Digital Preservation Services : State of the Art Analysis

Research report funded by the DC-NET project.An overview of the state of the art in service provision for digital preservation and curation. Its focus is on the areas where bridging the gaps is needed between e-Infrastructures and efficient and forward-looking digital preservation services. Based on a desktop study and a rapid analysis of some 190 currently available tools and services for digital preservation, the deliverable provides a high-level view on the range of instruments currently on offer to support various functions within a preservation system.European Commission, FP7peer-reviewe

Guiding manufacturing companies towards digitalization a methodology for supporting manufacturing companies in defining their digitalization roadmap

open4noWithin the era of Industry 4.0, digital technologies are seen as the main drivers for manufacturing industry transformation. In fact, many sustain that manufacturing companies will be able to obtain many benefits and opportunities from the digital transformation. If on one hand manufacturing companies have to be able to “ride” this wave of transformation in order to remain competitive, on the other hand, before investing in digital technologies, they have to understand what their current situation is and what their needs are with respect to both digital technologies and organizational processes in different functions. Indeed, the success of the transformation process mainly depends on the company ability to be ready to apply the technological change that some of these digital technologies envision. From these considerations, after having figured out their current readiness level for starting the digital transformation fostered by the Industry 4.0, it is possible to state that the next step manufacturing companies have to undertake is to define their transformation roadmap. With the aim to guide them towards this transformation process, a maturity model, called DREAMY (Digital REadiness Assessment MaturitY model) and based on the inspiring principles of the CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) framework, has been developed and utilized. The objectives of this model are twofold. Firstly, it allows the assessment of the current digital readiness of manufacturing companies and the identification of their strengths and weaknesses with respect to implemented technologies and organizational processes. Secondly, it enables the identification of a set of opportunities offered to companies by the digital transformation, considering their strengths and aiming to overcome their weaknesses. Through the application of this methodology into case studies, it has been possible to reach two main results. On one hand, the analyzed manufacturing companies have been aware of their digital readiness level, of their strengths and weaknesses and of the main opportunities they can exploit from the digitalization process starting from their current situation. On the other hand, empirical evidences were gathered on the current level of manufacturing companies’ digital readiness and on the possible common traits among the identified opportunities.openDe Carolis A.; MacChi M.; Negri E.; Terzi S.De Carolis, A.; Macchi, M.; Negri, E.; Terzi, S

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Investigation of the use of navigation tools in web-based learning: A data mining approach

Web-based learning is widespread in educational settings. The popularity of Web-based learning is in great measure because of its flexibility. Multiple navigation tools provided some of this flexibility. Different navigation tools offer different functions. Therefore, it is important to understand how the navigation tools are used by learners with different backgrounds, knowledge, and skills. This article presents two empirical studies in which data-mining approaches were used to analyze learners' navigation behavior. The results indicate that prior knowledge and subject content are two potential factors influencing the use of navigation tools. In addition, the lack of appropriate use of navigation tools may adversely influence learning performance. The results have been integrated into a model that can help designers develop Web-based learning programs and other Web-based applications that can be tailored to learners' needs

Infectious Disease Ontology

Technological developments have resulted in tremendous increases in the volume and diversity of the data and information that must be processed in the course of biomedical and clinical research and practice. Researchers are at the same time under ever greater pressure to share data and to take steps to ensure that data resources are interoperable. The use of ontologies to annotate data has proven successful in supporting these goals and in providing new possibilities for the automated processing of data and information. In this chapter, we describe different types of vocabulary resources and emphasize those features of formal ontologies that make them most useful for computational applications. We describe current uses of ontologies and discuss future goals for ontology-based computing, focusing on its use in the field of infectious diseases. We review the largest and most widely used vocabulary resources relevant to the study of infectious diseases and conclude with a description of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) suite of interoperable ontology modules that together cover the entire infectious disease domain

CHORUS Deliverable 3.4: Vision Document

The goal of the CHORUS Vision Document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area and to highlight trends and challenges in this domain. The vision of CHORUS is strongly connected to the CHORUS Roadmap Document (D2.3). A concise document integrating the outcomes of the two deliverables will be prepared for the end of the project (NEM Summit)