It is possible to generate an SQL schema from XML Schema manually; however automatically generating an SQL schema from XML Schema would generally be very beneficial. This paper presents XML Schema-driven generation architecture components with XSL Stylesheet. In this paper, an algorithm for this type of generation is presented. The inputs of the algorithm are XML Schema and XSL Stylesheet, and the output is an SQL schema. The proposed algorithm shows how this component can automatically be generated. An evaluation of the proposed algorithm is also presented by testing the algorithm with different examples.  

Differences in activation between spores from strains of Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. israelensis with and without the toxin-encoding plasmid pBtoxis are demonstrated. Following alkaline activation, the strain bearing pBtoxis shows a significantly greater germination rate. Expression of just three genes constituting a previously identified, putative ger operon from this plasmid is sufficient to produce the same phenotype and characterizes this operon as a genetic determinant of alkaline activation.

Nowadays, e-mail is widely becoming one of the fastest and most economical forms of communication .Thus, the e-mail is prone to be misused. One such misuse is the posting of unsolicited, unwanted e-mails known as spam or junk e-mails. This paper presents and discusses an implementation of an Anti-spam filtering system, which uses a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) as a classifier and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) as a training algorithm. Standard genetic operators and advanced techniques of GA algorithm are used to train the MLP. The implemented filtering system has achieved an accuracy of about 94% to detect spam e-mails, and 89% to detect legitimate e-mails. 

 Abstract The Arabic language presents significant challenges to many natural language processing applications. The broken plu rals (BP) problem is one of these challenges especially for information retrieval applications. It is difficult to deal with Arabic broken plurals and reduce them to their associated singulars, because no obvious rules exist, and there are no standard stemming algorithms that can process them. This paper attempts to handle the problem of broken plural by de veloping a method to identify broken plurals in an unvowelised Arabic text and reducing them to their correct singular forms by incorporating the simple broken plural matching approach, with a machine translation system and an English stemmer as a new approach. A set of experiments has been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method using a number of text samples extracted from a large Arabic corpus (AL-Hayat newspaper). The obtained re sults are analyzed and discussed.

 Abstract There are several stemming approaches that are applied to Arabic language, yet no a complete stemmer for this language is available. The existing stem-based stemmers for stemming Arabic text have a poor performance in terms of accuracy and error rates. In order to improve the accuracy rates of stemming, a hybrid method is proposed for stemming Arabic text to produce stems (not roots). The improvement of the accuracy of stemming will lead by necessity to the improvement of many applications very greatly, including: information retrieval, document classification, machine translation, text analysis and text compression. The proposed method integrates three different stemming techniques, including: morphological analysis, affix-removal and dictionaries. 

Diabetic retinopathy is one of the most common diabetic complications, and is a major cause of new blindness in the working-age population of developed countries. Progression of vascular abnormalities, including the selective loss of pericytes, formation of acellular capillaries, thickening of the basement membrane, and increased vascular permeability characterizes early nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR). Capillary occlusion, as shown on fluorescein angiograms, is also one of the earliest clinically recognizable lesion of NPDR. In response to capillary non-perfusion, there is dilation of neighbouring capillaries, leading to early blood-retinal barrier breakdown, capillary non-perfusion, and endothelial cell injury and death. The resulting ischemia leads to increased production of growth factors, and the development of proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR), which is characterized by growth of new vessels and potential severe and irreversible visual loss. The exact pathogenic mechanism by which capillary non-perfusion occurs is still unclear but growing evidence now suggests that increased leukocyte-endothelial cell adhesion and entrapment (retinal leukostasis) in retinal capillaries is an early event associated with areas of vascular non-perfusion and the development of diabetic retinopathy. The leukocytes in diabetic patients are less deformable more activated, and demonstrate increased adhesion to the vascular endothelium. This review summarizes the current literature on the role of leukocytes in the pathogenesis of capillary occlusion, and discusses the potential of leukostasis as a new promising target in the treatment of diabetic retinopathy.

Aims/hypothesis: Increasing evidence suggests that chronic, subclinical inflammation plays an important role in the pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy. We recently reported that a glycosylating enzyme, core 2 beta-1,6-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase (core 2 GlcNAc-T), is implicated in increased leucocyte-endothelial cell adhesion in diabetic retinopathy via an upregulation mechanism controlled by TNF-alpha.

Subjects, materials and methods: We examined the functional link between circulating TNF-alpha and the activity and phosphorylation of core 2 GlcNAc-T in polymorphonuclear leucocytes of patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Results: Plasma levels of TNF-alpha, although similar in patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, were significantly higher than in age-matched healthy controls, and correlated well with the severity of retinopathy. Core 2 GlcNAc-T activity followed the same trend and was associated with the phosphorylation of the enzyme. Finally, the observation that TNF-alpha levels are also linked to glycaemic values suggests that in patients, as well as in vitro, the glycosylation-mediated cell adhesion process that plays a role in diabetic retinopathy may involve glucose- and TNF-alpha-induced protein kinase beta2 activation, and subsequently raise the activity of core 2 GlcNAc-T through increased enzyme phosphorylation.

Conclusions/interpretation: Our results reveal a novel rationale towards a specific treatment of diabetic retinopathy, based on the inhibition of core 2 GlcNAc-T activity and/or the blockage of cognate glycans.

A large body of evidence now implicates increased leukocyte-endothelial cell adhesion as a key early event in the development of diabetic retinopathy. We recently reported that raised activity of the glycosylating enzyme core 2 beta 1,6-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase (GlcNAc-T) through protein kinase C (PKC)beta2-dependent phosphorylation plays a fundamental role in increased leukocyte-endothelial cell adhesion and capillary occlusion in retinopathy. In the present study, we demonstrate that following exposure to plasma from diabetic patients, the human promonocytic cell line U937 exhibits a significant elevation in core 2 GlcNAc-T activity and increased adherence to cultured retinal capillary endothelial cells. These effects of diabetic plasma on enzyme activity and cell adhesion, mediated by PKCbeta2-dependent phosphorylation of the core 2 GlcNAc-T protein, were found to be triggered by increased plasma levels of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha. Levels of enzyme activity in plasma-treated U937 cells were closely dependent on the severity of diabetic retinopathy, with the highest values observed upon treatment with plasma of patients affected by proliferative retinopathy. Furthermore, we noted much higher correlation, as compared with control subjects, between increased values of core 2 GlcNAc-T activity and cell adhesion properties. Based on the prominent role of TNF-alpha in the development of diabetic retinopathy, these observations further validate the significance of core 2 GlcNAc-T in the pathogenesis of capillary occlusion, thereby enhancing the therapeutic potential of specific enzyme inhibitors.