Information system support in construction industry with semantic web technologies and/or autonomous reasoning agents

Information technology support is hard to find for the early design phases of the architectural design process. Many of the existing issues in such design decision support tools appear to be caused by a mismatch between the ways in which designers think and the ways in which information systems aim to give support. We therefore started an investigation of existing theories of design thinking, compared to the way in which design decision support systems provide information to the designer. We identify two main strategies towards information system support in the early design phase: (1) applications for making design try-outs, and (2) applications as autonomous reasoning agents. We outline preview implementations for both approaches and indicate to what extent these strategies can be used to improve information system support for the architectural designer

Search and Discovery Tools for Astronomical On-line Resources and Services

A growing number of astronomical resources and data or information services are made available through the Internet. However valuable information is frequently hidden in a deluge of non-pertinent or non up-to-date documents. At a first level, compilations of astronomical resources provide help for selecting relevant sites. Combining yellow-page services and meta-databases of active pointers may be an efficient solution to the data retrieval problem. Responses generated by submission of queries to a set of heterogeneous resources are difficult to merge or cross-match, because different data providers generally use different data formats: new endeavors are under way to tackle this problem. We review the technical challenges involved in trying to provide general search and discovery tools, and to integrate them through upper level interfaces.Comment: 7 pages, 2 Postscript figures; to be published in A&A

Interoperability and FAIRness through a novel combination of Web technologies

Data in the life sciences are extremely diverse and are stored in a broad spectrum of repositories ranging from those designed for particular data types (such as KEGG for pathway data or UniProt for protein data) to those that are general-purpose (such as FigShare, Zenodo, Dataverse or EUDAT). These data have widely different levels of sensitivity and security considerations. For example, clinical observations about genetic mutations in patients are highly sensitive, while observations of species diversity are generally not. The lack of uniformity in data models from one repository to another, and in the richness and availability of metadata descriptions, makes integration and analysis of these data a manual, time-consuming task with no scalability. Here we explore a set of resource-oriented Web design patterns for data discovery, accessibility, transformation, and integration that can be implemented by any general- or special-purpose repository as a means to assist users in finding and reusing their data holdings. We show that by using off-the-shelf technologies, interoperability can be achieved atthe level of an individual spreadsheet cell. We note that the behaviours of this architecture compare favourably to the desiderata defined by the FAIR Data Principles, and can therefore represent an exemplar implementation of those principles. The proposed interoperability design patterns may be used to improve discovery and integration of both new and legacy data, maximizing the utility of all scholarly outputs

Remembering history : the work of the information services sub-committee of the Joint Information Services Committee in the UK

The paper seeks to record the work of the committee and its interaction with the much better known Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme. It also examines the principles that underlay the development of content acquisition and supporting infrastructure in UK university libraries in the 1990s

Framing Outcomes and Program Assessment for Digital Scholarship Services: A Logic Model Approach

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by the Association of College and Research Libraries in College and Research Libraries in March 2021, available online: https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.82.2.142Assessing digital scholarship services offered either through academic libraries or elsewhere on campuses is important for both program development and service refinement. Digital scholarship support is influenced by fluid campus priorities and limited resources, including staffing, service models, infrastructure, and partnership opportunities available at a university. Digital scholarship support is built upon deep, ongoing relationships and there is an intrinsic need to balance these time-intensive collaborations with scalable service offerings. Therefore, typical library assessment methods do not adequately capture the sustained engagement and impacts to research support and collaboration that come from digital scholarship services. This article discusses the creation of a logic model as one approach to frame assessment of digital scholarship services in the university environment.Publisher allows immediate open acces