Graziella Tonfoni - Böcker

Is writing primarily a functional medium of communication? Is it possible to access fuller potential for it to contribute to the quality of our everyday lives?Writing as a Visual Art offers a revolutionary approach to writing by exploring a visual and multidimensional experience that is fun and common to people's experience. Clearly written and liberally illustrated chapters show writing text as akin to creating a drawing or painting, or designing a structure.The result of discoveries made during ten years of research in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, the author's findings have been successfully applied in education programmes in Italy and the rest of Europe, as well as workshops in the United States.

As information becomes increasingly accessible through newly-introduced technologies, the human mind seeks a more comprehensive interpretation of the world in which we live. In order to manage this information overload, we must carefully reconsider our attitude towards documentation. While acknowledging the value of the standard guidebooks' hard rules on documentation management, Tonfoni advocates a new approach that promotes additional skills required for consistent decision-making, such as information sensitivity. This book has been conceived as a movie on paper, and as such, can be considered a 'documentary on documentation'. Readers are invited to analyse their own reading experience throughout a set of pages, to become 'interactive on paper'; some space is intentionally provided for practice and annotation. Exercises are included to help readers consolidate new skills, through an innovative 'learning by seeing' experience. Since history is based on documentation, every e-mail or memo we write becomes a part of our individual history. This book will be invaluable to those whose careers rest on accuracy, who need to create both succinct and clear reports and presentations.

This is a consideration of natural language as well as a systematic, scientific explanation of the author's CPP-TRS framework. The book considers natural language as an information state, reflecting inherent complexity, and is presented in four parts. The four parts are: the theoretical background of the author's CPP-TRS theories of both text comprehension and text compression, and the full range of phenomena being handled; the implications, the progressive shifts and the changes in viewing and rethinking language; the visual system in CPP-TRS language and methodology for interpretation of qualitively different components in natural language; and the applications designed by the author and information about the upcoming application developments. The book proceeds towards the organizing of a theoretical framework, based on a way of viewing language, in terms of quantitative and qualitative reasoning about communication via natural language.

The book aims to encourage multiple perspective reading attitudes, which are meant to trigger and inspire new ways of viewing and engineering information. An innovative linguistic theory as well as a new model for text generation and text understanding are illustrated. The linguistic theory, enhanced by a novel artificial intelligence-based approach, will help readers to acquire information engineering skills and may be implemented in the design of knowledge management systems.

There is a trend to offer courses by virtual means. This approach has definite advantages. For example, virtual programs target professionals who would otherwise have to leave their jobs to pursue the degree. An enormous proportion of universities are in the process of developing courses in a virtual environment.This book deals with virtual environments for teaching and learning. The chapters can be considered to be representative of the many approaches taken and the diversity of applications. The different perspectives and different solutions adopted are the result of intense research in various countries in the area of e-learning.

Modern defence forces rely mainly on intelligent information systems and high technology armour. This volume reflects the latest trends in military information systems research by bringing together international contributions that span from communications technology, through intelligent agents and large-scale modeling and simulation, to sociotechnical systems. Together, the articles represent a good cross section of contemporary information systems research.The book also shows the wealth of research on advanced information systems and on technologies developed for defence purposes. Some of the chapters may serve as a component of advanced defence training programs. They provide an important overview of crucial research, which has evolved over the last ten years.