Coptic SCRIPTORIUM:A Corpus, Tools, and Methods for Corpus Linguistics and Computational Historical Research in Ancient Egypt

Coptic, having evolved from the language of the hieroglyphs of the pharaonic era, represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM provides the first open-source technologies for computational and digital research across the disciplines as applied to Egyptian texts. The project is developing a digitized corpus of Coptic texts available in multiple formats and visualizations (including TEI XML), tools to analyze and process the language (e.g., the first Coptic part-of-speech tagger), a database with search and visualization capabilities, and a collaborative platform for scholars to contribute texts and annotations and to conduct research. The technologies and corpus will function as a collaborative environment for digital research by any scholars working in Coptic

Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED): Semi-Structured Tagging for Real-World Events in Large-Scale EEG.

Real-world brain imaging by EEG requires accurate annotation of complex subject-environment interactions in event-rich tasks and paradigms. This paper describes the evolution of the Hierarchical Event Descriptor (HED) system for systematically describing both laboratory and real-world events. HED version 2, first described here, provides the semantic capability of describing a variety of subject and environmental states. HED descriptions can include stimulus presentation events on screen or in virtual worlds, experimental or spontaneous events occurring in the real world environment, and events experienced via one or multiple sensory modalities. Furthermore, HED 2 can distinguish between the mere presence of an object and its actual (or putative) perception by a subject. Although the HED framework has implicit ontological and linked data representations, the user-interface for HED annotation is more intuitive than traditional ontological annotation. We believe that hiding the formal representations allows for a more user-friendly interface, making consistent, detailed tagging of experimental, and real-world events possible for research users. HED is extensible while retaining the advantages of having an enforced common core vocabulary. We have developed a collection of tools to support HED tag assignment and validation; these are available at hedtags.org. A plug-in for EEGLAB (sccn.ucsd.edu/eeglab), CTAGGER, is also available to speed the process of tagging existing studies

Multivalent Metadata : Exploiting the Layers of Meaning in Digital Resources

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web was due in part to the simplicity of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). It is anticipated that the next generation of web technology, coined the Semantic Web, by Tim Berners-Lee (1989, p. 1), will be driven by the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The XML suite of technologies provides a framework for the application of metadata, and hence semantic information, to web resources. Advantages of a semantic web include improved sharing and reuse of resources, enhanced search mechanisms and knowledge management. The knowledge or meaning contained in digital information may vary according to the perspective of the viewer and can be seen therefore as multivalent in nature. Semantic information that is highly relevant to one user may be of no interest to another. The aim of this project was to demonstrate the layers of meaning inherent in a data sample and how they could be encapsulated in metadata then accessed and manipulated using current technologies, thus leveraging the knowledge contained. Analysis of the data sample, a typical component of an online training product, determined meaningful ways in which the knowledge contained could be reused and adapted. From this analysis a set of test criteria was generated. Metadata was then created for the sample data and the tests implemented using a range of XML technologies

Model driven design and data integration in semantic web information systems

The Web is quickly evolving in many ways. It has evolved from a Web of documents into a Web of applications in which a growing number of designers offer new and interactive Web applications with people all over the world. However, application design and implementation remain complex, error-prone and laborious. In parallel there is also an evolution from a Web of documents into a Web of `knowledge' as a growing number of data owners are sharing their data sources with a growing audience. This brings the potential new applications for these data sources, including scenarios in which these datasets are reused and integrated with other existing and new data sources. However, the heterogeneity of these data sources in syntax, semantics and structure represents a great challenge for application designers. The Semantic Web is a collection of standards and technologies that offer solutions for at least the syntactic and some structural issues. If offers semantic freedom and flexibility, but this leaves the issue of semantic interoperability. In this thesis we present Hera-S, an evolution of the Model Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) method Hera. MDWEs allow designers to create data centric applications using models instead of programming. Hera-S especially targets Semantic Web sources and provides a flexible method for designing personalized adaptive Web applications. Hera-S defines several models that together define the target Web application. Moreover we implemented a framework called Hydragen, which is able to execute the Hera-S models to run the desired Web application. Hera-S' core is the Application Model (AM) in which the main logic of the application is defined, i.e. defining the groups of data elements that form logical units or subunits, the personalization conditions, and the relationships between the units. Hera-S also uses a so-called Domain Model (DM) that describes the content and its structure. However, this DM is not Hera-S specific, but instead allows any Semantic Web source representation as its DM, as long as its content can be queried by the standardized Semantic Web query language SPARQL. The same holds for the User Model (UM). The UM can be used for personalization conditions, but also as a source of user-related content if necessary. In fact, the difference between DM and UM is conceptual as their implementation within Hydragen is the same. Hera-S also defines a presentation model (PM) which defines presentation details of elements like order and style. In order to help designers with building their Web applications we have introduced a toolset, Hera Studio, which allows to build the different models graphically. Hera Studio also provides some additional functionality like model checking and deployment of the models in Hydragen. Both Hera-S and its implementation Hydragen are designed to be flexible regarding the user of models. In order to achieve this Hydragen is a stateless engine that queries for relevant information from the models at every page request. This allows the models and data to be changed in the datastore during runtime. We show that one way to exploit this flexibility is by applying aspect-orientation to the AM. Aspect-orientation allows us to dynamically inject functionality that pervades the entire application. Another way to exploit Hera-S' flexibility is in reusing specialized components, e.g. for presentation generation. We present a configuration of Hydragen in which we replace our native presentation generation functionality by the AMACONT engine. AMACONT provides more extensive multi-level presentation generation and adaptation capabilities as well aspect-orientation and a form of semantic based adaptation. Hera-S was designed to allow the (re-)use of any (Semantic) Web datasource. It even opens up the possibility for data integration at the back end, by using an extendible storage layer in our database of choice Sesame. However, even though theoretically possible it still leaves much of the actual data integration issue. As this is a recurring issue in many domains, a broader challenge than for Hera-S design only, we decided to look at this issue in isolation. We present a framework called Relco which provides a language to express data transformation operations as well as a collection of techniques that can be used to (semi-)automatically find relationships between concepts in different ontologies. This is done with a combination of syntactic, semantic and collaboration techniques, which together provide strong clues for which concepts are most likely related. In order to prove the applicability of Relco we explore five application scenarios in different domains for which data integration is a central aspect. This includes a cultural heritage portal, Explorer, for which data from several datasources was integrated and was made available by a mapview, a timeline and a graph view. Explorer also allows users to provide metadata for objects via a tagging mechanism. Another application is SenSee: an electronic TV-guide and recommender. TV-guide data was integrated and enriched with semantically structured data from several sources. Recommendations are computed by exploiting the underlying semantic structure. ViTa was a project in which several techniques for tagging and searching educational videos were evaluated. This includes scenarios in which user tags are related with an ontology, or other tags, using the Relco framework. The MobiLife project targeted the facilitation of a new generation of mobile applications that would use context-based personalization. This can be done using a context-based user profiling platform that can also be used for user model data exchange between mobile applications using technologies like Relco. The final application scenario that is shown is from the GRAPPLE project which targeted the integration of adaptive technology into current learning management systems. A large part of this integration is achieved by using a user modeling component framework in which any application can store user model information, but which can also be used for the exchange of user model data

MACE: Joint Deliverable "Evaluation of the MACE system"

Stefaner, M., Wolpers, M., Memmel, M., Duval, E., Specht, M., Börner, D., Gruber, M., De Jong, T., Giretti, A., & Klemke, R. (2009). MACE: Joint Deliverable "Evaluation of the MACE system". MACE-project.This deliverable presents the evaluation results of the MACE project1. MACE integrates large amounts of technology enhanced learning contents and metadata in the domain of architecture, in order to create a framework for the integration of multiple content sources, content enrichment with different metadata types, and improved access to these existing contents.MAC

Trust-Based Techniques for Collective Intelligence in Social Search Systems.

A key-issue for the effectiveness of collaborative decision support systems is the problem of the trustworthiness of the entities involved in the process. Trust has been always used by humans as a form of collective intelligence to support effective decision making process. Computational trust models are becoming now a popular technique across many applications such as cloud computing, p2p networks, wikis, e-commerce sites, social network. The chapter provides an overview of the current landscape of computational models of trust and reputation, and it presents an experimental study case in the domain of social search, where we show how trust techniques can be applied to enhance the quality of social search engine predictions

Better Science Through an Enhanced User Interface with the ALMA Archive

Trabalho de projeto de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Engenharia de Software), 2022, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasThe Atacama Large Millimetre Array, located on the homonymous Chilean desert, constitutes one of the world’s most advanced interferometric observatories. Covering the millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths, the facility supports the needs of an ever-growing community within astronomy and astrophysics research groups. As it happens with all ground-based astronomical instruments, however, data storage and exploitation remain an outstanding challenge; while the former can be managed through technical upgrades to the Array instrumentation, the latter largely depends on how the archival data is accessed, analysed and presented to the user. Currently, ALMA observations are made publicly available through the ASA (ALMA Science Archive) online platform. Despite offering native, metadata-based filtering that can be applied to an observation’s various fields, such as location, spectral windows or integration time, it is understood that the ASA would benefit from supplementary tools improving its visualization components, allowing for a more direct assessment of both the archive’s global state and its more localized clusters (e.g., field density distribution). This thesis describes the status of an ongoing project within the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA), foreseeing the development and production of a separate website that provides the user with a set of data analysis and visualization tools; while other functionalities are predicted to be included, the platform will mainly focus on the visual plotting of specific regions containing ALMA observations, enabling the users to directly identify particularly deep regions of the sky. Apart from allowing for a better scientific exploitation of pre-existing astronomical data through the combination of interrelated observations, the visualization toolkit may also increase the archive’s appeal and utility among non-expert users, promoting a larger public engagement with the ESO’s activities; on a longterm basis, it is intended that this platform will come to represent a valuable asset to the ALMA community

The TXM Portal Software giving access to Old French Manuscripts Online

Texte intégral en ligne : http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/13.ProceedingsCultHeritage.pdfInternational audiencehttp://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/13.ProceedingsCultHeritage.pdf This paper presents the new TXM software platform giving online access to Old French Text Manuscripts images and tagged transcriptions for concordancing and text mining. This platform is able to import medieval sources encoded in XML according to the TEI Guidelines for linking manuscript images to transcriptions, encode several diplomatic levels of transcription including abbreviations and word level corrections. It includes a sophisticated tokenizer able to deal with TEI tags at different levels of linguistic hierarchy. Words are tagged on the fly during the import process using IMS TreeTagger tool with a specific language model. Synoptic editions displaying side by side manuscript images and text transcriptions are automatically produced during the import process. Texts are organized in a corpus with their own metadata (title, author, date, genre, etc.) and several word properties indexes are produced for the CQP search engine to allow efficient word patterns search to build different type of frequency lists or concordances. For syntactically annotated texts, special indexes are produced for the Tiger Search engine to allow efficient syntactic concordances building. The platform has also been tested on classical Latin, ancient Greek, Old Slavonic and Old Hieroglyphic Egyptian corpora (including various types of encoding and annotations)

Facilitating self-organization in non-hierarchical communities: a methodology for regeneration programs

Research purpose: As a by-product in the development of the Quality Management Systems, self-organized working groups were introduced and became a common practice in management. In the last ten years some authors – influenced by the developments in the study of Complex Systems – have reintroduced the self-organization concept as being the future of management. In this approach, the description of the mechanism driving this process has been explored to provide a method to facilitate the emergence of viable organisational structures and to support such organizational behaviour. This topic becomes more relevant in the present times when the community development is more locally oriented and the communities are being empowered to become more autonomous in the definition of the means and results they want to improve their quality of live. It is within this context that in order to facilitate self-organization processes – in a rural community engaged in a independent regeneration program –this research suggest the use of a model inspired in both cybernetics and the self-organization in a biological system. Methods: This thesis details the development of a three loops framework aimed to facilitate the self-organizing behaviour through the use of a Visualization - Planning - Reflective toolset (V-P Toolset). The framework was deployed within a case study organization (The XOOP) using an interpretivist philosophy of constructionism to guide the research. During its execution the researcher acted as both an observer and participant of the organisational change. Within the context of an action research project, the framework followed a multimethodology design where cybernetic and social tools of organizational analysis such as the Viable System Model (VSM), Narrative and Story-telling analysis and Social Network Analysis (SNA) provided a unique approach to the facilitation of self-organization and the mergence of viable organizational structures. Results: The VSM and the SNA were used to diagnose the organizational structure. The information provided by these tools was then contextualized within the Narrative and Story-telling analysis, identifying critical events in the evolution of the organization. This combination of tools provided insights about the self-organizing behaviour of the organization and the mechanism that facilitated (or impeded) the emergence of viable organizational structures throughout the evolution of the observed community.Conclusions: The introduction of a common language to describe the organization facilitated the endogenous creation of a shared mental model of the community. This representation of the organization made more efficient the exchange of information, the coordination of activities and the autonomous operation of the different working groups. Thus, the iterative loops of the V-P contributed to made this process more efficient and provided evidence about the convenience of the integration of the VSM with the SNA as organizational diagnostic tools