HILT : High-Level Thesaurus Project. Phase IV and Embedding Project Extension : Final Report

Ensuring that Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) users of the JISC IE can find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse in an environment where most national and institutional service providers - usually for very good local reasons - use different subject schemes to describe their resources is a major challenge facing the JISC domain (and, indeed, other domains beyond JISC). Encouraging the use of standard terminologies in some services (institutional repositories, for example) is a related challenge. Under the auspices of the HILT project, JISC has been investigating mechanisms to assist the community with this problem through a JISC Shared Infrastructure Service that would help optimise the value obtained from expenditure on content and services by facilitating subject-search-based resource sharing to benefit users in the learning and research communities. The project has been through a number of phases, with work from earlier phases reported, both in published work elsewhere, and in project reports (see the project website: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/). HILT Phase IV had two elements - the core project, whose focus was 'to research, investigate and develop pilot solutions for problems pertaining to cross-searching multi-subject scheme information environments, as well as providing a variety of other terminological searching aids', and a short extension to encompass the pilot embedding of routines to interact with HILT M2M services in the user interfaces of various information services serving the JISC community. Both elements contributed to the developments summarised in this report

Development and optimization of zeolite synthesis route from natural koalin for adsorption of dyes

Synthesis of zeolite using kaolin as the main source of alumina and silica has been identified as a novel zeolite production process, which could reduce the cost of using the synthetic reagents and the high energy consumption. A low grade kaolin was used for studying the most suitable synthesis route and operating parameters for producing a high yield and pure phase zeolite. The study adopted the alkaline activation and microwave assisted heating as modification techniques of the conventional hydrothermal synthesis process. Calcination and crystallization proceses were identified as the bottleneck operations within the process. Hence, this study employed 2k factorial design of experiment to study the relationship of metakaolinization temperature of 600 – 800 oC with calcination time of 1 – 5 hours. And that of crystallization time of 9 – 16 hours with aging treatment time of 12 – 36 hours. Central Composite Design (CCD) is used for optimization with axial and center point for factors evaluation towards the responses; yield percent (%) and crystallinity (%) for crystallization process. Based on the Response Surface Methodology (RSM), with desirability value of 98.67 %, the significant parametric aging condition is 27 hours and crystallization time is 9 hours were suggested to yield an optimum product for 80.47 yield percent and 76.92 crystallinity. Three confirmation runs were performed based on the suggested optimum parameter and the calculated error value was found to be below 10 %. The synthesized zeolite-A from the confirmation runs was characterized through XRD. The results were then corroborated with the analytical results from SEM, BET and FTIR. The activity of the synthesized zeolite A was confirmed by a structural refinement analysis, that identified the product as a member of the cubic crystalline systems, belonging to a Fm3c space group with lattice cubic structure values where

Evaluation of the Altogether Better Asset Mapping in Sharrow and Firth Park, Sheffield

‘I am My Community’ is an asset mapping exercise led by Altogether Better that has explored a model by which trained Community Health Champions (CHCs) are used to undertake an inventory of the physical and social assets linked to the health and well-being of their communities and neighbourhoods. The project, which started in 2011 and was completed in April 2012, was undertaken in two communities in Sheffield, Sharrow and Firth Park, by two delivery organisations, ShipShape and SOAR. A steering group including Altogether Better, the Department of Health, Sheffield Well-Being Consortium, Sheffield City Council, ShipShape staff and CHCs, SOAR staff and CHCs, and South Yorkshire Police has overseen the delivery and development of the project and work. This report presents findings from an evaluation of the ‘I am My Community’ asset mapping, conducted by the Centre for Health Promotion Research, Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Leeds Metropolitan University. It presents evidence about the engagement of CHCs in asset mapping and offers recommendations regarding their involvement in future projects

A support architecture for reliable distributed computing systems

The Clouds kernel design was through several design phases and is nearly complete. The object manager, the process manager, the storage manager, the communications manager, and the actions manager are examined

From M-ary Query to Bit Query: a new strategy for efficient large-scale RFID identification

The tag collision avoidance has been viewed as one of the most important research problems in RFID communications and bit tracking technology has been widely embedded in query tree (QT) based algorithms to tackle such challenge. Existing solutions show further opportunity to greatly improve the reading performance because collision queries and empty queries are not fully explored. In this paper, a bit query (BQ) strategy based Mary query tree protocol (BQMT) is presented, which can not only eliminate idle queries but also separate collided tags into many small subsets and make full use of the collided bits. To further optimize the reading performance, a modified dual prefixes matching (MDPM) mechanism is presented to allow multiple tags to respond in the same slot and thus significantly reduce the number of queries. Theoretical analysis and simulations are supplemented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed BQMT and MDPM, which outperform the existing QT-based algorithms. Also, the BQMT and MDPM can be combined to BQMDPM to improve the reading performance in system efficiency, total identification time, communication complexity and average energy cost