With the invention and rapid improvement of data-capturing devices, such as satellite imagery and digital cameras, the information that archaeologists must manage in their everyday's activities has rapidly grown in complexity and amount. In this work we present Indiana Finder, an interactive visualization system that supports archaeologists in the examination of large repositories of documents and drawings. In particular, the system provides visual analytic support for investigative analysis such as the interpretation of new archaeological findings, the detection of interpretation anomalies, and the discovery of new insights. We illustrate the potential of Indiana Finder in the context of the digital protection and conservation of rock art natural and cultural heritage sites. In this domain, Indiana Finder provides an integrated environment that archaeologists can exploit to investigate, discover, and learn from textual documents, pictures, and drawings related to rock carvings. This goal is accomplished through novel visualization methods including visual similarity ring charts that may help archaeologists in the hard task of dating a symbol in a rock engraving based on its shape and on the surrounding symbols.

Although the C-based interpreter of Python is reasonably fast, implementations on the CLI or the JVM platforms offers some advantages in terms of robustness and interoperability. Unfortunately, because the CLI and JVM are primarily designed to execute statically typed, object-oriented languages, most dynamic language implementations cannot use the native bytecodes for common operations like method calls and exception handling; as a result, they are not able to take full advantage of the power offered by the CLI and JVM.

In this paper we report a set of results extracted from our experience in using PDAs and 3G multimedia cellular phones in Cultural Heritage (CH) through projects covering an activity spanning 10 years. In particular, we focus on a interesting variant of context-awareness, namely attention-awareness, derived from our more recent ICT European project, named Agamemnon. Such concepts are essential to the development of next generation mobile applications in cultural heritage and in other comparable fields. We present an experiment tackling this new issue by exploiting image recognition technology and we deeply analyze advantages and drawbacks of this approach, showing some preliminary results.

Rectangular dualization is an effective, hierarchically oriented visualization method for network topologies and can be used in many other problems having in common with networks the condition that objects and their interoccurring relations are represented by means of a planar graph. However, only 4-connected triangulated planar graphs admit a rectangular dual. In this paper we present a linear time algorithm to optimally construct a rectangular layout for a general class of graphs and we discuss a variety of application fields where this approach represents an helpful support for visualization tools.

Recent advances in the availability of 3G-cellular phones with imaging and multimedia capability and in the development of the new mobile telephone networks opens completely new horizons for the development of innovative IT tools in the domain of cultural heritage, with particular emphasis to archaeological sites and museums. AGAMEMNON is a project, co-funded under the 1ST 6th Framework Program of the European Commission, which exploits mobile phones equipped with embedded cameras as the main input/output device to provide a visitor of an archeological site with a personalized, information enriched experience. In this paper we describe the image-based "attention awareness engine" which represents the main concept entrusted into AGAMEMNON's user interface a mechanism for querying multimedia cultural heritage contents based on the user's context. We shall also discuss the main issues underlying the addressed problem, and review the preliminary results obtained so far in the project development.

HIDEL (HIerarchical DEscription Language) is a new language for structural description of hardware systems. The use of HIDEL allows a modular and hierarchical description of a hardware system. HIDEL can be integrated with a data model, called the Hierarchical Hypergraph with Ports (HHP), which provides a graph-based description of a VLSI object at different levels of specification. The possibility of extending the HIDEL-HHP environment with functional description for simulation is also investigated.

A structured graph is a hierarchy of graphs which provides a representation of a graph at variable detail levels. In this paper we investigate the path problem in a structured graph. The concept of structured graph is defined, and a formal definition of path in such a structure is given. The relationship between structured paths and canonical ones in the graph represented by a structured graph is investigated. Algorithms to construct paths and to compute a structured path from a given canonical one are presented.

Abstract A method to develop cross‐assemblers is explained by describing the XMETA system, where the advantages given by the semantic power of meta‐assemblies have been combined with the clarity of modern high level languages, such as Pascal, in defining assembly semantics. XMETA accepts a superset of the IEEE‐P694 microprocessor assembly language standard syntax: system structure is detailed and examples are provided to illustrate its use. Actual experiences are briefly summarized in the conclusions.

Abstract We present the results of our experience in introducing modularity into the programming language Pascal in order to aid the creation and use of library modules. Our system performs the symbolic linking of source language modules producing a single Pascal text ready for compilation; performing the link phase before compilation anticipates interface consistency checks, and suggests a possible improvement of program development systems. Our extension is implemented in a preprocessor which ensures a complete compatibility with any standard Pascal compiler. In this paper we examine the main features of some high‐level programming languages which support modularization and data abstraction and some experiences in introducing modularity into Pascal; on this basis we describe our choice in detail. The design and implementation details are discussed and some examples are presented.