Shoin

As life styles change, so does architecture. In few other ways can we see so directly and concretely the changes in the social and cultural life of the Muromachi elite as in the development of shoin-style architecture and the invention of the new form of domestic structure known as the kaisho.

Shoin (書院, drawing room or study) is a type of audience hall in Japanese architecture that was developed during the Muromachi period. The term originally meant a study and a place for lectures on the sūtra within a temple, but later it came to mean just a drawing room or study. From this room takes its name the shoin-zukuri style. In a shoin-zukuri building, the shoin is the zashiki, a tatami-room dedicated to the reception of guests.

The emerging architecture of the Muromachi period was subsequently influenced by the increasing use and appearance of shoin. One of the most noticeable changes in architecture to arise from the shoin came from the practice of lining their floors with tatami mats. Since tatami mats have a standardized size the floor plans for shoin rooms had to be developed around the proportions of the tatami mat; this in turn affected the proportions of doors, the height of rooms, and other aspects of the structure. Before the shoin popularized the practice of lining floors with tatami mats it had been standard to only bring out a single tatami mat for the highest-ranking person in the room to sit on.

List of minor planets: 75001–76000

Description logic

Description logics (DL) is a family of formal knowledge representation languages. Many DLs are more expressive than propositional logic but less expressive than first-order predicate logic. In contrast to the latter, the core reasoning problems for DLs are (usually) decidable, and efficient decision procedures have been designed and implemented for these problems.

DLs are used in artificial intelligence to describe and reason about the relevant concepts of an application domain (known as terminological knowledge). It is of particular importance in providing a logical formalism for ontologies and the Semantic Web: the Web Ontology Language [OWL] and its profile is based on DLs. The most notable application of DLs and OWL is in biomedical informatics where DL assists in the codification of biomedical knowledge.

Introduction

A Description Logic (DL) models concepts, roles and individuals, and their relationships.

The fundamental modeling concept of a DL is the axiom - a logical statement relating roles and/or concepts. This is a key difference from the frames paradigm where a frame specification declares and completely defines a class.