Due to the possibility that petroleum supplies will be exhausted in the next decades to come, more and more attention has been paid to the production of bacterial pl- tics including polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), polylactic acid (PLA), poly(butylene succinate) (PBS), biopolyethylene (PE), poly(trimethylene terephthalate) (PTT), and poly(p-phenylene) (PPP). These are well-studied polymers containing at least one monomer synthesized via bacterial transformation. Among them, PHA, PLA and PBS are well known for their biodegradability, whereas PE, PTT and PPP are probably less biodegradable or are less studied in terms of their biodegradability. Over the past years, their properties and appli- tions have been studied in detail and products have been developed. Physical and chemical modifications to reduce their cost or to improve their properties have been conducted. PHA is the only biopolyester family completely synthesized by biological means. They have been investigated by microbiologists, molecular biologists, b- chemists, chemical engineers, chemists, polymer experts, and medical researchers for many years. PHA applications as bioplastics, fine chemicals, implant biomate- als, medicines, and biofuels have been developed. Companies have been est- lished for or involved in PHA related R&D as well as large scale production. It has become clear that PHA and its related technologies form an industrial value chain in fermentation, materials, feeds, and energy to medical fields.
The book synthesizes research on the analysis of biomedical ontologies using formal concept analysis, including through auditing, curation, and enhancement. As the evolution of biomedical ontologies almost inevitably involves manual work, formal methods are a particularly useful tool for ontological engineering and practice, particularly in uncovering unexpected "bugs" and content materials. The book first introduces simple but formalized strategies for discovering undesired and incoherent patterns in ontologies before exploring the application of formal concept analysis for semantic completeness. The book then turns to formal concept analysis, a classical approach used in the mathematical treatment of orders and lattices, as an ontological engineering principle, focusing on the structural property of ontologies with respect to its conformation to lattice or not (non-lattice). The book helpfully covers the development of more efficient algorithms for non-latticedetection and extraction required by exhaustive lattice/non-lattice analysis. The book goes on to highlight the power and utility of uncovering non-lattice structure for debugging ontologies and describes methods that leverage the linguistic information in concept names (labels) for ontological analysis. It also addresses visualization and performance evaluation issues before closing with an overview and forward-looking perspectives on the field. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers interested in biomedical ontologies and their applications. It can be a useful supplement for courses on knowledge representation and engineering and also provide readers with a reference for related scientific publications and literature to assist in identifying potential research topics. All mathematical concepts and notations used in this book can be found in standard discrete mathematics textbooks, and the appendix at the end of the book provides a list of key ontological resources, as well as annotated non-lattice and lattice examples that were discovered using the authors' methods, demonstrating how "bugs are fixed" by converting non-lattices to lattices with minimal edit changes.
Generalized Plasticity deals with the plasticity of materials and structures. It is an expansion of the "Unified Strength Theory to Plasticity Theory", leading to a unified treatment of metal plasticity and plasticity of geomaterials, generally. It includes the metal plasticity for Tresca materials, Huber-von-Mises materials and twin-shear materials and the geomaterial plasticity for Mohr-Coulomb materials, generalized twin-shear materials and the Unified Strength Theory.
