NAG Ltd Clause Samples

NAG Ltd. In the thirty years of its existence NAG has produced many versions of its software designed for use in different settings. As the number of available languages and environments proliferates, NAG continues to devote significant effort to developing and maintaining versions of its core software which run in different language environments (Fortran-77, Fortran-95, C), or inside other software packages (as IRIS Explorer modules, a Matlab toolbox, Excel add-ins etc.). Ad-hoc embeddings including Active-X components and Java wrappers have been produced for individual customers. Generic mechanisms such as those proposed by this project which made this kind of embedding/wrapping process easier would be a major benefit to NAG, increasing both speed-to-market for existing products and also the size of that market itself. The components which NAG develops are very specialised and the process of selecting the appropriate algorithm for a specific task often requires expert knowledge. The use of well- defined ontologies for problem and service description and agents for matching one to the other would greatly simplify this process and make embedding collections of NAG algorithms in new environments much more straightforward. NAG has identified three specific exploitation paths as follows. The first is definitely achievable in roughly the lifetime of the project, the second shortly afterwards, while the third is more speculative. 1. By integrating existing general-purpose packages into the MONET framework, the market represented by their existing user bases (the size of which is usually estimated as several million people worldwide) will be opened up to third parties such as NAG. It is important to stress that existing packages such as Matlab, Maple and Mathemat- ica already offer mechanisms for calling external code which are sufficient to allow a third party to perform this integration. Software packages based on NAG’s numerical library components and using agents to choose solution strategies could be tailored to each package (e.g. by providing documentation in its “native” format) with mini- mal effort, thus reducing both development costs and time to market. Since developing such systems does not require collaboration from outside the project Consortium, some commercial exploitation along these lines should be plausible within the lifetime of the project, or soon after its conclusion. 2. A growing part of ▇▇▇’s business is concerned with selling components to third...