuss Hysteria, a work for trombone and four-channel tape. Abbie Conant, an internationally recognised trombonist, commissioned and performed Hysteria as part of her ‘Wired Goddess’ project. I chose five lines of poetry from John Campion's Tongue Stones: ‘matter/mater/meter/muthos’, ‘bowl of regeneration/quickener of wombs’, ‘follow the mysteries of your feet’, ‘Let dark ages be crucibles’ and ‘wounds like flowers opening’. With this text I created an implex of sonic images relating the body, fertility, menses and violence. The first line is particularly important and shapes the first two-thirds of the piece. The musical material complements the text and uses periodicity to suggest the body's heartbeat and breath. The heartbeat serves as a cantus firmus, occurring every five seconds, and pedal tones form the primary material for the trombone part and connect to the idea of breath. The punctuating gunshots occurring in the first half imply violence, and the dark red lighting suggests blood. The tape and trombone intertwine in a sonic world evoking the womb and regeneration. The four-channel tape heightens the sense of immersion that connected to the piece's resonance and dream-like atmosphere. The web of these associations constitutes an artistic reflection on the sensibility and experience of the feminine in a patriarchal society.

The origins of women's pioneering contributions to the repertoire and history of electroacoustic music can often be linked to the growth of academic and commercial electronic and computer music studios in North America. A significant number of early female composers in the medium received their initial training and experience in the United States and their accomplishments begin in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. Women's achievements in the educational and entertainment sectors have laid the foundation for subsequent generations who have influenced the aesthetic and technical path of electroacoustic music.

Excerpted from several chapters of the author's historical series on women composers and music technology, the article outlines the contributions of several of the earliest women in the United States to the utilisation of music technology in creative work. Also discussed are research precedents in this area and issues regarding women and music technology in the United States today. With the creation of her book series outlining the achievements of women working with music technology, the author hopes to offer a valuable contribution to research on the history of electroacoustic music in general and women's representation in the genre in particular.

Project Lovelace is a school-based programme for students aged twelve to eighteen years interested in learning about making music by using technology. The programme is designed to encourage equal and equitable participation by male and female students through instruction in technology-enhanced music performance, improvisation, composition, analysis and notation. Project Lovelace is named in honour of the contributions of the female mathematician Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, who in 1842 predicted that computers could be used for musical composition (Roads 1996).

The goals of Project Lovelace are to develop collaborative-based methods for gender-balanced school music technology programmes, amass a gender-balanced repertoire suitable for school music technology programmes, nurture creativity and analytical skills in music technology, and conduct a longitudinal study that documents the changing attitudes and perceived competencies of participating students and teachers.

The motivation to initiate Project Lovelace was the timely convergence of two vexing issues perennially facing music technology programmes in higher education, specifically at the University of Michigan: the proportionally small number of female applicants to university music technology programmes and the need to continually upgrade or replace laboratory equipment. Why not allocate second-generation university laboratory equipment to the schools with the intent of building school-based music technology curricula that lead to a gender-balanced university applicant pool?

The aim of this paper is to study the threshold behavior for the satisfiability property of a random k-XOR-CNF formula or equivalently for the consistency of a random Boolean linear system with k variables per equation. For k ≥ 3 we show the existence of a sharp threshold for the satisfiability of a random k-XOR-CNF formula, whereas there are smooth thresholds for k=1 and k=2.

We present the dual to Birkhoff's variety theorem in terms of predicates over the carrier of a cofree coalgebra (that is, in terms of ‘coequations’). We then discuss the dual to Birkhoff's completeness theorem, showing how closure under deductive rules dualises to yield two modal operators acting on coequations. We discuss the properties of these operators and show that they commute. We prove as our main result the invariance theorem, which is the formal dual of Birkhoff's completeness theorem.

This article attempts to identify trends in non-academic Japanese electronic music related to the representation of identity issues including gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race. Simultaneously, it attempts to point out limitations in Western identity politics which complicate the identification and clarification of such themes. In particular, the Western desire to define cultural diversity through a multiplication of distinct identity constructs is contrasted with Japanese aversions to images of factionalism or political affiliation. It is postulated that the ‘Globular’ identity politics found in Japanese electronic music suggest ways of thinking around Western ideological conundrums such as the tendency to use terms of ‘equality’ (a notion of similarity) when negotiating for communal ‘diversity’ (a notion of dissimilarity). This extends to current attempts at diversification among academic and commercial digital audio producers.

We give a bound for the ω-equivalence problem of polynomially bounded D0L systems which depends only on the size of the underlying alphabet.

This article is part of PhD research dealing with gender issues in electroacoustic music, focusing on the voice. The first part of the article begins with a discussion of the musical material under research. Thereafter follows an elaborate overview of the number of male and female composers, vocalists and recorded voices in several series of CDs of electroacoustic and computer music. The gendered roles of the live, pre-recorded and synthesised voices are discussed and the musical couple of the male composer and the female vocalist emerges. The second part touches upon several issues raised by the results of part one: the roles of the performer and the composer, (dis)embodiment, femininity and technology. This is a preview into some of the remaining research. In section 2, other music than the CD series of section 1 is discussed as well. The gender patterns are interpreted in a broader context. The role of the female vocalist is many sided. Cyborg voices relate to old patterns as well as new possibilities.

Preparing Organised Sound's thematic issue on ‘gender in music technology’ has been exciting and challenging. Exciting, because this field is young with only a few publications around. Such a thematic issue offers an opportunity to bring people together who are active in this field, and thus works towards the creation of a ‘critical mass’. Hopefully it will stimulate others to think and write about these gender issues as well. But the area itself also posed a challenge. Would we receive enough submissions? Would we be able to publish a sufficiently interesting issue on gender?

During the last few years it has become increasingly clear that a very wide variety of state-based dynamical systems, such as transition systems, automata, process calculi and class-based systems can be captured uniformly as coalgebras. Moreover, the theory and applications of coalgebras is developing into a field of interest in its own right, presenting a deep mathematical foundation, a growing range of applications and interactions with various other areas, such as reactive and interactive system theory, object-oriented and concurrent programming, formal system specification, modal logic, dynamical systems, control systems, category theory, algebra, analysis, and so on.

This article reports on the first phase of a four-year, multi-university Canadian research project called ‘In and Out of the Studio’. The intention of this project is to study the experiences and working practices of women sound producers in Canada, and to produce a multimedia computer installation and set of articles about their ideas, approaches and philosophies. We are studying gender issues that affect the work of these women in areas as diverse as film sound recording and post-production, sound engineering, radio art, performance art, experimental music, audio documentary production, and web sound. This is a wide range of disciplines, with their associated professional formations. What links the experiences of these diverse cultural workers is their focus on organising sound, and their gender. The first phase of the research focuses on formations: the following phase will concentrate on working practices through a discussion and analysis of specific recent works produced by the participants. The second part of this article explores the working processes of Hildegard Westerkamp in her composition of Gently Penetrating Beneath the Sounding Surfaces of Another Place (1997), through an interview with Westerkamp conducted in 1997. This interview will be used as a model for the in-depth studio interviews in the present study.

We prove that for every countable ordinal α one cannot decidewhether a given infinitary rational relation is in the Borel class ${\bf \Sigma_{\alpha}^0}$ (respectively ${\bf \Pi_{\alpha}^0}$ ). Furthermoreone cannotdecide whether a given infinitary rational relation is a Borel set or a ${\bf \Sigma_{1}^1}$ -complete set. We prove some recursive analogues to theseproperties. In particular one cannot decide whether an infinitary rational relation is anarithmetical set.We then deduce from the proof ofthese results some other ones, like: one cannot decide whether thecomplement ofan infinitary rational relation is also an infinitary rational relation.

We describe the communicating alternating machines and theirsimulation. We show that, in the case of communicating alternatingmachines which are bounded, simultaneously, by polynomial time andlogarithmic space, the use of three communication levels insteadof two does not increase computational power of communicatingalternating machines. This resolves an open problem [2]concerning the exact position of machines with three communicationlevels in the hierarchy.

Bayesian Networks and Decision Graphs by Finn V. Jensen, Springer Verlag, £64.95, ISBN 0-387-95259-4

1 Opening

PKDD 2001, the 5th European Conference on Principles of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD), was held in Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, this year (Monday 3 to Thursday 7 September), and co-located with the 12th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML 2001). The proceedings comprised two volumes, one for PKDD (De Raedt & Siebes, 2001) and one for ECML (De Raedt & Flach, 2001); and form part of the Springer Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. The conference was held in the University buildings in the centre of the old town. Freiburg and the surrounding area were for many years part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and thus the university was described to us as being one of the oldest Austrian Universities.

The main focus of this article is the work of Daphne Oram, composer of electronic music, who founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958 and went on to run her own independent studio from where she composed several significant pieces of electronic music, designed and built a new audio recording machine, and lectured and wrote extensively on electronic and concrète music. The paper will endeavour to show that Ms Oram is deserving of recognition as an innovative composer of electronic and concrète music, as well as possessing interesting and valuable insight into the practice and theory of this medium. It will critically examine her work, and methods for achieving completed pieces, and compare and contrast her compositional work and the thinking behind it, to the work of other significant composers of the time.

This survey introduces existing approaches to Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) and particularly Conversation Policies (CPs) which can be viewed as general constraints on the sequence of semantically coherent messages leading to a goal. Then limitations of these CPs are discussed in detail, particularly limitations on flexibility and specification. Finally, ACLs are viewed from the dialectic point of view, and some approaches are introduced in this context: some focusing on commitment-based protocols and others on dialogue-game-based protocols.

In my dissertation Gender Perspectives in Vocal Performance Art, I examine the history and aesthetics of the genre. The core of my work is a vocal database that focuses especially on the extended vocal techniques of the natural voice. In this article, I concentrate on the electronic aspect of vocal performance art. While I provide a brief historical overview of the developments of vocal performance art and its technological developments from the 1970s to the 1990s, the central question of this article is whether gender patterns exist when these practices are combined with electronic sound technologies.